Rebecca Ferguson: ‘We were on set, a hand slipped onto my arse, and I said, “Don’t ever f***ing touch me again”’
Rebecca Ferguson is tucking into a plate of bacon and eggs in a London hotel room, her diamante-studded heels discarded on the floor beside her. “Have you had breakfast?” she asks as I arrive, pointing to the bowl of yoghurt and granola she’s lined up for dessert. “I tried to not eat breakfast until lunchtime, but when I know that I shouldn’t, I just want it.” She takes a mouthful. “But I’m really ready, I can speak and eat.”
She’s right. Somehow the Swedish actor, star of the Mission: Impossible franchise and the 2017 musical phenomenon The Greatest Showman, manages to speak, eat and maintain such powerful eye contact I can hardly bear to glance down at my questions. Ferguson is here to promote her new film, The Kid Who Would Be King, in which she plays a tree-dwelling sorceress who sets out to murder a child and enslave all of England. Or, as she puts it with a note of fondness, a “b***h”. “I can say that,” she adds, “you can’t.”
The 35-year-old is self-assured and forthcoming; she doesn’t do reticence. Nor is she easily fazed. When she played MI6 agent Ilsa Faust in 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, she was practically the only woman on set, either behind the camera or in front of it. “It doesn’t matter, I’m there for the challenge,” she says. “I train with them, I do the stunts with them, we hang out together. We’re just family.”
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Have there been times when that wasn’t the case? “God yeah, definitely,” she says. “I have definitely, no shadow of a doubt, been treated unfairly. I’ve walked off a set with a male director once. I thought, ‘I’d rather fly home, and be sued for not continuing, than go through this s**t again.’ But confronting that was the most scary thing I’d ever done – walking off the set and saying, ‘I’m not shooting until you and I have had a conversation outside.’”
Rebecca Ferguson in ‘The Kid Who Would Be King’ (20th Century Fox)
That conversation didn’t go the way Ferguson planned. “I realised he was very manipulative,” she says. “I think it’s called gaslighting. He made me think that I was going crazy. And I thought, ‘How the f*** did this happen? God, you’re good. You’re either very brilliant, or very dangerous.’ And I had to retrack and think, ‘No, no, what am I actually saying? I need to say something. I’m making a point, and I need to get to the end of it.’”
Did she manage to resolve it? “I did,” she says brightly. “We walked onto set, a hand slipped onto my arse, I hit it off, and I said, ‘Don’t ever f***ing touch me again.’ And he never did. That was it.”
Some actors seem somehow smaller in the flesh, a little less impressive – but Ferguson emits the same slow-burning magnetism that carried her from a breakout role in BBC‘s The White Queen in 2013 to that star-making turn as agent Faust (whom she’s confirmed she’ll be playing for a third time in the series’ next instalment). She doesn’t say what she was filming when that unpleasant experience took place, but it would have been their loss if she had not returned to set.
As Morgana in The Kid Who Would Be King, in which a modern-day schoolboy stumbles upon King Arthur’s sword and must embark upon a quest to save the land, she spends much of her time tethered to a tree, her own veins indistinguishable from the roots that crawl over her body. Morgana is a grotesque figure, inside and out – but Ferguson leaps to her defence.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout – Trailer 2
“She’s a woman who was born with magic, and was seen as something disgusting and horrendous,” she says, “because no one understood it. She was cast out from her family. Of course she’s dark. Of course she’s lonely. Of course she’s self-centred. Because she was never loved! Just like some politicians in the world.”
Political analogies crop up throughout the film – “A land is only as good as its leaders,” says Patrick Stewart’s Merlin – but that wasn’t on Ferguson’s mind when she read the script. “I wasn’t sitting there going, ‘Ooh, that’s Europe today, isn’t it? That’s America.’ But it’s hard not to make those comparisons, and it’s beautiful how it works. I remember when we did The White Queen, we talked about women fighting for the throne, and I realised we’re still fighting the same battles. It never ends. It never stops.”
