1000 films to see before you dieMoviesFilms beginning with F
The Fabulous Baker Boys
(Steve Kloves, 1989)
The casual suavity of the Bridges brothers was caught, like lightning in a bottle, in this lounge-lizard romance about a cocktail-bar duo whose act and personal lives are dragged apart when a gorgeous wannabe chanteuse (Michelle Pfeiffer) joins the act. The subsequent ménage a trois isn't new, but the scintillating chemistry between the players is dazzling to watch and deceptively rich in detail.
A Face in the Crowd
(Elia Kazan, 1957)
A before-its-time satire said to prophesise the power of the media, shock-jock megalomaniacs, even the Reagan presidency. Andy Griffith made his debut, in a role very different from the folksy warmth with which he would be later associated - Larry Rhodes, an Arkansas tramp with the gift of the gab who is included one day in a radio programme. He rises to become one of the country's biggest stars, with a chillingly faked sort of down-home bonhomie, masking egotism and a growing taste for power.
Face/Off
(John Woo, 1997)
Fasten your seatbelt for exhilaratingly over-the-top action - Nic Cage and John Travolta are the terrorist and FBI man who swap faces in a surgically enhanced game of cat and mouse. No one does operatic fight sequences quite like Woo, and this film has arguably his greatest: a slo-mo shoot-out set to Over the Rainbow.
The Faculty
(Robert Rodriguez, 1998)
Breezy and exciting homage to 1950s paranoid sci-fi augmented by Scream writer Kevin Williamson's clever-clever postmodernisms - Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Breakfast Club. And it's one of the few teen movies with an oddly positive drug message.
Fahrenheit 9/11
(Michael Moore, 2004)
However universally derided the Iraq war is now, Michael Moore's sensational docu-polemic against it was out on a limb at the time. With a raucous mixture of comedy, scorn, anger and devastatingly chosen news clips, Moore landed a sledgehammer punch on President Bush and his various shabby consiglieri.
The Fallen Idol
(Carol Reed, 1948)
Long-lost Greene-Reed collaboration, which surfaced after decades in limbo, this is also one of the great tales told from a child's perspective - fit to stand alongside The Go-Between and What Maisie Knew in its account of a child destroyed by the sexual misdemeanors of adults. After The Heiress, Ralph Richardson's finest hour on screen.
Fanny and Alexander
(Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
Perhaps the cinematic climax to Bergman entire career, this wonderfully rich three-hour autobiographical drama revisits episodes from his childhood, focusing on the fictional Ekdahl family, particularly 10-year-old Alexander and his sister, Fanny. When their widowed mother remarries a tyrannical bishop, misery ensues. Gorgeously shot by Sven Nykvist, this intimate tale transcends the director's habitual dark torment to suggest that life's pleasures are for the taking.
Far from Heaven
(Todd Haynes, 2002)
Todd Haynes' lush simulacrum of Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas is wild with colour and suffused with yearning. Julianne Moore is stunning as the lavishly costumed housewife who loses her husband to a man, and scandalises her community through her friendship with her black gardener.
Farewell My Concubine
(Chen Kaige, 1993)
Following the fortunes of two Beijing Opera performers through half-a-century of turbulent Chinese history, this is epic film-making of the highest order. Few directors would contemplate such an ambitious undertaking; the fact that Chen pulled it off so successfully is something of a miracle.
Fargo
(Joel Coen, 1996)
The wit, the style and the drolly eccentric performances complement a strong sense of menace and disquiet in this comedy-thriller classic from the Coens. Frances McDormand earns her place in the hall of fame as the pregnant police officer whose dogged detective work in the freezing Minnesota snow foils a bungled mock-kidnapping plot hatched by the sinister yet incompetent William H Macy.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
(Amy Heckerling, 1982)
Everybody here became a star, down to minor player Forest Whitaker, and it's Cameron Crowe's finest hour. Somewhere between Jeff Spicoli ("Duuuuuude!") and Judge Reinhold ("I'm gonna kick 100% of yer ass!") lies suburban teenage Nirvana. Until Mr Hand shows up... .
