Films beginning with E

East of Eden
(Elia Kazan, 1955)
James Dean's big screen debut. Based on the novel by John Steinbeck, it repositions the sibling rivalry of Cain and Abel into a post-first world war farming community in California. An angsty Dean struggles to earn the respect of withdrawn father Raymond Massey, who favours golden twin Richard Davalos. It may be hard to watch Dean without knowing you're watching a doomed idol, but it's a tribute to his very real talent that the performance outweighs the legend.

Easy Rider
(Dennis Hopper, 1969)
Drop-outs Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda get on their motorbikes and head in search of freedom in this seminal 1960s road movie. Between LA and New Orleans, the long-haired outlaws freak out small towns, drop acid and pick up alcoholic lawyer Jack Nicholson. Smartly scripted by Terry Southern, with a classic soundtrack.

Edward II
(Derek Jarman, 1991)
Derek Jarman's painterly queer-cinema stylings often overshadowed his investment in storytelling and, more importantly, character, but Edward II is his most potent amalgam of all three. Based on Marlowe's 16th-century play about the UK's only acknowledged gay monarch, it's an imaginative, anachronism-laden assault on homophobia, buoyed by some of his more outré performances and a pertinent contemporary edge.

Edward Scissorhands
(Tim Burton, 1990)
Burton's near-perfect fable somehow manages to yoke gruesome European fairy-tales with picket-fence America, and injects a dose of Hammer horror for good measure. Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder have true screen chemistry, but it's Burton's heady cocktail of design, image and harmless eccentricity that steals the show.

Eight and a Half (8 1/2)
(Federico Fellini, 1963)
A semi-autobiographical satire about Marcello Mastroianni's harried Italian film-maker, lost in a magnificently poetic, surreal narrative jumble; wild dreams and a circus-like setting joyfully fuse together. Still wonderful to look at.

Eight Men Out
(John Sayles, 1988)
An incredible cast of character players brings to life the "Black Sox" baseball scandal of 1919, when gangster Arnold Rothstein bribed the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series. Meticulously put together on a nothing budget, the movie looks surprisingly sumptuous for Sayles, who never stints on the drama, and shoots good baseball too.

8 Mile
(Curtis Hanson, 2002)
Capitalising on Eminem's phenomenal record sales, this loosely biographical, hip-hop aficionado's wet dream charts the rise of poor white trailer-trash B Rabbit, set against the backdrop of rundown, racially-tense Detroit at the birth of its hip-hop explosion. The incendiary lyrical battle scenes are elevated by Eminem's silver-tongued talent.

Election
(Alexander Payne, 1999)
Payne relocates What Makes Sammy Run? to the political battleground of the American high school, where a sad-sack teacher gets a bit too intimately involved in the face-off between a likeable slacker and a type-A go-getter, played to flinty, ruthless perfection by Reese Witherspoon.

Elephant
(Gus Van Sant, 2003)
Van Sant's "interpretation" of the Columbine high-school massacre defies a conventional reading of the horrible event at its core. There's no traditional central character to identify with; through a series of long tracking shots, kids saunter about on a languid vibe, being jocks, cheerleaders, or like, whatever - en route to a grisly conclusion.

The Elephant Man
(David Lynch, 1980)
With hindsight we can all see what a good fit Lynch was with this material, but back then, with only Eraserhead under his belt, producer Mel Brooks showed real vision in choosing his director. John Hurt deftly pushes the sweet soul of the deformed John Merrick through pounds of incredible prosthetics. Lynch's imagination has not reached this level of emotional connection since.

Elizabeth
(Shekhar Kapur, 1998)
"I am married... to England!" Cate Blanchett's closing-curtain announcement of the aloof monarch we all know from school textbooks is a thrilling moment, and Kapur's period thriller a sterling account of how she got there. A character study powered by passion and realpolitik, with Blanchett's supple transformation from princess to Gloriana, and Geoffrey Rush just as good as courtly fixer Sir Francis Walsingham.

Elmer Gantry
(Richard Brooks, 1960)
Sinclair Lewis's dissection of an evangelist was published in 1927. More than 30 years later, director Richard Brooks and star Burt Lancaster fell upon Gantry and showed a new being - a media celebrity, patently fake yet deeply irresistible, and a model for immoral and moral leadership.

Empire of the Sun
(Steven Spielberg, 1987)
One of Spielberg's early attempts to mark himself out as a mature director. With such strong source material - an autobiographical novel by JG Ballard adapted by Tom Stoppard - he can get his teeth into the complex and often mercenary morals of the characters; in truth, he's more at home with the rousing set-pieces.