That’s why she thinks the #MeToo movement is “so bloody brilliant” – it’s given women the courage to fight those battles. “And yes,” she says, “some people are gonna have to stand in the line of the bullet for change to happen. C’est la vie. It happens. And you’re not there for no reason. There’s no smoke without bloody fire.”
leftCreated with Sketch. rightCreated with Sketch. 1/42 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
With this update and upgrade of the 1930s serial adventure, Steven Spielberg turns what could have been pastiche into a practically perfect film. Harrison Ford’s daring archaeologist is almost always out of his depth but has impeccable underdog charm, and Douglas Slocombe’s casually stunning cinematography is matched by one of John Williams's finest scores. Indy is ultimately irrelevant to the entire plot, interestingly, but his indefatigable effort to do the right thing still inspires. HO
Rex
2/42 The Wings of the Dove (1997)
Henry James is notoriously difficult to adapt well, but here is the darkly shimmering exception. Helena Bonham Carter still hasn’t topped Kate Croy, conniving but also trapped by her circumstances, as a leading role; the masquerade of her and Linus Roache's motives makes the film a psychological thriller of sorts. Iain Softley directs the Venice sequences with bewitching gamesmanship, then tears your heart out at the end. PS
Miramax Films
3/42 Spirited Away (2001)
Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki's films delight kids with their bright colours, imaginative characters and plucky heroines (usually). But there's meat to their bones for adults to digest, especially in this towering fantasy epic. As young Chihiro takes a job in a mysterious bathhouse peopled by spirits in order to save her parents, viewers can explore everything from deeply rooted interpretations of traditional Japanese myth to Miyazaki's fascination with Western filmmaking and the Second World War. And visually it’s unparalleled. HO
Toho
4/42 Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí changed the face of cinema with this 16-minute-long Surrealist short, instantly confronting the viewer with the sight of an eyeball being slit open. Narrative is jettisoned, and the unnerving power of juxtaposition championed in dreamlike montage, which still has a fizzing voltage and suggestive power. PS
5/42 Avengers (2012)
Yes, but hear us out: Avengers is a grand experimental film. Marvel risked four popular franchises on this superhero throw of the dice, something never attempted in cinema history. They won, and made the fizzing chemistry of the unlikely gang who must save us from aliens look easy. But the failure of every Marvel imitator since makes clear how impressive this billion-dollar gamble really was, and how difficult it is to tell character-driven stories in blockbuster cinema on this scale. And as a bonus, it has a Hulk. HO
Marvel Studios
6/42 The Shining (1980)
Yes, but hear us out: Avengers is a grand experimental film. Marvel risked four popular franchises on this superhero throw of the dice, something never attempted in cinema history. They won, and made the fizzing chemistry of the unlikely gang who must save us from aliens look easy. But the failure of every Marvel imitator since makes clear how impressive this billion-dollar gamble really was, and how difficult it is to tell character-driven stories in blockbuster cinema on this scale. And as a bonus, it has a Hulk. HO
Warner Bros/Hawk Films/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
7/42 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
One of those remakes that justifies remakes, Philip Kaufman’s beautifully skilful spin on the McCarthy-era alien-clone thriller translates it wickedly to the psychobabble age of the 1970s, with a bit of post-Watergate panic thrown in. Donald Sutherland’s lugubrious health inspector is a nicely grumpy enemy of the pod people, and the hysteria ratchets up masterfully. PS
8/42 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Wes Anderson's meticulously mannered and beautifully composed films are not to all tastes, but when combined with a cast of this calibre and a more-than-usually heartfelt script, they are capable of magic. Gene Hackman plays the disgraced patriarch of a family of geniuses, making one last attempt at redemption. With a who’s who of Hollywood in support, it’s a story that is as bizarre, hilarious and moving as family life itself. HO
Buena Vista Pictures
9/42 Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
David Lean’s First World War epic about TE Lawrence remains a filmmaking milestone, the movie that Steven Spielberg rewatches before starting each new film. Its genius is to combine huge scale battles – notably the attack on Aqaba – with psychological insight into the toll that the war took on Lawrence’s mind. The white-led casting of Arab characters is appalling to modern eyes, but with its daring, dazzling filmmaking it remains one to watch despite that. HO
Rex
10/42 Bicycle Thieves (1948)
