Films beginning with B part 1

Babe
(George Milller, 1995)
George "Mad Max" Miller's penchant for cute animal flicks doesn't stop with penguins, as per last year's Happy Feet - he also adapted and directed this surprisingly heartfelt tale of about a pig reprieved from death row and adopted by a sheepdog. It skirts glutinous kids'-movie cliches, subtly flagging up its message of nonconformity and tolerance instead.

Babette's Feast
(Gabriel Axel, 1987)
Set in picturesque sepia-toned 19th century Denmark, this is the movie equivalent of dinner at the Brothers Grimm. Awash with a gently puritanical sensibility, it pares religion to its most spiritual form, with food as a sumptuous example of how to serve God, when French civil war refugee Babette thanks her new community with a feast fit for a king.

Back to the Future
(Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
Few things are as enjoyable, or as rare, in the movie world as a smart crowd-pleaser. A relentlessly entertaining time travel tale that heaps paradoxes and conundrums upon hapless Michael J Fox. Zemeckis was quite the subversive back then, smuggling in such risqué elements as Fox fighting off amorous advances from the girl who would later become his mother.

Bad Boy Bubby
(Rolf De Heer, 1993)
Fans of provocative cinema should track down this Australian one-off, that starts out bizarre and only gets stranger. A 30-year-old man has been kept locked indoors by his mother for his entire life. And used as her sex slave. When he escapes, there's no telling what could happen.

Bad Day at Black Rock
(John Sturges, 1955)
The train stops in the Black Rock desert and a one-armed Spencer Tracy gets off. He has a medal to deliver to a war hero. But Black Rock has forgotten this man and is now as grim as Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. What's a one-armed man to do . . . ?

Bad Lieutenant
(Abel Ferrara, 1992)
"Gambler. Thief. Junkie. Killer. Cop." They forgot "Conflicted Catholic" and "Defiler of the Altar," but hey, who's counting? Harvey Keitel gives a masterclass in depravity, redemption and loss as an addicted, corrupt cop enduring a staggeringly unpleasant tailspin of a weekend. Abel Ferrara at his most outrageous and, weirdly, most controlled.

Bad Santa
(Terry Zwigoff, 2003)
Inebriated, foul-mouthed, child-hating, criminally intent Billy Bob Thornton gleefully desecrates everything the shopping malls hold dear. Plumbing new depths in festive vulgarity, it's definitely not for the children, but it is hilarious, and ultimately, it has a heart.

Badlands
(Terrence Malick, 1973)
Malick's first feature instantly established him at the forefront of the Movie Brat generation, and rightly so: his hyper-alienated study of two teen thrill-killers (loosely based on the Starkweather-Fugate) was perfectly in tune with its times. There's a L'Etranger-esque quality to the blank, seemingly motiveless need for violence; it's strangely funny, too.

Bagdad Café
(Percy Adlon, 1987)
Very often the best films about the US come from non-Americans . Bavarian Adlon places an efficient German hausfrau in a dwindling Mojave diner to turn its fortunes around. Jack Palance's dignified role as a patron eminded casting directors to start putting him back into good movies.

Bambi
(David Hand, 1942)
Many a grown-up can still be reduced to tears by the plight of the young deer and his doomed mother, but Disney's woodland coming-of-age story is less sentimental and more primal than you'd think. Animation experts watch and weep, too; the pioneering "multi-plane" technique brings the story to life perfectly.

Bande À Part
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
In what's perhaps Jean-Luc Godard's most audience-friendly film, two guys fall in love with not just a girl but the money she might lead them to. The signature scenes are a Charleston dance sequence and a record-setting dash through the Louvre, but the zany action races toward a shocking finale.

Bandit Queen
(Shekhar Kapur, 1994)
Based on the true-life tale of "India's most feared outlaw", Poolan Devi, Bandit Queen doesn't make for easy viewing. Although Devi herself campaigned to have Kapur's film banned (arguing that there was more to her life story than "sniveling" and being "raped") the film remains a powerful expose of caste in India and a gripping revenge movie to boot.

Barbarella
(Roger Vadim, 1968)
Along with Cat Ballou, this is the high tide of Jane Fonda's almost forgotten pre-feminist, transparent-miniskirt-and-gogo-boots bimbo period - a louche, campy, wildly over-the-top sci-fi spoof from serial Svengali Roger Vadim. Unpardonable in so many ways, and therefore unmissable.