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(Russ Meyer, 1965)
Domineering women, fast cars, rape, murder, lesbians and a sleazy soundtrack - the world had seen little to compare to this kinky crime classic at the time, and it's become a touchstone for 60s retro-heads. It's more complex and less trashy than it sounds (there's a proper story) and after all these years it still pulsates with energy.
Fear Eats the Soul
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
In Fassbinder's hands, Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is transformed from swish melodrama to blunt instrument. The forbidden romance is now between an elderly Berlin cleaner and a Moroccan immigrant 30 years her junior, and Fassbinder picks away at society's scabs so mercilessly, you've got to applaud.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
(John Hughes, 1986)
Matthew Broderick is the slick teen top-cat who plays hooky in spectacular fashion, despite the efforts of teacher nemesis Jeffrey Jones. More of a straight fantasy than any other of Hughes's lauded works, FBDO is still pulled off with the frictionless brio of the best screwball comedies: it never patronises its characters (unless they are adults), and has a peerless straight-guy in Jones, plus engaging performances from the skiving trio of Broderick, Mia Sara and Alan Ruck.
Festen
(Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
A black-tie reunion descends into accusation and recrimination, and Vinterberg's hand-held camera captures the ugliness with all the raw honesty and immediacy of a home movie. A blistering study of bourgeois secrets and lies that kickstarted the Dogme movement.
Field of Dreams
(Phil Alden Robinson, 1989)
A spiritually uplifting movie about a ghostly baseball team starring Kevin Costner might sound like a bad joke, but this enduringly heart-warming film about a simple Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his yard after a voice tells him, "If you build it, they will come", is a quietly provocative, stunningly acted tale of regret, redemption and forgiveness.
The Fifth Element
(Luc Besson, 1996)
A shamelessly overblown futuristic thriller, with Bruce Willis's tough-guy cab driver doing his damnedest to save the planet and keep evil at bay. Besson's crossover hit is a lavish treat of dazzling colours, special effects and campy performances.
Fight Club
(David Fincher, 1999)
Edward Norton and Brad Pitt found some fizzing alpha-male chemistry in this stomach-turning satire, taken from the cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton is the sleepless neurotic who finds unwholesome fascination in hanging out at 12-step addiction groups; through this shadowy world, he hooks up with the charismatic and witty Pitt, who introduces him to an underground sect for bare-knuckle fights. Therapy for the politically incorrect real man.
Fires Were Started
(Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
Humphrey Jennings' best-known world war two documentary reconstructs one night in the lives of a dockside fire company in the East End, staffed by ordinary Britons of all classes - a Bevan-esque ideal - as they prepare for another night of heavy bombing raids. Filled with Jennings' peculiarly beautiful brand of docu-poetics.
A Fish Called Wanda
(Charles Crichton, 1988)
Ealing veteran Crichton helmed this sly transatlantic heist flick, splicing the remnants of the Monty Python team with newcomers from Hollywood: Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline as scheming "siblings". The ensemble cast spar gamely, and a blithe meanspiritedness - witness the tormenting of pet-loving hitman Michael Palin - is the order of the day.
Fists in the Pocket
(Marco Bellocchio, 1965)
Lou Castel plays a teenage epileptic, simmering like a shop-soiled Brando, in this turbulent tour of a dysfunctional Italian family. While writer-director Marco Bellocchio is still making acclaimed films today, he has never quite equalled the intensity of his electrifying debut feature.
Fitzcarraldo
(Werner Herzog, 1982)
Herzog tried to cast Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger and Jason Robards in the role of the impresario who tries to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, but who else but Klaus Kinski could have been the avatar of human absurdity the director wanted - or who, indeed, could have kept pace with Herzog's own derangement? Dragging a steamboat over a mountain says it all: the crew really did that.
Five Easy Pieces
(Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Jack Nicholson plays Bobby, a randy oil-rig worker who, as we eventually discover, is also a trained pianist in flight from his affluent background. There were many disaffected road movies that emerged from America during the Vietnam-war era, but this was one of the most incisive and influential.
Flesh
(Paul Morrissey, 1968)
The hustlers, society darlings and drag queens of Andy Warhol's Factory, though cast in fictional scenarios, scream, preen, mumble and bumble through their everyday lives on screen. This, along with companion movies Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), are testament to the allure and vacuity of Pop Art, both as product and critique of the most romanticised era of cultural experimentation.