A devastating portrait of the poverty trap, Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece remains all too relevant. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is offered a desperately-needed job – but it requires a bicycle, and when his is stolen he and his son resort to desperate measures to get it back. Shot with non-professional actors who lived in circumstances close to that of their characters, this is a study in compassion and empathy. HO
Rex Features
11/42 Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Spanning five decades of Chinese history, this sprawling epic follows two stars of the Peking Opera from harsh childhood training through the perils of the Second World War, the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution. Director Chen Keige drew on his own experience of the Cultural Revolution to shape this groundbreaking, tormented romance both between Zhang Fengyi’s Ziaolou and Leslie Cheng’s Dieyi, and between Ziaolou and his former prostitute wife Juxian (Gong Li). HO
Miramax Films
12/42 Brazil (1985)
Originally titled 1984½, Terry Gilliam’s crazily ambitious riff on Orwell is a dystopian comedy about a world stuffed to bursting point: one clerical error and it threatens to burst, plunging Jonathan Pryce’s befuddled low-level bureaucrat into madness and chaos. A nightmare of retro-futuristic oppression, outfitted with mad bravura and some of the best sci-fi production design ever. PS
20th Century Fox
13/42 Tokyo Story (1953)
Pauline Kael thought that the basic appeal of movies was the “kiss kiss bang bang” of action and romance, but Yasujirō Ozu demonstrates that film is capable of much more in this quiet family drama. It’s a simple story about two elderly parents visiting their adult children, only to find that the younger generation is busy with other things. But it’s also a meditation on the passing of time, and on grief, and on the constant push towards the new that will break your heart every time you watch it. HO
Rex Features
14/42 Double Indemnity (1944)
If we have learned anything from film noir, it is that murder pacts never work out well for both parties. That’s certainly the lesson when Fred MacMurray’s infatuated salesman offers life insurance to Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale Phyllis against her unloved husband. The scheme gives way to a riveting stew of suspicion and paranoia, with Stanwyck’s ruthless determination warping MacMurray’s Neff out of all recognition as director Billy Wilder tightens the screws. HO
Rex Features
15/42 Days of Heaven (1978)
Terrence Malick’s second, and for many, greatest film is a mesmerisingly gorgeous love triangle set in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, loosely based on an Old Testament parable. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams are the lovers who pose as brother and sister to fool a rich, dying farmer (Sam Shepard). Nestor Almendros’s astounding magic-hour photography rightly won an Oscar, and Linda Manz supplies heartbreaking, plainspoken narration as Gere’s younger sister. PS
Paramount Pictures
16/42 Citizen Kane (1941)
The problem with calling something “the greatest film ever made” is that it begins to sound like homework. Forget that: beyond all the technical dazzle and ground-breaking filmmaking Orson Welles’s masterpiece has red blood in its veins and a huge beating heart. What’s more, its portrait of a thrusting, occasionally demagogic tycoon and the hollowness at the heart of his success remains as relevant as it ever was, and the suggestion that America might be susceptible to media manipulation all too believable. HO
17/42 Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)
Nirvana and despair among a troupe of 19th century theatre actors, in Marcel Carné's luminously moving epic of the heart. This not only represents the full flowering of French cinema's Golden Age, but a gracious look back at the performing traditions film was built on. It’s peopled with some of the most touchingly clownish characters you’ll ever see. PS
Rex Features
18/42 Rear Window (1954)
Whether you see it as Alfred Hitchcock’s celebration of voyeurism or simply one of the most nail-biting thrillers ever made, it’s a superb example of the Master of Suspense at work. James Stewart’s photographer, laid up with a broken leg, becomes obsessed with the lives of his neighbours and suspects one of murder. The unusually vulnerable hero – as in Vertigo – increases the stakes and ensures that simple brawn won’t save the day, while Hitchcock ratchets up the tension unbearably by putting Grace Kelly’s plucky girlfriend in the lion’s mouth. HO
19/42 It Happened One Night (1934)
Claudette Colbert's eloping heiress and Clark Gable's hack on his uppers warily team up on a Greyhound bus, only to aggravatingly fall for each other. Frank Capra's evergreen romcom all but invented the love-hate formula that's one model for silver screen chemistry, hoicking up Colbert's skirt to flash a leg when they need to hitch-hike, and dismantling Gable's smarmy defences. The biggest hit of its day for a reason, it was also the first ever film to win the big five at the Oscars. PS
20/42 Hoop Dreams (1994)