Barry Lyndon
(Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Kubrick's Thackeray adaptation is a staggering vision of the 18th century aristocracy, switching from cluttered detail to reveal yet another stunning composition in which the protagonists - snotty Irish aristocrats, suspicious Prussian mercenaries and Ryan O'Neal's ambitious arriviste - are situated. Kubrick is at his most imperious here, but it suits a thrilling European grand canvas.

Barton Fink
(Joel Coen, 1991)
The Coens have diverse influences, but this is insane: a Clifford Odets-ish playwright works for a Kafkaesque studio alongside William Faulkner's doppelganger, while his neighbour, a satanic Willy Loman, conjures an inferno that may prefigure the Holocaust. Spiritedly demented.

Batman
(Tim Burton, 1989)
An astonishingly successful high-gothic reinvention of the Caped Crusader, which banished the pop-art comedy of the TV show. Most of the humans were upstaged by the terrific set - except, of course, for Jack Nicholson as the Joker.

Battle of Algiers
(Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
A stark, powerful account of the Algerian uprising that has the immediacy of a newsreel although it is, in fact, a dramatisation. Dealing with imperial power, terrorism, torture and counter-insurgency, it is as pertinent now as then - testament to its honesty and accuracy.

Battle Royale
(Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)
Blood-splattered gore-fest that pushes ultra-violence to delirious, satirical heights. Teacher Takeshi Kitano takes his junior-high students on class trip to a remote island to execute a brutal new Government directive: kill each other, or die. Teen rivalries and crushes play out in deadly style as the body count mounts.

Battleship Potemkin
(Sergei Eistenstein, 1925)
If Birth of a Nation established the ground rules of narrative cinema, Battleship Potemkin made it swing. Eisenstein's Soviet history of the abortive Odessa mutiny aimed for documentary realism, hot-wiring the narrative with pioneering montage techniques and the sort of dazzling set-pieces that had other directors rushing to pay homage.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped
(Jacques Audiard, 2005)

A superb remake of James Toback's 1978 film Fingers, this jumpy psychological thriller also tackles multi- layered mysteries about love and self-imposed prisons. Romain Duris stars as Thomas, a real-estate entrepreneur involved in brutal shady deals, who raids derelict buildings at night, releases rats out of bags and forces poor immigrants out of their homes. In private, however, Thomas is a talented but frustrated classical musician; the mysterious title of the film becomes increasingly clear as Audiard focuses on capturing the inner music of the soul, the syncopated flutter of a heartbeat. Eventually Thomas seeks out private lessons with a beautiful Chinese pianist to prepare an audition; Audiard creates some stunning scenes of subtle dialogue-free moments between teacher and student. With the grainy, close-ups of Duris's face and focus on the jagged pieces of his life, Audiard shows he is a master in setting up contrasts: gorgeous mix of gaudy colour and chiaroscuro shadows, the interplay of shattering violence and tremulous lyricism. Like like the Bach fugue that Thomas drums out endlessly on his baby Grand, Audiard's film is a rigorous study in counterpoint, evoking two parallel worlds that play off each other, then finally come together with a elliptic flash-forward ending Thomas is a fugitive running from his own demons; whether or not he will ever find peace in his new life is anyone's guess.

Lanie Goodman

Beau Travail
(Claire Denis, 1999)
An outstanding aesthetic achievement that follows the rivalry between a Foreign Legion recruit (Gregoire Colin) and his jealous superior (Denis Lavant). Denis choreographs the rancour into an intense homoerotic ballet that, against the Djibouti desert, seems to aspire more deeply than cinema and more monumentally than dance: almost a kind of parched sculptural beauty.

Becket
(Peter Glenville, 1964)
An unlikely vein of homoeroticism runs through this epic about the troubled friendship between King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) and Thomas Becket (Richard Burton.) Burton and O'Toole, for all their reputation as hellraisers, are magnificent: they bring an intensity and intelligence to their roles that it is impossible to think of any contemporary British stars being able to match.

Before Sunrise
(Richard Linklater, 1995)
Two beautiful American strangers meet on a Eurorail train and spend a day and night walking around Vienna, a journey electrified by instant infatuation-maybe even love. Linklater's verbose two-hander runs on the heady buzz of kismet, and reaches a wide-open ending that led to an equally sublime sequel, Before Sunset.

Being John Malkovich
(Spike Jonze, 1999)
Ever want to be someone else? "Careful what you wish for" is the message in one of the greatest American films of the 90s, which is at once a slapstick comedy, a transsexual love story and a philosophical investigation into celebrity worship, gender confusion, the wages of ambition and the nature of identity. Controlled lunacy and pure genius.

