Films beginning with G

Gallivant
(Andrew Kotting, 1997)
A travelogue like no other. Andrew Kotting's freeform road trip around the British coast is a tribute to the unsung eccentrics who make up our national identity and to the bonds of family. The two women in Kotting's life - his octogenarian gran and his young daughter Eden, who has Joubert syndrome - are his companions on this salty mini-epic journey in a movie that is as innovative and experimental as it is earthy.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
(Vittorio De Sica, 1970)
A wonderfully quiet, elegiac late film from the Bicycle Thieves director, dwelling on an Italian Jewish family who live serenely behind their garden walls as Mussolini's fascism starts to bite in the world outside. A dreamlike metaphor for the internal places that cannot be despoiled by simple brutality.

The General
(Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, 1927)
Watch The General with an audience and you realise just what a masterpiece this is. It's the great communal rollercoaster of silent-screen cinema, greased with quicksilver, no-nets physical comedy that constantly takes the breath away. Buster Keaton is the soulful centre of a slapstick storm.

Get Carter
(Mike Hodges, 1971)
The granddaddy of the Brit-grit crime genre is every bit as sordid and compelling as when it first came out. Michael Caine is the magnificently deadpan gangster who journeys to Newcastle to investigate the mysterious death of his brother. He delivers some great lines, including (all together now): "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself!"

Ghost
(Jerry Zucker, 1990)
Lovers Sam (Patrick Swayze) and Molly (Demi Moore) are sundered when the former is killed by a mugger, but Sam returns from beyond the grave to save his girl from a similar fate. It's supernaturally silly and sentimental, but in spite of that, moving, with a transcendent performance from Whoopi Goldberg as a wacky medium.

Ghost Dog; Way of the Samurai
(Jim Jarmusch, 1999)
Jarmusch's reputation as the one-off genius of US indie cinema was mightily reinforced by this intriguing mood piece with a wonderfully authoritative performance by Forest Whitaker - the best he was to get until Idi Amin came along. He is Ghost Dog, a mercenary assassin who lives according to the code of the Japanese samurai and conducts his life in a spirit of ascetic self-denial and Zen acceptance of his own inevitable violent death.

Ghost in the Shell
(Mamoru Oshii, 1995)
A Japanese anime whose combination of thrilling high-tech action and creditable philosophical questioning lifts it far above the genre's customary nerdy concerns. Like Blade Runner, it anticipates the convergence of artificial intelligence and the human soul in the form of a neo-noir detective story. Its intricately imagined future dictated the shape of sci-fi to come.

Ghost World
(Terry Zwigoff, 2001)
Daniel Clowes' comic series about teen-girl anomie enters the third dimension in the capable hands of director Terry Zwigoff. Star Thora Birch reveals layers of vulnerability and alienation behind her character's ironic façade, and Steve Buscemi is also outstanding as a sad-sack record collector and Birch's unlikely paramour.

Ghostbusters
(Ivan Reitman, 1984)
The action-comedy has been the death of many a Hollywood hack director, but Ivan Reitman aced it with a wonderfully daft premise: supernatural janitors save New York from an ancient Sumerian deity. Cue whip-crack special effects, a gothic frisson, iconic marketing and one very cheesy theme song. Bill Murray on sinful deadpan form can't have hindered, either.

Giant
(George Stevens, 1956)
Endemic racism and the metamorphosis of Texas from ranch land to oil well are operatically told, with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor as rich farmers, and James Dean the poor handyman turned oil magnate who infects their lives. Justifies the epic length with Dean's mesmerising screen presence alone.

Gigi
(Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
"Thank heavens for leetle girls," sings twinkly Maurice Chevalier: not sure he'd get away with that today, but it won him a special Oscar, one of nine garnered by this effervescent musical. Adapted from Colette's story, it has Leslie Caron's coquettish Gigi training to become a courtesan in 1890s Paris, to the tune of Lerner and Loewe's sweet songs.

Gilda
(Charles Vidor, 1946)
Rita Hayworth, at the absolute pinnacle of her beauty and torpid, moth-to-a-flame seductiveness, is the souped-up, purring V8 engine of this majestically batty and obsessive, Argentina-based casino thriller, in which soulful fugitive Glenn Ford and George "Scarface" Macready (of Paths of Glory fame) tussle ruthlessly and fruitlessly for her favours.