The trials of young black basketball hopefuls in Chicago tell us volumes, from their upbringing to all-or-nothing career rimshots, about the opportunities otherwise denied them. For these portraits of inner-city poverty, gliding between frustration and triumph, Steve James’s epic of ghetto realities has been influential on every sports doc that has come in its wake. The Academy’s documentary branch will never quite live down failing to nominate it. PS
Kartemquin Films
21/42 The Apartment (1960)
This blistering Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond script is a demonstration of just how dark a love story can be get without tipping entirely into bitterness, a standing rebuke to every lazy, schmaltzy comedy going. While the entire cast is stellar and Shirley MacLaine was never better, it’s worth ignoring them all and just watching Jack Lemmon’s meek office worker CC Baxter. Every gesture and glance is flawless; he carries entire scenes without a word. HO
Rex
22/42 Paris, Texas (1984)
The title of Wim Wenders’s Palme d’Or-winning emotional odyssey is both a real place and a broken state of mind. The missing Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is found wandering there in a battered cap, and begins a trek to make amends with his ex (Nastassja Kinski), whom he finds, oblivious to who he is, on the other side of a Houston peepshow window. Culminating unforgettably with this long-take tête-a-tête, it's a mesmerising quest for redemption, with a Ry Cooder score that will twang its way into your soul. PS
23/42 Synedoche, New York (2008)
It’s encouraging how many obituarists of Philip Seymour Hoffman identified this as his masterwork – literally the performance of a lifetime. The meta-theatrical conceit – Caden Cotard is constructing a play about his life, which becomes as long as his life – lets Charlie Kaufman unleash a panoply of ideas about creativity, self-worth, love, death, everyday and lifelong terrors. It’s bruisingly honest, and a shattering experience for the faithful. PS
Sony Pictures Classics
24/42 Before Midnight (2013)
Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have settled down since the two earlier films in Richard Linklater’s essential trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), but the problems in their lives – self-inflicted by now – only keep proliferating. Trenchantly pushing them into full-on battle-of-the-sexes territory, the film squares them off for a bitterly adult dissection of a long-term relationship, asking stark questions about love, compromise and lasting the course. PS
25/42 Le Mépris (1963)
Other Jean-Luc Godard films are punchier, ruder, more experimental. But this is his most lavish, measured, and sad: an elegiac fantasy of filmmaking, as a loose adaptation of the Odyssey grinds to a halt on Capri, with Jack Palance as the brash American producer trying to sell art by the yard. Meanwhile, the screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his beautiful, bored wife (Brigitte Bardot) tussle and reconcile in an incessant, pained ballet. PS
26/42 Casablanca (1942)
Some films strain under the weight of greatness; Casablanca’s quality bubbles through. Against the backdrop of the Second World War, two former lovers reunite though everything in the world is pulling them apart. Bogart’s Rick hides a huge heart under a thin veneer of cynicism; opposite him Ingrid Bergman’s luminous Ilsa would melt an iceberg. Packed with quotable lines and brimming over with impeccable cool, here we are, still lookin' at you, kid. HO
27/42 Meet Me in St Louis (1944)
On the surface, Vincente Minnelli's Technicolor classic is all sweetness and light: Judy Garland, the Trolley song, lots of dancing and tinsel. What makes this one of the great American musicals is an undertow of despair a mile wide. It's a nostalgia trip as subtly bitter as it is sugary; and the subtext of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is anything but merry. PS
Rex
28/42 A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Georges Méliès pioneered many of the visual and special effects techniques that have formed the backbone of fantastical filmmaking ever since, and he pushed them all to their limits in this turn-of-the-century tale of a rocket trip to the moon to meet the strange creatures who live upon it. Witty touches and a real sense of story mean that this is still entertaining more than a century later, and if the effects are less awe-inspiring now, they’re still beautifully designed and executed. HO
Rex Features
29/42 Out of the Past (1947)
Cigarette smoke gives everyone a halo in this masterly, Jacques Tourneur-directed tale of a private investigator (Robert Mitchum) who can’t escape old associates – especially Kathie (Jane Greer), the doll-faced schemer who’s perhaps noir’s ultimate femme fatale. Aka Build My Gallows High, it’s a fatalistic masterpiece, with Kirk Douglas as the smarmy gangster setting Mitchum up for a fall. PS
30/42 His Girl Friday (1940)