Flirting With Disaster
(David O Russell, 1996)
Comic masterpiece about a furiously uptight manchild (Ben Stiller) travelling cross-country with his wife (Patricia Arquette) and his breathtakingly useless social worker (Tia Leoni) in search of his real parents, who turn out to be acid-dealing, pot-growing 60s casualties. His in-laws, predictably and hysterically, are very much not.
The Fly
(David Cronenberg, 1986)
One of the few films that gives remakes a good name. It's a love triangle between a man, a woman and a genetic-level infestation of rampant, mutating fly DNA. Then real-life couple Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis show real chemistry - by no means a given - adding real pathos to Cronenberg's body-horror.
Force of Evil
(Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
In this classic noir, lawyer John Garfield puts himself through the wringer to protect his numbers-racketeering brother from bankruptcy when his criminal clients embark on a plan to ruin their opposition. Polonsky was an active and committed Marxist and even though the film attacks a rather dubious form of capitalism, it was enough to get him blacklisted.
The Fortune Cookie
(Billy Wilder, 1966)
First and best example of the Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau double act: the former is a cameraman knocked over while covering a sports event, the latter an ambulance-chasing lawyer who persuades him to ham up his injuries for the compensation money. Wilder and co-scripter IAL Diamond are at their cynical funniest; this is a real treat.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921)
Blood-heat silent melodrama that made Rudolph Valentino a worldwide star. He's the incarnation of dark-eyed South American sensuality as the scion of Argentinian ranch-owners who decamps to debauchery in France but gets killed in the war. Before that, though, he tangoed into the hearts of women everywhere.
The Four Hundred Blows
(François Truffaut, 1959)
A moving portrait of an unloved and misunderstood adolescent who turns to petty crime, this marks the first of Truffaut's semi-autobiographic saga of Antoine Doinel, sensitively played by the director's alter-ego protege Jean-Pierre Léaud. A landmark in black-and-white new wave realism for its masterful mix of understated emotion and innovative technique.
Frankenstein
(James Whale, 1931)
Although it strays somewhat from Mary Shelley's novel, Whale's Frankenstein provided one of cinema's most iconic visions in the form of Boris Karloff's flat-topped monster. His sensitive, mute performance still seems years ahead of the rather stagey showboating of the other actors. Viewed today, you can still catch glimpses of how groundbreaking this was on release.
Freaks
(Tod Browning, 1932)
"One of us! One of us!" Browning's oft-banned masterpiece tells of a circus girl who marries a dwarf for his money, only to suffer the terrifying vengeance of his pals from the freak tent. Still a queasy experience today.
The French Connection
(William Friedkin, 1971)
Archetypal tough-guy policier that cemented Friedkin's reputation in the early 70s New Hollywood, as well as catapulting Gene Hackman to the major league after years of toiling in relative obscurity. His Popeye Doyle was perfect for the times: violent, ruthless, amoral, and too desperate to care.
The Front
(Martin Ritt, 1976)
Ritt's drama is a grim reminder of how McCarthyism destroyed actors' and writers' careers. Ritt himself, along with screenwriter Walter Bernstein and several of their cast, had been blacklisted in the 1950s because of their perceived communist sympathies. Their anger at the injustice of it is palpable. There are desperately sad moments - Zero Mostel begging for work - but some dark comedy too, courtesy of Woody Allen as the neurotic New Yorker acting as a "front" for a blacklisted writer friend.
The Fugitive
(Andrew Davis, 1993)
One of the strongest of the 1990s' round of TV remakes, The Fugitive is Harrison Ford's last great browbeaten star turn before he began the long slide into irrelevance. US Marshal Tommy Lee Jones makes a superbly antagonistic opponent, cranking up the tension in an unpretentious, pile-driving blockbuster.
Funny Games
(Michael Haneke, 1997)
Like all the best horrors, this one begins happily, with a nice family driving through the countryside. What's different is the way Haneke handles what follows. As a pair of white-gloved psychopaths get to work, he cleverly challenges our own appetite for screen sadism, keeping the suspense at screaming point all the while.
· This article was amended on Tuesday July 10 2007. Fight Club was released in 1999, not 1990. This has been corrected.
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