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"The 100 best movies you've never heard of" an article from July 19, 1991 (ew.com)
submitted 2 months ago by TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com to c/movies@hexbear.net
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[-] Camden28@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

These are mostly famous movies and a lot of them are in regular rotation on Turner Classic Movies. I've bolded the titles I think are most worth a try, but since I haven't seen all these, I've surely missed a bunch. Part 1:

  • Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) : (seen) A tense, claustrophobic thriller from the days when John Carpenter made good cheap movies, this is an imaginative urban update of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo: Cops.
  • Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) : (seen) Director John Sturges captures, mercilessly, what it’s like to be a stranger in an unfriendly town. Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine are astonishingly evil local villains.
  • The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) : (seen) Sam Peckinpah decided, cinematically speaking, to ”go fishin”’ for fun. Jason Robards.
  • Barbarosa (1982) : Willie Nelson's best role to date. Gary Busey is a farm boy- turned- sidekick in Fred Schepisi’s fine, funny campfire tale of a movie.
  • La Bete Humaine (1938) : (seen) Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion, but his feverish adaptation of the Emile Zola novel is just as gripping.
  • The Big Combo (1955): Racketeer and human slime Richard Conte stars in this flashy and often unforgettable crime flick. Surely one of the first movies to feature a pair of homosexual lovers who are also thugs.
  • Black Narcissus (1947) : (seen) This smartly written, stunningly filmed, by the great British director Michael Powell.
  • Brain Damage (1988): A chatty parasitic slug attaches itself to human spinal cords. This cheap, fast, gross horror-comedy by Frank Henenlotter (Frankenhooker) manages to be both an antidrug parable and a sleazy B flick without losing its cool.
  • The Brood (1979): (seen) David Cronenberg -- the real source of terror lies in the ways our bodies betray us. For a cheap horror flick, The Brood echoes on levels you may not care to acknowledge.
  • Burn! (1970): Marlon Brando as an agent provocateur sent by the British government to incite a slave uprising on a Caribbean island in the 19th century. Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s complex film is as remarkable for its steaming, sensual surfaces as for its sophisticated political thinking.
  • Candy Mountain (1988): Codirected by esteemed still photographer Robert Frank and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Walker), this lovely shaggy-dog story takes a cocky kid from New York to the wilds of Canada in search of a reclusive guitar maker. On the way, he meets every musical eccentric from Buster Poindexter to Leon Redbone to Dr. John and finds a surreal stillness at road’s end.
  • Carrie (1952): (seen) Unpopular because of its frank treatment of unwholesome material, director William Wyler’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (not to be confused with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film). Laurence Olivier as George Hurstwood, the married man who runs off with Carrie (Jennifer Jones).
  • Caught (1949): A dark, eerie weepie made by French director Max Ophuls. Barbara Bel Geddes marries Robert Ryan, but he’s revealed to be a sadistic egomaniac. By the time James Mason rescues her, she’s nearly bonkers.
  • Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979): Its studio originally released this film as Head Over Heels, but the truth lies between the two titles; this isn’t so much a cerebral film or a romantic comedy as it is a mature charmer.
  • Comfort and Joy (1984): Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth’s gentle comedy about a Glaswegian deejay whose life has slipped out of its normal groove is a true piece of eccentricity.
  • The Company of Wolves (1984): (seen) This maze-like fantasy is a tart, luxurious marriage of medieval fairy tale and kinky coming-of-age symbolism, with a wild sense of play that offsets its sizable pretensions.
  • Criss Cross (1949) : (seen) Robert Siodmak directed this film noir. Burt Lancaster is the slightly dopey armored-car guard with alluring Yvonne De Carlo as his duplicitous wife. Anthony (Tony) Curtis movie debut.
  • Dancing Lady (1933) : (seen) Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, and the Three Stooges in the same movie? Musical that runs the style gamut from Astaire’s lithe elegance to the Stooges’ rowdiness.
  • Dark Star (1974) : (seen) If John Carpenter’s directorial debut looks like a low-budget student film, it is.
  • Death Race 2000 (1975) : (seen caveat: this may bore modern audiences) Keith Carradineand Sylvester Stallone. Director Paul Bartel keeps the gore almost discreet.
  • Deception (1946) : (seen) Bette Davis, Claude Rains.
  • Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle) (1983) : (seen) Luc Besson. There’s no dialogue, but gleaming sepia photography and surreal touches keep the viewer enthralled.