A screwball comedy of substance, Howard Hawks's remake of The Front Page is an objectively odd mix of high stakes and high comedy. Yet it works because the machine-gun dialogue is so quick that there's never a moment to question what’s happening (the great screenwriter Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the original Broadway play, worked on it uncredited). Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, as the warring editor and star-reporter trying to work together long enough to land the story of the year, remain the standard by which all on-screen chemistry should be judged. HO
31/42 The Conversation (1974)
Who's eavesdropping on whom? Hatched before Watergate and speaking eerily to it, this audacious story of an obsessive surveillance whiz (a career-best Gene Hackman), commissioned to snoop but finding himself morally embroiled, is a slippery plunge into Seventies paranoia like no other. What a run Francis Ford Coppola had, slipping this one in between the first two Godfathers. PS
Paramount Pictures
32/42 Blow Out (1981)
John Travolta's Z-movie sound man, out recording one night, accidentally tapes what turns out to be a political assassination. Brian De Palma hit peak ingenuity and gut-punch profundity with this stunning conspiracy thriller, mounted with a showman's élan but also harrowing emotional voltage from its star. It’s one of the most delirious thrillers of the 1980s, with a bitterly ironic pay-off that’s played for keeps. PS
Filmways Pictures
33/42 City of God (2002)
There’s a deep contradiction at the heart of this acid-bright portrait of the violence in Rio’s favelas. On one hand these child hustlers and teen gangsters have an intense lust for life, an exuberance displayed in dance and play and love; on the other, they value life cheaply and take it without a qualm. Director Fernando Meirelles and co-director Kátia Lund cast a talented band of local kids to give it authenticity and then punctuated their story with Scorsese-esque violence that still shocks. HO
34/42 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
The diverging romantic fortunes of Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar, as did Michael Caine) provide an ideal structure for Woody Allen to check in on a midway state of adulthood, when there's already a sense of disappointment about squandered promise, but still much to play for. It hits the miraculous sweet spot between all Allen’s modes and tones. PS
Rex
35/42 Raising Arizona (1987)
The Coen Brothers had already established a ghoulish signature style with Blood Simple, but here they showed us how funny they could be, in a zig-zagging kidnap farce which manages the difficult feat of being both zany and adorable. Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter are the unlikely couple whose abduction of a spare newborn quintuplet, Nathan Jr, causes all hell to break loose. PS
20th Century Fox
36/42 Caché (2005)
This looks and acts like a thriller, but in reality Michael Haneke’s exploration of colonialism, guilt, paranoia and privacy cares more about subtext than about scares or mystery. A well-to-do Parisian family are tormented by the arrival of surveillance tapes of their lives, but it’s not clear who could be sending them or why, leading patriarch Georges (Daniel Auteuil, never better) to confront his own past sins. As a subversion of genre and viewer expectation, there are few to match it. HO
Rex
37/42 The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Straight up the best Bourne movie – an experience Ultimatum can’t help but want to repeat, more falteringly – because of Paul Greengrass’s phenomenal instincts for pace, Matt Damon’s unguessed flair for minimalism, and a script by Tony Gilroy that’s all about conscience. Barring Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s the best and most enduring action movie of the present millennium. PS
38/42 The General (1926)
Orson Welles suggested that Buster Keaton’s silent Civil War comedy might be the greatest film ever made, and who are we to argue? Keaton’s Johnny Gray is a key figure on the railroads of the Confederacy, but he and his engine, The General, must go above and beyond to defeat a Union spy. Ignore the dodgy politics and focus on the sublime physical comedy of Keaton’s beautifully composed routines. You’ll come out wondering if movies even need sound. HO
Rex
39/42 The Babadook (2014)
The Babadook is a black, hunched pop-up book monster who raps on your door three times before paying a visit. And you can’t get rid of him. Widowed mum Amelia (brilliant Essie Davis) can’t remember reading his book to her emotionally disturbed misfit of a son (Noah Wiseman) before. Jennifer Kent’s thoughtful Australian chamber shocker, a feast of inventive design, claws its way into you and leaves scratch marks. PS
40/42 When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Is it impossible for men and women to be purely platonic? It is according to Harry, in this beautiful, brainy comedy about two neurotic New Yorkers who become friends and then more. Directed by Rob Reiner and written by wonderful Nora Ephron, it's a paean of sorts to Woody Allen's early films, with razor-sharp observations about sex and dating ("I'll have what she's having"). It's still the pinnacle of both Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's careers.
