10. My Girl (Howard Zieff, 1991)
Macaulay Culkin’s character gets stung by a bee and dies! Waaa! As a young bairn, the sheer injustice of this was too much to handle. I haven’t attempted a rewatch in many years.
9. You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937)
Directed by Fritz Lang, this early film noir tells the story of Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda), an ex-convict who wants to start a new life. He falls in love with a gorgeous dame called Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney) and marries her, except he’s wrongly convicted of a bank robbery, and sentenced to death. Then a gun is smuggled into the prison, and everything goes from bad to worse. The end is unbearably tragic.
8. Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010)
Uncompromising and stark, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful has little in the way of ‘easy moments’. Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a single father of two, trying to escape the clutches of the Barcelonan underground crime scene, as well as that of his abusive ex-wife, all while dealing with cancer, and the full-scale deaths of a large number of illegal Chinese immigrants. I warned you. After watching this in the cinema I comfort-ate two whole tins of Ambrosia and didn’t speak to my flatmates for a whole day.
7. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler (played exceptionally by Liam Neeson), a German businessman who managed to save 1100 Jews from being gassed in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, this is Spielberg’s three-hour long masterpiece in black-and-white and stabs of red.
6. Bambi (James Algar,1942)
This Walt Disney classic is a perennial tearjerker from that old anti-Semite Walt Disney. Bigotry aside, ‘Bambi’ is a beautiful tale about a deer who loses his mother. Former Beatle Paul McCartney has stated in interviews that it was watching the shooting of Bambi’s mother that piqued his interest in animal rights. If the film hasn’t set you off, then that little fact probably will...
5. Splendour in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
Elias Kazan’s tale of two Kansas high school sweethearts is set against the backdrop of the stock market crash of 1929, and the socio-sexual pressures of small-town America. Deanie (a dreamy Natalie Wood) and Bud (Warren Beatty) are the perfect high school couple, but their love is limited to second base (if you catch my drift), lest Deanie run the danger of being loose with her luvin’. Eventually Deanie is abandoned by her pressurised boyfriend Bud and descends into madness. She is committed to an institution while Bud goes off to study at Yale.
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