  • Detour (1945) : (seen) Edgar G. Ulmer’s cult thriller is perhaps the cheapest good movie ever made. The entire film appears to have been shot in a living room, yet this tumbledown shack of a movie works.
  • Dodsworth (1936) : (seen) William Wyler drama of mid-life in America. Walter Huston -- dispirited by retirement and his failed marriage -- conveys can-do idealism by trying to come to terms with its inadequacy.
  • Dreamchild (1985) : The girl on whom Lewis Carroll based Alice in Wonderland arrives in America at age 80 to participate in the author’s centenary. Once there, the elderly Alice (Coral Browne) is tormented by memories of Carroll (Ian Holm), who she realizes was papassionately in love with her.
  • A Fine Madness (1966): Studio honcho Jack Warner thought Irvin Kershner’s satire “antisocial” and had it recut but still didn’t manage to destroy it. Sean Connery stars.
  • The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953): (seen) coscripted by Dr. Seuss, Fingers is a triumph of gaga production design — a toy chest bulging with Technicolor strangeness.
  • Forbidden Zone (1980) : (seen) cult flick. a lot of great old Cab Calloway music. Composer Danny Elfman, leader of Oingo Boingo, plays the Devil. Uncategorizable and incredibly cool.
  • 49th Parallel (1941) : (seen) It’s as entertaining as propaganda gets, with Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, and Raymond Massey popping up in guest shots.
  • Foxes (1980) : (seen decades ago. thought it managed to be anti-female despite giving them leads, but the ET review suggests I was too harsh) A movie that dares to treat Valley girls as if they were humans? Like, sure.
  • Get Crazy (1983): This mindless teen comedy offers Lou Reed’s dead-on parody of Bob Dylan, Malcolm McDowell’s gleeful Mick Jagger imitation, Fabian and Bobby Sherman as villain Ed Begley Jr.’s henchmen. Gloriously dumb essential viewing.
  • Glen or Glenda? (1953): Edward D. Wood Jr., the renowned Worst Director of All Time, made this scrappy docudrama about transvestism and transsexuality.
  • Good News (1947): squeaky-clean students. After Peter Lawford meets June Allyson all their problems are resolved with a few fun production numbers.
  • Go Tell the Spartans (1978): Hailed by critics, Spartans looked beyond the anguish of individual Vietnam vets to examine the war’s fundamental tactical lunacy. Burt Lancaster as an embittered military adviser who in 1964 already sees the conflict’s inevitable downward arc.
  • Gun Crazy (1949) : (seen) A crackerjack B movie. A small-town guy obsessed with guns (John Dall) comes under the spell of a femme fatale (Peggy Cummins) and the two are soon outlaws. Director Joseph H. Lewis.
  • Heartland (1979): Conchata Ferrell comes to work for Rip Torn in the unrelenting Wyoming of 1910. This restrained period piece based on a pioneer woman’s diaries has so little talk that it’s almost like a silent movie.
  • Hell in the Pacific (1969): (seen) Two stranded World War II soldiers try to kill each other. American (Lee Marvin) and Japanese (Toshiro Mifune) are men of few words, but John Boorman’s direction is a textbook example of visual storytelling.
  • The Hidden (1987): An extremely violent sci-fi thriller. This one’s about a surly alien that jumps from host to host while acting out its most psychopathic impulses.
  • High and Low (1963) : (seen) Akira Kurosawa. The title refers to the film’s two milieus: the luxurious home of an executive whose chauffeur’s son is abducted, and the squalid haunts of the boy’s kidnapper.
  • High Tide (1987) : modern-day weepie from Australia: Judy Davis gets stranded in the town that holds the daughter she abandoned a decade before. Directed by Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career), it’s a devastating portrait.
  • Hi, Mom! (1970): One of the few counterculture satires that deserve to be called subversive, Brian De Palma’s comedy features the young Robert De Niro as a Vietnam vet who becomes a peeping tom porno filmmaker and, finally, a bomb-wielding anarchist.
  • The Hit (1984): Stephen Frears returned to movies after 13 years directing for British TV. ETerence Stamp as the stool pigeon, John Hurt as his assassin, Laura del Sol as a hooker, and the sweepingly gorgeous Spanish scenery they pass through.
  • Home of the Brave (1949): Producer Stanley Kramer’s taboo- breaking portrait of a black WW II soldier, though somewhat dated in language and style, offers powerful insights into the psychology of racism and warfare. James Edwards indelibly etches the sting of each insult, and Lloyd Bridges, as his buddy, conveys the well-intentioned but ineffectual goodwill of an entire American generation.
  • Housekeeping (1987): The misunderstood film from director Bill Forsyth. Two orphaned sisters come under the care of their wacky, free-spirited aunt (Christine Lahti). The movie is a tragicomic portrait of a woman in touch with the noncomformist impulses of the ’60s.
  • In a Lonely Place (1950) (seen) Humphrey Bogart shows his tough mask cracking open to reveal a bitter neurotic. Nicholas Ray directed Bogie breaking up with Gloria Grahame knowing that his own marriage to Grahame was on the rocks.
  • I Walked With a Zombie (1943) : (seen) B movies. Reworking the plot of Jane Eyre, director Jacques Tourneur brings Frances Dee into a plantation family cursed by lust, jealousy, and creepy zombie fever.
[-] Camden28@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