Columbia Pictures
41/42 Inside Out (2015)
Toy Story revolutionised animation; Up and Wall-E vie for the best opening of any film this century, but for sheer audacity Pete Docter’s head-trip must prevail. As a little girl struggles to adapt following a family move across country, her emotions go on a madcap adventure through the mind itself. What’s dazzling here is that two completely separate films unfold at once. Kids watch brightly coloured sprites on a quest; adults watch a psychologically dense depiction of how we think and feel. It’s wonderful.
Getty
42/42 True Romance (1993)
Disinterred from a script Tarantino wrote in the mid-Eighties called The Open Road – the same screenplay that also spawned Natural Born Killers – Tony Scott's True Romance is a pulpy, hyperviolent twist on a damsel-in-distress fairytale, with a plinky-plonky score that is based on Badlands. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the lovers on the lam, chased by Christopher Walken's suave mafioso. Bombastic, brash – and totally brilliant.
Rex
1/42 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
With this update and upgrade of the 1930s serial adventure, Steven Spielberg turns what could have been pastiche into a practically perfect film. Harrison Ford’s daring archaeologist is almost always out of his depth but has impeccable underdog charm, and Douglas Slocombe’s casually stunning cinematography is matched by one of John Williams's finest scores. Indy is ultimately irrelevant to the entire plot, interestingly, but his indefatigable effort to do the right thing still inspires. HO
Rex
2/42 The Wings of the Dove (1997)
Henry James is notoriously difficult to adapt well, but here is the darkly shimmering exception. Helena Bonham Carter still hasn’t topped Kate Croy, conniving but also trapped by her circumstances, as a leading role; the masquerade of her and Linus Roache's motives makes the film a psychological thriller of sorts. Iain Softley directs the Venice sequences with bewitching gamesmanship, then tears your heart out at the end. PS
Miramax Films
3/42 Spirited Away (2001)
Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki's films delight kids with their bright colours, imaginative characters and plucky heroines (usually). But there's meat to their bones for adults to digest, especially in this towering fantasy epic. As young Chihiro takes a job in a mysterious bathhouse peopled by spirits in order to save her parents, viewers can explore everything from deeply rooted interpretations of traditional Japanese myth to Miyazaki's fascination with Western filmmaking and the Second World War. And visually it’s unparalleled. HO
Toho
4/42 Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí changed the face of cinema with this 16-minute-long Surrealist short, instantly confronting the viewer with the sight of an eyeball being slit open. Narrative is jettisoned, and the unnerving power of juxtaposition championed in dreamlike montage, which still has a fizzing voltage and suggestive power. PS
5/42 Avengers (2012)
Yes, but hear us out: Avengers is a grand experimental film. Marvel risked four popular franchises on this superhero throw of the dice, something never attempted in cinema history. They won, and made the fizzing chemistry of the unlikely gang who must save us from aliens look easy. But the failure of every Marvel imitator since makes clear how impressive this billion-dollar gamble really was, and how difficult it is to tell character-driven stories in blockbuster cinema on this scale. And as a bonus, it has a Hulk. HO
Marvel Studios
6/42 The Shining (1980)
Yes, but hear us out: Avengers is a grand experimental film. Marvel risked four popular franchises on this superhero throw of the dice, something never attempted in cinema history. They won, and made the fizzing chemistry of the unlikely gang who must save us from aliens look easy. But the failure of every Marvel imitator since makes clear how impressive this billion-dollar gamble really was, and how difficult it is to tell character-driven stories in blockbuster cinema on this scale. And as a bonus, it has a Hulk. HO
Warner Bros/Hawk Films/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
7/42 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
One of those remakes that justifies remakes, Philip Kaufman’s beautifully skilful spin on the McCarthy-era alien-clone thriller translates it wickedly to the psychobabble age of the 1970s, with a bit of post-Watergate panic thrown in. Donald Sutherland’s lugubrious health inspector is a nicely grumpy enemy of the pod people, and the hysteria ratchets up masterfully. PS
8/42 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Wes Anderson's meticulously mannered and beautifully composed films are not to all tastes, but when combined with a cast of this calibre and a more-than-usually heartfelt script, they are capable of magic. Gene Hackman plays the disgraced patriarch of a family of geniuses, making one last attempt at redemption. With a who’s who of Hollywood in support, it’s a story that is as bizarre, hilarious and moving as family life itself. HO