Gimme Shelter
(Albert and David Maysles, 1970)
The Rolling Stones engaged verite forefathers the Maysles brothers to film their Altamont concert, little realising that the hideous consequences of the night would be caught forever by the unflinching pair. However, this groundbreaking rock doc isn't simply a record of chaos, showing the Stones in hypnotic, mellow studio moments as well as performing in their prime at an electrifying pre-gig university-show warm up.

Ginger Snaps
(John Fawcett, 2000)
Neat title, that - the Ginger in question is an eye-rolling teenager who falls victim to both the onset of menses and a mysterious hairy beast, with spectacular consequences. This smart Canadian horror film uses the werewolf legend to express the anxiety, alienation, and raging hormones of adolescence.

Gladiator
(Ridley Scott, 2000)
Russell Crowe is a suitably meaty presence in this sword-and-sandals spectacular. The epic blood-and-guts battle scenes are breathtaking and the legendary Oliver Reed makes his final performance as the gladiatorial showman. Terrifically entertaining.

Glengarry Glen Ross
(James Foley, 1992)
A pummelling translation of the David Mamet play, Glengarry Glen Ross sets four Chicago real-estate salesmen at each other's throats in a microcosm of American capitalism. Mamet's muscular argot is handed around the cast like testosterone supplements, and it's fascinating to see the macho ensemble - Pacino, Lemmon, Arkin, and Ed Harris - fight their corners with it.

Gloria
(John Cassavetes, 1980)
Against her wishes, a hard-boiled dame with former mafia connections becomes caretaker of an endangered little boy after his parents are murdered by the mob. The tidy premise - tough broad paired with adorable orphan - is given welcome rough edges by John Cassavetes' direction and Gena Rowlands' full-blooded performance.

The Go-Between
(Joseph Losey, 1970)

Before Merchant Ivory turned them into a formula, this is the way Edwardian period movies used to look: mighty essays on class and repression as well as febrile evocations of a rural English landscape that had, even then, almost totally vanished. LP Hartley's 1953 novel - with its imperishable opening lines, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there" - accentuates the gulf between the pre-first world war summer, and a Britain that was just about to enter the socio-sexual revolution of the second half of the 20th century. His narrative focuses on the traumas suffered by a young boy whose guilt at spilling details of a cross-class love affair results in a catatonic condition. By the time American exile Joseph Losey made the film, the 1960s had battered away most of the Edwardians' taboos, and the crisis of ideas had abated. But there was plenty of room to create the film as a counterpoint to that poetic opening; the presence of two very starry British actors - Julie Christie and Alan Bates - at the height of their powers stresses a continuity between turn-of-the-century Norfolk and the modern day. The Go-Between was Losey's third collaboration with Harold Pinter (after The Servant and Accident), and in many ways the most orthodox. Nevertheless, Pinter did insert flash-forwards and the like to create a fractured sense of chronology that reflected the novel's later-life perspective. Losey, ever the observant exile, luxuriates in the period detail, but never allows the surfaces to become too glossy. He knew, first and foremost, that this was a story about people, and a great one at that.

Andrew Pulver

The Godfather
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
The potency of the organised-crime genre was massively re-established by this family epic: a locus classicus for 1970s American cinema. It established wiseguys as the true American anti-heroes and adventurers for our time, more seductively glamorous than cowboys or spacemen; for decades afterwards the movie was a how-to behaviour manual for real-life criminals.

Goldfinger
(Guy Hamilton, 1964)
Somewhere in between the comparative realism of the first two Bond films and self-parodic Roger Moore frippery, Goldfinger is high operatic 007, with Sean Connery on majestic form. Hamilton takes the key obsessions - sex, power, danger, money - and smelts them down into iconic images: Shirley Eaton embalmed in gold; the laser inching towards the coveted crotch...

The Golem
(Carl Boese, Paul Wegener, 1920)
A rabbi in 16th-century Prague conjures up a living clay man to save his community from expulsion by the emperor - for, ironically, charges of witchcraft. Once activated, the powerful creature eventually runs amok amidst the expressionistic sets, in many scenes that later found echoes in Frankenstein.

Gone With the Wind
(Victor Fleming, 1939)
It's the American civil war, with Vivien Leigh stepping forward to be Scarlett as they burned Atlanta, and Clark Gable not giving a damn. David O Selznick made it, exhausting his writers and directors. It's the film of films, the eternal money-spinner. Is it worth it? I'll think about that tomorrow.