Being There
(Hal Ashby, 1979)
Peter Sellers' penultimate role was one he had struggled to get to the screen for almost a decade. As Chance the gardener, who has lived a life with little more than television as a companion, Sellers offers a blank canvas upon which the other characters imprint whatever meaning they wish. Faultless in all departments.

Belle de Jour
(Luis Buñuel, 1967)
A surreal satire of bourgeois sexual neuroses, in which a wealthy, frigid housewife chooses to spend her afternoons working in a brothel. Catherine Deneuve delivers a typically impenetrable performance, enacting masochistic, degrading fantasies (both hers and others) and revealing the faultlines of a repressed, depraved middle class destined to self-destruct. Possibly Buñuel's greatest film.

La Belle Noiseuse
(Jacques Rivette, 1991)
A four-hour film, slow-moving but passionately detailed, about the nature of artistic creation, loosely derived from Balzac. Michel Piccoli is a 60-year-old painter whose talent is blocked until one day, he meets beautiful Emmanuel Beart. His powers miraculously revive, at the expense, perhaps, of his marriage. Rivette used improvisatory techniques to devise the movie, slowly following the technical process of painting itself.

Belleville Rendez-vous
(Sylvain Chomet, 2003)
Amid the gleaming CGI orthodoxy enforced by Pixar and co, Chomet's loping, surreal 2D animation was always going to stand out a mile. The distended retro world you're pulled through by a Parisian pensioner and her dog as they search for her abducted grandson, a Tour de France cyclist, is detailed, quirky and utterly fascinating.

Ben-Hur
(William Wyler, 1959)
The epic movie as originally intended - a life-or-death battleground in which world-views duke it out earnestly via oiled-up hunks in really cool chariots. Wyler's three-and-a-half-hour blockbuster has shown Homeric durability, thanks to the soulful clash of values between Charlton Heston's redeemed Jewish slave and his more pragmatic Roman friend. And Wyler hardly skimped on the chariots either.

La Bête Humaine
(Jean Renoir, 1938)
Jean Renoir used the fiction of Emile Zola to create his deeply disturbing noir movie. Simone Simon and Dernand Ledoux play Séverine and Roubaud, a couple who kill their former employer on a train. Jean Gabin plays the engineer who witnesses the crime, but instead of turning them in, uses the information to exert a sinister blackmail. He is in love with Séverine, and begins a bizarre affair with her.

La Bete
(Walerian Borowczyk, 1975)
The great art-porn favourite of the 70s is crazily Gothic, madly over-the-top, and comically sublime. The gadabout son of a mysterious French aristocrat is engaged to be married to an innocent American heiress. He has an awful secret, linked to rumours of a "beast" rampaging around the estate. Notorious at the time for its close-ups of horse erections, the film also features scenes showing a young woman enjoying congress with someone in a big hairy Beast costume.

Better Off Dead
(Savage Steve Holland, 1985)
A morose high-school student contemplates suicide after his girlfriend dumps him, but he's luckily distracted by a comely exchange student and a constant parade of strange characters and situations. This glimpse of John Cusack's charms is a loopy sleeper among classic American teen comedies of the 80s.

Betty Blue
(Jean Jacques Beneix, 1986)
Set in a seaside bungalow resort, a torrid romance between a handyman/wannabe novelist and a wild waitress spirals into obsession and madness. Beneix's cult film is a winning mix of dazzling colours, audacious dialogue and steamy chemistry between Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle.

Beverly Hills Cop
(Martin Brest, 1984)
The Bruckheimer-Simpson axis of evil in full seductive effect: star plus empowering premise plus megavolume action sequences. The star was Eddie Murphy, the premise was rough inner-city cop straightens out chi-chi LA enclave (including Steven Berkoff as chief badman) and avenges a lost buddy while he's at it. Harold Faltermeyer's slinky, synthy title song, Axel F, was a perfect expression of how you felt after it was all over.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
(Russ Meyer, 1970)
The west coast hippie scene never looked as enviably groovy as it does in Meyer's exuberantly psychedelic masterpiece. Following an all-girl rock trio's ride on fame's roller-coaster, it boasts colourful characters, a vintage soundtrack, cod-Shakespearean narration and a brilliantly ludicrous ending.

Bicycle Thieves
(Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
De Sica's neo-realist classic came freewheeling out of the ruins of postwar Italy to take world cinema by storm. The director shot his simple working-class parable on the streets of Rome, using natural light and non-professional actors. Six decades on, it feels as fresh and as relevant as ever.

The Big Chill
(Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)
Seminal hippie-cum-yuppie tribute to friendship, centred on a nostalgic weekend reunion of seven college friends. Kasdan weaves bittersweet reflections on love and sex with a smattering of soul-searching for lost idealism, offset by a feelgood Motown soundtrack.