Buena Vista Pictures
9/42 Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
David Lean’s First World War epic about TE Lawrence remains a filmmaking milestone, the movie that Steven Spielberg rewatches before starting each new film. Its genius is to combine huge scale battles – notably the attack on Aqaba – with psychological insight into the toll that the war took on Lawrence’s mind. The white-led casting of Arab characters is appalling to modern eyes, but with its daring, dazzling filmmaking it remains one to watch despite that. HO
Rex
10/42 Bicycle Thieves (1948)
A devastating portrait of the poverty trap, Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece remains all too relevant. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is offered a desperately-needed job – but it requires a bicycle, and when his is stolen he and his son resort to desperate measures to get it back. Shot with non-professional actors who lived in circumstances close to that of their characters, this is a study in compassion and empathy. HO
Rex Features
11/42 Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Spanning five decades of Chinese history, this sprawling epic follows two stars of the Peking Opera from harsh childhood training through the perils of the Second World War, the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution. Director Chen Keige drew on his own experience of the Cultural Revolution to shape this groundbreaking, tormented romance both between Zhang Fengyi’s Ziaolou and Leslie Cheng’s Dieyi, and between Ziaolou and his former prostitute wife Juxian (Gong Li). HO
Miramax Films
12/42 Brazil (1985)
Originally titled 1984½, Terry Gilliam’s crazily ambitious riff on Orwell is a dystopian comedy about a world stuffed to bursting point: one clerical error and it threatens to burst, plunging Jonathan Pryce’s befuddled low-level bureaucrat into madness and chaos. A nightmare of retro-futuristic oppression, outfitted with mad bravura and some of the best sci-fi production design ever. PS
20th Century Fox
13/42 Tokyo Story (1953)
Pauline Kael thought that the basic appeal of movies was the “kiss kiss bang bang” of action and romance, but Yasujirō Ozu demonstrates that film is capable of much more in this quiet family drama. It’s a simple story about two elderly parents visiting their adult children, only to find that the younger generation is busy with other things. But it’s also a meditation on the passing of time, and on grief, and on the constant push towards the new that will break your heart every time you watch it. HO
Rex Features
14/42 Double Indemnity (1944)
If we have learned anything from film noir, it is that murder pacts never work out well for both parties. That’s certainly the lesson when Fred MacMurray’s infatuated salesman offers life insurance to Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale Phyllis against her unloved husband. The scheme gives way to a riveting stew of suspicion and paranoia, with Stanwyck’s ruthless determination warping MacMurray’s Neff out of all recognition as director Billy Wilder tightens the screws. HO
Rex Features
15/42 Days of Heaven (1978)
Terrence Malick’s second, and for many, greatest film is a mesmerisingly gorgeous love triangle set in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, loosely based on an Old Testament parable. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams are the lovers who pose as brother and sister to fool a rich, dying farmer (Sam Shepard). Nestor Almendros’s astounding magic-hour photography rightly won an Oscar, and Linda Manz supplies heartbreaking, plainspoken narration as Gere’s younger sister. PS
Paramount Pictures
16/42 Citizen Kane (1941)
The problem with calling something “the greatest film ever made” is that it begins to sound like homework. Forget that: beyond all the technical dazzle and ground-breaking filmmaking Orson Welles’s masterpiece has red blood in its veins and a huge beating heart. What’s more, its portrait of a thrusting, occasionally demagogic tycoon and the hollowness at the heart of his success remains as relevant as it ever was, and the suggestion that America might be susceptible to media manipulation all too believable. HO
17/42 Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)
Nirvana and despair among a troupe of 19th century theatre actors, in Marcel Carné's luminously moving epic of the heart. This not only represents the full flowering of French cinema's Golden Age, but a gracious look back at the performing traditions film was built on. It’s peopled with some of the most touchingly clownish characters you’ll ever see. PS
Rex Features
18/42 Rear Window (1954)
Whether you see it as Alfred Hitchcock’s celebration of voyeurism or simply one of the most nail-biting thrillers ever made, it’s a superb example of the Master of Suspense at work. James Stewart’s photographer, laid up with a broken leg, becomes obsessed with the lives of his neighbours and suspects one of murder. The unusually vulnerable hero – as in Vertigo – increases the stakes and ensures that simple brawn won’t save the day, while Hitchcock ratchets up the tension unbearably by putting Grace Kelly’s plucky girlfriend in the lion’s mouth. HO