End of the Century
(Jim Fields, Michael Gramaglia, 2003)
While it's no major surprise that musicians are people too, the music industry spends billions helping fans ignore this simple fact. Onstage and in uniform on their almost never-ending tour, the Ramones gave away nothing of their private selves. They're revealed to be as flawed as the rest of us in this excellent and candid documentary.

The Endless Summer
(Bruce Brown, 1966)
Brown bottles the original innocent impulse of the 50s surfing explosion, grabbing his camera and following two young board-riders as they hunt for tasty waves in uncharted territory. But his gee-whizz narration now has a sharp nostalgic bite: harking back to the days before commercialisation took over the sport, and mass tourism marred untouched horizons.

Les Enfants du Paradis
(Marcel Carné, 1945)
Monumental classic set in Paris's 19th-century theatrical world, recounting an ill-fated affair between the mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and the mysterious Garance (Arletty), loved by four different men. Shot by Carné in secret in occupied France, this riveting three-hour drama is cinema's mightiest metaphysical ode to love and freedom.

The English Patient
(Anthony Minghella, 1996)
A rich adaptation job from Michael Ondaatje's novel by writer-director Minghella that preserves most of the complex plot and a good measure of the poetry. The subjective puzzle of the narrative feels modern, but the romance between Ralph Fiennes' mysterious count and Kristin Scott Thomas' sensual married woman has that killer old-fashioned swoon factor.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
(Werner Herzog, 1974)
Derived from the true story of a man who appeared in a Nuremberg market square in 1828 with no history or social abilities. It transpires he had been raised in complete isolation, and Herzog uses the character both to provide a blank canvas and a mirror to examine if society has really given us anything of real worth.

Enter the Dragon
(Robert Clouse, 1973)
Despite the atrocious acting, paper-thin plot and rancid production values, this is the alpha and omega of Bruce Lee. But also, more importantly, it was the first movie to transfuse the ecstatically over-the-top sensibility of Hong Kong action film-making into the American mainstream. The fight sequences still feel state-of-the-art.

Eraserhead
(David Lynch, 1977)
A timid man is bewildered by family pressures and strange visions on the industrial fringes of an unnamed city in Lynch's avant-garde debut. It conjures an eerie, hermetic unterworld, riddled with dirty secrets and bizarre phenomena - a stage set for the most uncanny of nightmares.

ET: the Extra-Terrestrial
(Steven Spielberg, 1982)

Spielberg's story of the little boy from a broken home who befriends an extra-terrestrial left behind on Earth is a movie of passionate idealism and unapologetic faith in the power of love. In this strange and beautiful love story lies the genesis of the Generation-X phenomenon: a whole raft of people in the west growing up in a secular, affectless society, yearning to feel reverence and rapture, and looking for love in the ruins of faith. We all know the story: ET is orphaned by the departure of his spaceship, but a happy chance leads him to young Elliot (Henry Thomas) who takes him in, feeds him, experiences ET's divine gift for healing, and finally in an ecstatic mind-melding process, experiences a strange and divine state of grace. They are united in their loneliness and vulnerability, and you simply don't have a pulse if you don't feel your spine tingling and scalp prickling at Elliot's speech over ET's lifeless body: "I don't know how to feel; I can't feel anything any more. I love you, ET." This is a brilliant film about the alienated and powerless experience of being a child, yet it is a way of imagining how a child would feel if it had an adult's freedom and responsibility. It is a visionary romance.

Peter Bradshaw

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004)
Charlie "Being John Malkovich" Kaufman proved he was no one-trick pony with this layered, complex romance. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are especially good as the lovers who are trying to forget; Gondry is whip-smart in the director's chair.

The Evil Dead
(Sam Raimi, 1981)
Raimi mixed DC Comics horror, nerve-jangling suspense, some pioneering no-budget Steadicam and a million sick belly-laughs into one of the greatest homemade Hollywood calling cards ever dreamed up.

The Exorcist
(William Friedkin, 1973)
The special effects may have dated, but this classic story of a little girl possessed by the devil remains intensely scary. When her daughter begins to act up, Ellen Burstyn calls in the services of Jesuit Max Von Sydow and the stage is set for a climactic confrontation between good and evil.

Eyes Without a Face
(Georges Franju, 1960)
One of those films that you'd swear was made at least 20 years later than it actually was. A plastic surgeon kills young girls to provide temporary face grafts for his disfigured daughter. Coldly clinical and, in one memorable scene, explicitly gory. So much nastier than other early 60's horror films.

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