1000 films to see before you dieMoviesFilms beginning with U
Ugetsu Monogatari
(Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
A haunting fable about the vanity of human wishes, as incarnated in two men in 16th-century Japan: a potter and a merchant. One yearns for riches, and is seduced by a phantom princess; the other longs to be a samurai, and leaves for the warrior's life while his wife drifts into prostitution. An absorbing and beautifully photographed tale.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(Jacques Demy, 1964)
A wartime romance told entirely in song - something of a first. The pop-art colour schemes and beautiful people (led by the young Catherine Deneuve) might suggest a sugared almond of a movie, but there's a bitter flavour to both the music and story, and a hard centre.
(Hal Hartley, 1989)
Now sadly overshadowed by lead actor Adrienne Shelly's recent murder in New York, this remains a key entry in the American independent scene of the 1980s. Hartley's deadpan comedy about a Long Island girl (Shelly) and her obsession with a mysterious stranger (Robert Burke) is still as smart as a lick of paint.
Under the Skin
(Carine Adler, 1997)
One of the performances that launched the movie career of Samantha Morton: she plays Iris, a young woman deeply affected by the sudden death of her mother (played by Rita Tushingham). Iris embarks on an odyssey of casual sex, emotional anguish and psychological self-harm. A classic arthouse vehicle for a risky, raw performance.
Unforgiven
(Clint Eastwood, 1992)
The latest, maybe greatest phase of the icon's career began with an interesting half-retraction from the omniscient death-dealer of spaghetti westerns. Starting with his ageing gunfighter's shaking hands, Eastwood fastidiously debunks America's founding mythology, though the final act of vengeance suggests that maybe there could have been no other way.
United 93
(Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Harrowing recreation of the hijacking of the fourth plane on 9/11. Given that we already know its tragic outcome, the story manages to remain gripping by allowing the action to unfold in real time. The sober, unsensational treatment of its subject matter makes it all the more emotionally devastating.
(Brian De Palma, 1987)
Incorruptible cop Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) tries to bring down Robert De Niro's bulked-up Al Capone in this Prohibition-era thriller. Sharp-shooter Andy Garcia, grizzly old-timer Sean Connery and nerdy accountant Charles Martin Smith are hand-picked by Ness to break the Chicago mob's all-pervasive grip on the city through a series of shoot-outs and stand-offs, with De Palma even finding room for a homage to Battleship Potempkin's Odessa steps sequence.
(Bryan Singer, 1995)
A scriptwriter's tour de force for Christopher McQuarrie - a piece of classic impenetrable noir that talks, talks, then talks some more as, Rashomon-style, it sets into motion one of the best final-act plot swerves ever. Oh, and it introduces Kevin Spacey as 90s cinema's favourite secret weapon.
Uzak
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
A beautiful and sad movie that attains a clarity and simplicity that lesser film-makers could strain every sinew trying to achieve without ever getting anywhere. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age, yet the film itself is, gloriously, the opposite of depressing. It is gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate visual comedy with a shy adroitness that Woody Allen might admire. Uzak means "distant": an idea whose metaphorical significance matches the more obvious sense of physical distance and estrangement. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) has made a success of his life as a photographer living in Istanbul; professionally bored and disillusioned, he is conducting a deeply unsatisfactory affair with a married woman. His life is upended by the deeply unwelcome arrival of Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), a dopey country cousin from the village that he has left behind. It isn't long before Yusuf is getting on his nerves in a very big way, but the realisation that Yusuf is the nearest thing Mahmut will now ever get to human companionship in the evening of his life is appallingly sad and funny. This odd-couple tragicomedy is so well acted by both men, so utterly involving, and so real. Uzak is about the distances that open up inexorably as we enter middle age: between the past and the present, between the present and an unattainable future, and between lonely men who shut themselves in their own carapaces of pride. Uzak is a film that I admire more than I can say - the work of a brilliant film-maker.
Peter Bradshaw
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ6Zobpwfo9pbmiipaN8c4WOamdpaJaeua6%2F06iqnp2SmrOwvsSypq6cmZqD