Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Sidney Lumet's retelling of the true events of a bank robbery gone wrong are a tour de force of cinema.

It's the true story of a bungled bak robbery that turns into a hostage crisis. Al Pacino plays Sonny, who along with his friend Sal rob a Brooklyn bank in order to obtain the money for Sonny's boyfriend/wife's sex change operation. Things don't go according to plan and the two end up taking the staff of the bank hostage and a media circus envelops around it. 

Sonny becomes an amazing anti hero winning over the hearts of the public and the hostages. You are routing for him until the bitter end.

One of Pacino's greatest roles, he portrays Sonny so well. A great supporting cast co-operates to make this a tight thriller and up there with Lumet's best.

A must see.

82. Belle De Jour (1967)

Catherine Deneuve stars as Severine, a bored bourgeois housewife who has a rather frigid sex life with her husband. She assumes a double life and goes and works for a high class brothel where she feels safe to explore and satisfy her prolific sexual fantasies.

For such a sexual storyline, the film is rather chaste and this is its advantage. Sex is never shown on camera and the fetishes of her clients are hinted at and left to the imagination. A great scene has her presented with a buzzing box by an Asian client. The only thing shown is the look on their faces which give little away and the audiences imaginations are left to run wild.

Severine's dual life is upset when she falls for a gangster client who infracts into her respectable life with dire consequences.

It is certainly a film of its time. Highly stylised in the look and also the attitude of the mid-sixties. It could be mistaken as a take on a male fantasy, but the film never completely subjugates the women and it is Severine who is experimenting with her own sexuality and no character's psychology is stamped out as this or that.

It's a beautifully complex film, bizarre at times, but never simple. 

81. The Bigamist (1953)

A rather strange sort of melodrama. Edmond O Brien stars as Harry Graham, a freezer salesman from San Francisco who is trying to adopt a child with his wife and business partner Eve (Joan Fontaine.) In the vetting process, the head of the adoption agency, Mr. Jordan, uncovers Harry's dual life in LA where he also has a wife and a son to boot. The film is Harry explaining to Mr. Jordan how he came to be in such a predicament.

The melodrama is at full pelt here, but for such a mix of damaged characters, you start to empathise with all of them. Ida Lupino stars as his LA wife Phyllis, but also directs the film. She was known as a poor man's Bette Davis and when the new wave of young starlets came into the studio system, she decided to step behind the camera and also write roles for herself. Good for her.

The film culminates in a courtroom scene with the conclusion of how it will all pan out left up in the air with a series of silent expressions that tell a wealth more than the script ever could.

It's a film that does well with the empathy, but though perfect Sunday afternoon viewing, I am not sure it quite belongs on this list.

80. The Band Wagon (1953)

The last of the great MGM musicals, Band Wagon, is a meta mix of styles from old to new; traditional to modern; revue to plot & character.

This modernisation is told in the story of Tony, a has-been star returning from Hollywood to New York to star in a musical written by his husband & wife writing friends. This pair are semi-autobiographical characters from the real pens of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. They based a lot of the plot on their own experiences of dealing with difficult directors. The real life pairing were just platonic friends, but wrote Lester & Lily as a married couple as their genuine friendship was considered to be unbelievable in a film.

The director Vincente Minnelli shows off his skills to the extreme here. The smorgasbord of styles are all exquisitely filmed and the cast seem to be having a ball. By far the best sequence is the noir parody, Girl Hunt: A Murder Mystery in Jazz.  Michael Kidd's choreography is brilliant as the action enfolds with jazz hand fighting and Fred Astaire delivers some great corny lines. "She came at me in sections. More curves than a scenic railway." The 'she' is Cyd Charisse who adds a whole spate of glamour (and a fine set of pins) to the proceedings.

A true classic musical.

"That's Entertainment!" is correct.