Part 2:

  • Jazz on a Summer’s Day : (seen) (1959) 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Director Bert Stern treats jazz musicians (including Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Anita O’Day) with the same smooth idol worship he brought to his Marilyn Monroe pinups.
  • The Killing (1956) : (seen) Stanley Kubrick down-and-dirty caper picture. Kubrick transforms the perfect-crime material into the screen equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle, leaping back and forth in time and showing the same scenes from many points of view.
  • Kiss Me Deadly (1955) : (seen) Robert Aldrich’s style is perfectly suited to Mickey Spillane’s prose as Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) goes after a gang.
  • Lonely Are the Brave (1962) : (seen) Kirk Douglas is a lonesome cowboy who hates fences and seems to belong to another century. He's pursued by sheriff Walter Matthau. This lovely, understated film shot in high-contrast black and white has a real feeling for the cowboy’s stoic melancholy.
  • Macao (1952) : (seen) Josef von Sternberg’s moody action picture (partly reshot by an uncredited Nicholas Ray). Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell star. This was as hot and suggestive as it got in the ’50s.
  • Marked Woman (1937) : (seen) Bette Davis in this brutal crime melodrama based on the case in which Lucky Luciano was brought down by his hookers.
  • Mikey and Nicky (1976) : Two gangsters (Peter Falk and John Cassavetes) engage in a soul-searching, all-night talkathon. Directed by Elaine May, this explosive comedy is done in the improvisational style of Cassavetes’ own films.
  • Miracle Mile (1989): Anthony Edwards makes a date with Mare Winningham, only to discover that nuclear war is an hour away. Directed by Steve DeJarnatt, Miracle posits that Armageddon will look like an epic shopping-mall riot.
  • Mixed Blood (1985) : Paul Morrissey’s drug-war revenge comedy is so deadpan that it barely has a pulse. But Marilia Pera is a campy stitch and the dialogue has the loopy, vicious ring of truth.
  • Monkey Business (1952): Not the 1931 Marx Brothers film, this gem from Howard Hawks is probably the last great screwball comedy. Scientist Cary Grant and wife Ginger Rogers accidentally drink a youth serum. There’s a young Marilyn Monroe as a bonus.
  • The Naked Kiss (1964) : (seen) Constance Towers, a hooker who arrives in a small town pretending to be a champagne saleswoman, reforms. Written and directed by Sam Fuller.
  • The Naked Spur (1953) : (seen) James Stewart, seeking a bounty, tries to bring killer Robert Ryan back to justice in Anthony Mann’s complicated morality tale as Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker, and Millard Mitchell get in the way.
  • Near Dark (1987) : (seen) Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire revamp.
  • 1918 (1984): Writer Horton Foote turned his memories of small-town Texas into a whole cycle of plays and films; 1918 is the heart of the bunch. Hallie Foote, Matthew Broderick.
  • The Ninth Configuration (1980): The new head of an Army nuthatch (Stacy Keach) turns out to be crazier than his wards, but the plot soon gives up in favor of bizarre philosophical exchanges and inscrutable passions.
  • On Dangerous Ground (1951) : (seen) Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino. Nicholas Ray’s strikingly composed film is tough, taciturn, and finally very tender.
  • One-Eyed Jacks (1960): The only movie Marlon Brando ever directed is the first fully enlightened Western and its portrait of an America in which courage and camaraderie no longer hold sway makes it a neglected precursor to the cinema of Sam Peckinpah.
  • Over the Edge (1979) : (seen) Jonathan Kaplan’s juvenile-delinquent fable was the first film to update the James Dean ethos to the permissive ’70s, when forms of teen rebellion had been co-opted. Matt Dillon.
  • Paris Blues (1961): (seen) Trombonist Paul Newman and saxman Sidney Poitier wail, Paris seems a doped-up wonderland. Smitten tourists Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward argue that they’d all be happier back in the States. Duke Ellington’s score grooves.
  • Payday (1973): (seen) This little number leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. Rip Torn does wonders with the role of an addicted, low-rent country singer on tour. The movie, fueled by dead-on dialogue, follows Torn on his bender of self-destruction without message-making.
  • Peeping Tom (1960): (seen) Michael Powell effectively destroyed his career with this portrait of a camera-obsessed killer. Powell forces viewers to acknowledge the prurient kick they get from cinematic violence, making them accomplices to Carl Boehm, who murders women to capture their terrified expressions on film.
  • Personal Best (1982): Screenwriter Robert Towne’s debut as a director is both a visual celebration of women athletes and an insightful look at the relationship between competing runners Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly. One of the better sports movies ever, it’s also the sole mainstream film of the early ’80s to handle homosexuality without either hysteria or coy timidity.
