Five Best Movies Ever

#1: Citizen Kane (1941)
The opening sequence is still as electrifying as any in the history of movies: A tarnished sign on a forbidding black wire fence is the first thing you see in Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane – eponymous tragic hero and central enigma of this Mercury production – expires moments after the movie bearing his name comes stirring to life, gasping that cryptic word Rosebud with his last breath. Re-released on its 50th anniversary in 1991, Citizen Kane is thrillingly alive as it has ever been.
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The thrills of Welles’ breathtakingly exciting debut picture are multifarious. For one thing, there’s the exhilaration of watching a 25-year-old genius named Orson Welles explore the possibilities of the medium for the first time, playing provocatively with the properties of film as if he’d been doing it all his life. Visually and aurally – from Gregg Toland’s celebrated deep-focus cinematography to Robert Wise’s crisp, complex editing to the multi-layered expressionistic soundtrack – Kane is as stunning and sophisticated as any movie ever made, and it crackles and whizzes along at a pace that can even keep the MTV generation riveted to the screen. Then there’s the thrill of watching the exuberant young Mercury Players, among the finest actors ever to work in front of a movie camera, having the time of their lives as they projecting themselves into the future and into the past. Their fresh performances still bristle with spontaneity and an edge that few contemporary actors can match.
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#2: Amelie (2001)
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Ok. The plot is a bit weird, but amusing! Amelie was a girl who kind of grew up isolated from other children. Her antisocial ex-Army doctor father, mistakenly believes that she suffers from a heart condition (a mistake resulting from the increase in her heartbeat caused by the rare thrill of physical contact with her father, who only ever touches her during medical check-ups). Her mother Amandine, a neurotic schoolteacher with shaky nerves, sees to Amelie’s education. Amandine dies when Amelie is young, the victim of a freak accident involving a suicidal Québécoise woman who throws herself off the top of Notre Dame Cathedral and lands on Amelie’s mother. Raphaël withdraws even further as a result, and devotes his life to building a rather eccentric shrine in the garden to Amandine’s memory, which houses her ashes. Left to amuse herself, Amelie develops an unusually active imagination.
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#3: Wild Orchid (1990)
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This is the most erotic movie ever made! Director Zalman King’s original version of Wild Orchid seemed to be too sexually graphic for an R-rating and the MPAA threatened to release it with an X-rating (the NC-17 rating having not yet been introduced), which would have severely limited its commercial potential. King reluctantly edited out part of a love scene between Otis and Rourke in order to bring the film into line with the R-rating. The scene in question was widely rumored in the media to have shown the two actors — who had become romantically involved during production of the film — actually having intercourse; both actors denied this, but the director was ambiguous. The scene became a cause celebre in the media, with the Siskel & Ebert review program devoting part of one installment to film critic Roger Ebert discussing the censored scene with King (Ebert is shown watching the footage, but it was not broadcast). The footage itself had been filmed in such a way that penetration (if any) was not visible; even in one overhead shot showing realistic sexual movement, Rourke’s genitals are completely in shadow, making it impossible to confirm or deny based upon available photographic evidence. In his examination of the situation, Ebert used Wild Orchid as evidence that the MPAA needed to create a new rating for films made for adults that were not aimed at the pornography market to which the X-rating had been associated; not long after the film’s release, the MPAA abandoned X and introduced the NC-17 rating, which was intended for this purpose.
When Wild Orchid was released to the home video and cable markets the next year, King assembled an unrated “director’s cut” which contained the footage he had been forced to trim. The theatrical release ran at 105 minutes; the video version runs 111 minutes and most notably includes the more explicit version of the debated love scene which is almost completely made up of different footage than what was used in the R-rated theatrical version. This was one of the first occasions in which a film that had been edited for sexual explicitness was later issued in unexpurgated form on home video, a practice that is now standard.
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#4: Pulp Fiction (1994)
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Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters’ senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film’s title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of “pulp”. The plot, in keeping with most of Tarantino’s other works, is presented out of chronological sequence. The picture’s self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film.
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#5: The Pianist (2002)
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You turn 30 and still like playing war games on your computer, you like Terminator, Rambo & Co.? Try this one: The Pianist. Don’t eat right before the you watch the movie and do not arrange any dinner afterwards. Don’t watch this film alone. But if “Schindlers List” was more than you can bear, you better go back to your computer … A brilliant pianist, a Polish Jew, witnesses the restrictions Nazis place on Jews in the Polish capital, from restricted access to the building of the Warsaw ghetto. As his family is rounded up to be shipped off to the Nazi labor camps, he escapes deportation and eludes capture by living in the ruins of Warsaw. This movies is based on a book, a true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in Europe. At the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. By the start of the 1940s, Szpilman has seen his world go from piano concert halls to the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw and then must suffer the tragedy of his family deported to a German concentration camps, while Szpilman is conscripted into a forced German Labor Compound. At last deciding to escape, Szpilman goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee where he is witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943 – May 16, 1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1 August to 2 October 1944). This film will be tough. But no doubt about it. Everybody should watch this film once in his lifetime.
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Five Best Movies Ever