Good Night, and Good Luck
(George Clooney, 2005)
George Clooney's gorgeously photographed, black-and-white chamber drama looks at the waning years of the McCarthy era in America - and its disastrous toll - from the vantage point of the television news studio. Star David Strathairn doesn't merely impersonate legendary newsman Edward R Murrow so much as he channels his solemn gravitas.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(Sergio Leone, 1966)
The most successful of Leone's Dollars trilogy, and the best, with its trio of civil war antiheroes in search of a fortune in lost gold. Stylish to the max, witty at every turn and ceaselessly inventive on the visual front - plus the biggest explosion in movie history.

Goodfellas
(Martin Scorsese, 1990)
Narrated by coked-up "wiseguy" Ray Liotta, Scorsese's mafia masterpiece plunges us into a dizzying underworld - vicious gangsters, their wives and girlfriends, henchmen and hangers-on. Propelled by adrenalin-pumped paranoia and punctuated by bloody violence, the path it plots from glamour to horror is pure genius.

Gosford Park
(Robert Altman, 2001)
A return to form after a tepid 1990s with a classic Altmanesque spin on the country-house whodunnit. Murder most inconsequential and Stephen Fry's bungling detective stalk the mansion, but the real pleasure is the immersive, near-documentary eavesdropping through a vast cast of aristos and servants.

The Gospel According to St Matthew
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
Fundamentalists take note: it took a homosexual Marxist to bring us the finest biblical epic ever made. Pasolini reconfigures the messiah as a political animal; he dramatises his story with amateur actors and garnishes it with a soundtrack that runs the gamut from Bach to Billie Holiday. It is a devastating piece of work.

The Graduate
(Mike Nichols, 1968)
The older-woman-younger-man scenario has never been the same since Nichols launched Dustin Hoffman's career as Benjamin, the confused college boy whose love affair with Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) goes sour when he falls for her daughter. A counter-culture classic, and its haunting Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack is as fresh as it was four decades ago.

Le Grand Voyage
(Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004)
A modern classic road movie, and a lovely, gentle story of father-son bonding. Mohamed Majd is an elderly Moroccan exile in France who chivvies his irreligious younger son (Nicolas Cazalé) into driving him 3,000 miles on a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Ferroukhi was the first feature film-maker to be allowed to shoot in Mecca, and the crowd scenes there are really spectacular. A lovely, bittersweet reconciliation between the two men crowns the story.

La Grande Bouffe
(Marco Ferreri, 1973)
Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock has nothing on this splenetic 1973 last supper, in which Marcello Mastroianni and three grumpy mates fornicate, philosophise, then eat themselves to death. A decadent orgy that impressed Cannes but repulsed just about everyone else, it's scatological, unrepentantly on a road to nowhere, and defiantly one of a kind.

La Grande Illusion
(Jean Renoir, 1937)
Renoir's landmark first world war drama revolves around two French officers - an aristocrat and a working-class mechanic - in a POW camp where they befriend a Jewish banker. Prussian commander Erich von Stroheim treats his prisoners with civility, but they dig an escape tunnel. An unconventionally filmed gem about social class, ethnicity, and war's futility.

Grapes of Wrath
(John Ford, 1940)
Steinbeck's novel about the Dust Bowl saw the country in despair. The Fox film, made by John Ford but driven by Darryl Zanuck, has the common man triumphing. There's some awkwardness in that, but this is a riveting dramatisation of the Depression with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad - an Abe Lincoln in dusty jeans.

Grave of the Fireflies
(Isao Takahata, 1988)
Most animated films are little more than weak musicals tied together with gormless pop-culture references. This Japanese offering - from the peerless Studio Ghibli - offers a reminder that animation is merely a tool for telling a story, and not a genre. A heartbreaking tale of a young brother and sister struggling for survival in a firebombed Tokyo. The "acting" and "camerawork" are superb.

Grease
(Randal Kleiser, 1978)
Infectious musical capitalising on the 1970s' nostalgia for the 1950s, with lots of toe-tapping numbers, charismatic performances from Travolta and Newton-John in the leads, and an unabashed desire to entertain. In that it succeeds wonderfully.

The Great Dictator
(Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
The fight of the century - Chaplin v Hitler. Who has the funniest moustache and the most frightening speeches? So the two universal celebrities of the age met in one film. The sermon part is lame, but the comic ballet is a crushing defeat for fascism. You can see Charlie going mad before your eyes.