  • The Plague Dogs (1982): (seen) A dark tale of two dogs who escape from a laboratory only to enter an equally fierce landscape, this may be the most disturbing animated film ever made.
  • Point Blank (1967): (seen) John Boorman’s gangland melodrama. Lee Marvin comes back for revenge.
  • Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) : There’s a pterodactyl living in the Chrysler Building. Cops David Carradine and Richard Roundtree want to know why window washers are losing their heads, and Michael Moriarty is the cheeseball who finds the nest in this hilarious tabloid sci-fi/horror film.
  • The Revolt of Job (1983) : A Jewish couple (Ferenc Zenthe, Hedy Temessy) adopt a Christian child (Gabor Feher) just before the Holocaust engulfs them. Quietly harrowing, its real achievement is to show the progress of love without ever resorting to easy, tried-and-true ways.
  • Ride the High Country (1962) : (seen) director Sam Peckinpah. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea are former lawmen in the changing West in this drawling, droll, and sometimes violent character study.
  • Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) : Don Siegel’s tense, hard melodrama is far more than just a ”prison movie.”
  • The Saga of Anathan (1953) : Josef von Sternberg made this final, bizarre one-shot, filmed in Japanese with a Japanese cast and crew. Based on a true incident in which 12 sailors and a woman were marooned on a desert island, Anatahan is a mocking distillation of the director’s lifelong themes of human folly and the cruelties of romance.
  • Saint Jack (1979): Peter Bogdanovich came through with this character study of Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), an American pimp in early-’70s Singapore. Denholm Elliott plays a burnt-out businessman.
  • Say Amen, Somebody (1983) : (seen) Documentary on gospel singers.
  • Secret Honor (1984): Robert Altman’s film of Philip Baker Hall’s one-man show is an outrageous affront to the American Presidency. Hall creates a drunken dark-night-of-the-spleen monologue that’s hilarious and terrifying.
  • The Sender (1982) : Zeljko Ivanek gives a sensitive performance as a suicidal young man brought to a psychiatric hospital, where he transfers his bad thoughts to the institute’s population.
  • Shack Out On 101 (1955) : A one-set camp classic that gives you Lee Marvin as a Communist short-order cook named Slob, Keenan Wynn doing calisthenics on a diner counter, Whit Bissell recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Terry Moore acting with her pointy ’50s bra as the hash-slinging heroine who finds a Red in every bed. Good bad movies don’t get better than this.
  • The Shanghai Gesture (1941) : Josef von Sternberg directed. Ona Munson is proprietress of Shanghai’s most depraved casino, and Gene Tierney is memorably petulant as Poppy. It’s a richly entertaining piece of nonsense.
  • Smile (1975) : Michael Ritchie’s behind-the-scenes satire set at a ”Young American Miss” competition was a flop in ‘75, too cynical for those who like beauty pageants, too humane for those who don’t.
  • Songwriter (1984): Willie Nelson essentially plays himself as the musician outlawed from the Nashville establishment and his own home, and Kris Kristofferson is the ex-partner he hooks up with again. Alan Rudolph directs with a relaxed touch.
  • The Stepfather (1987): Terry O’Quinn is impressively screwy as a bland charmer. Directed by Joseph Ruben, this white-knuckle special never mistakes itself for anything but a taut, creepy-funny B screamer.
  • Straight Time (1978) : (seen) Dustin Hoffman plays a compulsive, small-time crook who is released from prison and can’t get the hang of living in the straight world.
  • Streamers (1983): (seen) Robert Altman helps detonate the verbal grenades in David Rabe’s play set in a Virginia Army barracks, where several young men nervously await transfer to Vietnam. Matthew Modine leads.
  • Streetwise (1985) : (seen) This portrait of homeless Seattle street kids is the rare documentary with the dramatic power of great fiction.
  • The Tenant (1976): Roman Polanski directs and stars in this funny thriller about a Polish expatriate who moves into a Paris apartment and begins to have delusions about his sinister neighbors. The third chapter in his apartment-house trilogy (after Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), this is the most personal.
  • They Live by Night (1949): The first film made by Nicholas Ray, later remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us, Night stars Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as young hicks in love and on the lam.
  • Ticket to Heaven (1981): Psychodrama about an ordinary guy (Nick Mancuso) who is seduced into the communal, accepting circle of the Heavenly Children (Moonies).
  • Track 29 (1988): This film starts to make sense only if you know the work of its writer, Dennis Potter. Like The Singing Detective, it’s a reality-versus-pop culture black comedy, about a housewife (Theresa Russell) who imagines that the baby she gave up years ago has returned as randy, spooky Gary Oldman.
[-] Camden28@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