The Big Combo
(Joseph H Lewis, 1955)
Joseph H Lewis (Gun Crazy) and monochrome cameraman supreme John Alton to bring film noir to its minimally expressive climax in the same year as Kiss Me Deadly. Visually inventive (the climax takes place under a single bulb), and watch for Fante and Mingo, cinema's first pair of well-adjusted, mutually devoted gay contract killers.

The Big Heat
(Fritz Lang, 1953)
Against a characteristic Lang backdrop of fatalistic trajectories and encroaching madness, of myriad doublings and halvings (embodied by Gloria Grahame's half-disfigured face, courtesy of Lee Marvin's coffee-pot), Glenn Ford's enraged, grief-stricken cop comes close to mirroring the animalism of his gangster foes. Bleak and shockingly violent, even today.

The Big Lebowski
(Joel Coen, 1998)
Jeff Bridges' amiable stoner tangles with dark forces in this gloriously silly riff on Raymond Chandler. As loosely thrown together as one of The Dude's joints, the plot sprawls to include everything from a missing trophy wife to a bunch of hopeless German nihilists.

Big Night
(Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci, 1996)
Character actor Stanley Tucci's starred and co-directed in this winning story of a pair of Italian immigrant brothers seeking out restaurant success in 50s America. The food is its own character, emotionally wrought and prepared with all the sensuousness of celluloid lovemaking. A delicious treat.

The Big Parade
(King Vidor, 1925)
The Saving Private Ryan of the silent era. Vidor's landmark war movie provided a showcase role for matinee idol John Gilbert as one of a posse of Yanks who sign up for the Great War; Vidor introduces many a stylistic flourish as bathetic human stories are juxtaposed with military conflict on a grand scale.

The Big Sleep
(Howard Hawks, 1946)
Take a classic Raymond Chandler novel set in Los Angeles. Make it a mystery more than anyone can fathom. Then watch the labyrinth turn into a love parade for Bogart and Bacall (truly a love affair made by the screen). So it's a film noir, a who-dun-what, a private eye caper, a love story and a screwball comedy.

Big Wednesday
(John Milius, 1978)
The unexpectedly sentimental side of writer-director Milius' testosterone-fuelled schtick is to be found in this emotional epic, as it tracks three Californian surfer buddies either side of the Vietnam draft. Cornball dialogue and overblown staging don't matter when the point is so obviously personal, the surfing magical, and the sense of diverging lives so true.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
(Stephen Herek, 1989)
California dudespeak is the universal lingua franca as Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter travel back in time for some field research for their history paper, of which they are in danger of "flunking most heinously". The duo's flipped-out enthusiasm and the script's slangy flair make for an air-guitar flourish of a teen comedy.

The Birds
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
"An apocalyptic tone-poem", Fellini called Hitchcock's last masterpiece. What sets the birds off? Mother's incestuous sexual jealousy? The son's burgeoning emotional independence? Tippi Hedren's lime-green dress? Whatever - the sexual tremors beneath the avian horror are the movie's true motor; and the effects, instantly dated in 1963, now seem horrifyingly retro-beautiful.

The Birth of a Nation
(DW Griffith, 1915)
Proceed with caution, for this film is racist, ridiculous history and it revived the Ku Klux Klan. But DW Griffith made the audience sit still for three hours, held by the rhythm of long shot and close-up. Yes, it's ugly and compromised, but it's hard to resist - welcome to movie history.

Black Cat, White Cat
(Emir Kusturica, 1998)
Amiably beserk tale of chaos and carnival from Sarajevo-born Kusturica, set among a modern-day Gypsy community living on the banks of the Danube. Petty crime and even pettier punishment ensue, all leading up to an epochally frenzied wedding party full of commotion, frolics and runaway ducks. Funny, fascinating and faintly exhausting.

Blackboard Jungle
(Richard Brooks, 1955)
Lurid high-school drama that introduced Hollywood to rock'n'roll, with slash-the-seats credit music by Bill Haley And The Comets, but Elvis and co had yet to exert their influence over these inner city juvenile delinquents. Glenn Ford exudes cool authority as a teacher drafted into to tame their savage hearts, but Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier are on fire as the boys who won't back down.

· This article was amended on Tuesday July 10 2007. Battleship Potemkin was not a "history of the abortive Kronstadt revolution"; it dealt with a mutiny that took place in 1905 on the Black Sea and a brief uprising that followed in Odessa. This has been corrected.

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