Great Expectations
(David Lean, 1946)
The finest Dickens adaptation not starring the Muppets, Great Expectations sees Lean on maestro form in his pre-epic phase, condensing the original novel into a graceful, shadowy British classic. Guy Green's Oscar-winning cinematography subtly translates Dickens' gothic touches, and John Mills and Alec Guinness forge a touching friendship against the encroaching dark.

The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle
(Julien Temple, 1980)
Hailed by Variety magazine as "the Citizen Kane of rock pictures," this incendiary affair charts the implosion of the Sex Pistols (in particular) and pop culture (in general). Original director Russ Meyer bailed out due to "creative differences" and was replaced by Temple, whose smart, cynical handling strikes the right note.

Greed
(Erich Von Stroheim, 1924)
Most of us probably know Erich Von Stroheim best as Gloria Swanson's Teutonic-looking and very sinister butler in Sunset Boulevard, but he was also responsible for this silent-era folie de grandeur, adapted from Frank Norris' novel McTeague, about a brutish dentist. The stories of Von Stroheim's battles with producer Irving Thalberg are as famous as the film itself; much of the footage was destroyed but hints of the director's genius still survive.

Gregory's Girl
(Bill Forsyth, 1981)
The consummate innocent teen romance story, as seen through the unflinchingly optimistic eyes of an easy going 16-year-old boy in love with life, love and Dorothy, the girl who usurps his place on the football field. Charmingly told, with a total lack of guile to sully its sweetness.

Grey Gardens
(Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer, 1975)
An extraordinary portrait of mother and daughter Big and Little Edie, cousins of Jackie O and former society women, who are living out their (last) days in a decaying mansion infested with wild animals, dressing eccentrically and eating foie gras (or is it dog food?) straight from the can. The directorial approach is restrained - would the Maysles dare impose their vision on these impressive ladies? - but Big and Little Edie are more than capable of telling their story on their own.

The Grifters
(Stephen Frears, 1990)
Jim Thompson's pulp novel is given classy Hollywood treatment, with mother-and-son con artists Anjelica Huston and John Cusack putting in superlative performances. Along comes Annette Bening to really mess things up. Frears, to his credit, avoids the noir cliches and puts the drama centre stage.

Grizzly Man
(Werner Herzog, 2005)
It's a scandal that Herzog's film, at the forefront of the documentary revival, didn't receive an Oscar nomination. The footage of Alaskan bears is remarkable enough, but it is unhinged naturalist Timothy Treadwell who is the real focus - and his borderline-deranged desire to be at one with the wilderness. Frequently unbelievable viewing - this is a different breed of nature film.

Grosse Pointe Blank
(George Armitage, 1997)
Few films dealing with hired killers ever show them having much of a personal life other than sitting alone in hotel rooms, assembling sniper rifles. This one places assassin John Cusack at his high school reunion. The excellent character work by the cast - including Minnie Driver and Alan Arkin - keep this from being a one-note comedy.

Groundhog Day
(Harold Ramis, 1993)
The prospect of repeating the same day over and over for eternity is both a brilliant comic device and a Buddhist means of transcendence in Ramis' exhilarating comedy. The circle of life is first a curse and then a salvation for Bill Murray, whose character journeys from misanthropic TV weatherman to piano-tickling bodhisattva.

Gummo
(Harmony Korine, 1997)
A small town ravaged long ago by a tornado is the setting for Harmony Korine's episodic tribute to all manner of weirdos, miscreants, and sadists. Even when the movie is numbingly self-indulgent, it is still one of a kind.

Gun Crazy
(Joseph H Lewis, 1950)
John Dahl and Peggy Cummings are pistol-packing fugitive lovers in Lewis's characteristically barmy but intensely romantic twist on the Bonnie-and-Clyde paradigm, as she, a quintessentially irrestible femme fatale, leads him by the Derringer to a foggy doom in a bleak swamp.

Guys and Dolls
(Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955)
One wonders what Sinatra and Brando made of each other in this, their lone movie together, and Brando's only musical. (Yes, apparently the boy can dance!) Although many of the stage show's finest songs were dropped, and Mankiewicz was a pedestrian director, somehow, vivacity, Technicolor and Jean Simmons' ethereal presence redeem everything

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