Part 3 -- Final bit:

  • Twice Upon a Time (1983): A PG-rated cartoon fable about a despot out to give the world permanent bad dreams. It’s too abstract for grade-schoolers, but teens and grown-ups who like fairy tales with a Pythonesque, warp-speed edge should enjoy it happily ever after.
  • Under Fire (1983) : (seen) The most human political thriller in years, this look at three journalists (Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman, and Joanna Cassidy) in Nicaragua manages to score all its points and still be engrossingly suspenseful. Even the romantic subplot doesn’t seem stupid.
  • Used Cars (1980): (seen) Good-taste guardians have always hated this raunchy, high-spirited comedy, and that’s all to the good . Director Bob Zemeckis went on to the glossier Back to the Future trio.
  • Vampire’s Kiss (1989) : (seen) A cult has already formed for this outrageous black farce about a Manhattan trendoid (Nicolas Cage) who slips into insanity and thinks he’s a vampire. It’s another caustic slapstick money-loser from the pen of Joseph Minion.
  • While the City Sleeps (1956): (seen) Fritz Lang’s dirty little urban drama is a sleazy roundelay where everyone sleeps around for advancement and the compulsion for personal power within the press is revealed as the embryo of totalitarianism.
  • Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978) : Karel Reisz’s adaptation of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, about the corruptive effects of the Vietnam war, is taut, tense, bitter, and unremittingly cynical. Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, and Michael Moriarty try to move heroin and are chased by drug dealers.
  • Withnail & I (1987): (seen) British actor Richard E. Grant plays Withnail — an impossibly narcissistic leech who never stops talking (or drinking). The movie captures the toxic excess of the late ’60s with a clear-eyed purity and humor.
  • Zardoz (1974): (seen) ohn Boorman’s campily imaginative sci-fi fantasy where women are Amazons and men are nervous. Along comes the very potent Sean Connery, ready to penetrate the Vortex in general and Charlotte Rampling in particular.
  • A Zed & Two Noughts (1985): (seen / caveat: I love Greenaway, but his works are slow) Peter Greenaway. With a plot that resonates but never resolves, and camera work that gorgeously uncovers the horrors of nature, Zed is chilly, beguiling gamesmanship.

I posted these here because I coulnd't get the page to load without enabling a bunch of questionable junk. The above is from an archive made several years ago and shortened for faster reading and for inclusion of my own brief comments on this list.

[-] ClassIsOver@hexbear.net 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks for posting these instead of making us brave a listicle site. I can't believe I've only seen two of them (Deathrace 2000 and Zardoz).

[-] Camden28@hexbear.net 2 points 2 months ago

Well since this list is from 1991 there's been more than 30 years of movies to see since then and anything newer is probably more culturally relevant. I mean: Point Blank was kinda great in its time, but I think it'd just feel dated now. Sometimes a movie can shine above being dated and sometimes being dated makes a movie more interesting, but in the case of Point Blank... well... while I still like watching Lee Marvin, there are so many movies to see and so little time that it doesn't need to be on a must-watch list.

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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