19/42 It Happened One Night (1934)
Claudette Colbert's eloping heiress and Clark Gable's hack on his uppers warily team up on a Greyhound bus, only to aggravatingly fall for each other. Frank Capra's evergreen romcom all but invented the love-hate formula that's one model for silver screen chemistry, hoicking up Colbert's skirt to flash a leg when they need to hitch-hike, and dismantling Gable's smarmy defences. The biggest hit of its day for a reason, it was also the first ever film to win the big five at the Oscars. PS
20/42 Hoop Dreams (1994)
The trials of young black basketball hopefuls in Chicago tell us volumes, from their upbringing to all-or-nothing career rimshots, about the opportunities otherwise denied them. For these portraits of inner-city poverty, gliding between frustration and triumph, Steve James’s epic of ghetto realities has been influential on every sports doc that has come in its wake. The Academy’s documentary branch will never quite live down failing to nominate it. PS
Kartemquin Films
21/42 The Apartment (1960)
This blistering Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond script is a demonstration of just how dark a love story can be get without tipping entirely into bitterness, a standing rebuke to every lazy, schmaltzy comedy going. While the entire cast is stellar and Shirley MacLaine was never better, it’s worth ignoring them all and just watching Jack Lemmon’s meek office worker CC Baxter. Every gesture and glance is flawless; he carries entire scenes without a word. HO
Rex
22/42 Paris, Texas (1984)
The title of Wim Wenders’s Palme d’Or-winning emotional odyssey is both a real place and a broken state of mind. The missing Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is found wandering there in a battered cap, and begins a trek to make amends with his ex (Nastassja Kinski), whom he finds, oblivious to who he is, on the other side of a Houston peepshow window. Culminating unforgettably with this long-take tête-a-tête, it's a mesmerising quest for redemption, with a Ry Cooder score that will twang its way into your soul. PS
23/42 Synedoche, New York (2008)
It’s encouraging how many obituarists of Philip Seymour Hoffman identified this as his masterwork – literally the performance of a lifetime. The meta-theatrical conceit – Caden Cotard is constructing a play about his life, which becomes as long as his life – lets Charlie Kaufman unleash a panoply of ideas about creativity, self-worth, love, death, everyday and lifelong terrors. It’s bruisingly honest, and a shattering experience for the faithful. PS
Sony Pictures Classics
24/42 Before Midnight (2013)
Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have settled down since the two earlier films in Richard Linklater’s essential trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), but the problems in their lives – self-inflicted by now – only keep proliferating. Trenchantly pushing them into full-on battle-of-the-sexes territory, the film squares them off for a bitterly adult dissection of a long-term relationship, asking stark questions about love, compromise and lasting the course. PS
25/42 Le Mépris (1963)
Other Jean-Luc Godard films are punchier, ruder, more experimental. But this is his most lavish, measured, and sad: an elegiac fantasy of filmmaking, as a loose adaptation of the Odyssey grinds to a halt on Capri, with Jack Palance as the brash American producer trying to sell art by the yard. Meanwhile, the screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his beautiful, bored wife (Brigitte Bardot) tussle and reconcile in an incessant, pained ballet. PS
26/42 Casablanca (1942)
Some films strain under the weight of greatness; Casablanca’s quality bubbles through. Against the backdrop of the Second World War, two former lovers reunite though everything in the world is pulling them apart. Bogart’s Rick hides a huge heart under a thin veneer of cynicism; opposite him Ingrid Bergman’s luminous Ilsa would melt an iceberg. Packed with quotable lines and brimming over with impeccable cool, here we are, still lookin' at you, kid. HO
27/42 Meet Me in St Louis (1944)
On the surface, Vincente Minnelli's Technicolor classic is all sweetness and light: Judy Garland, the Trolley song, lots of dancing and tinsel. What makes this one of the great American musicals is an undertow of despair a mile wide. It's a nostalgia trip as subtly bitter as it is sugary; and the subtext of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is anything but merry. PS
Rex
28/42 A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Georges Méliès pioneered many of the visual and special effects techniques that have formed the backbone of fantastical filmmaking ever since, and he pushed them all to their limits in this turn-of-the-century tale of a rocket trip to the moon to meet the strange creatures who live upon it. Witty touches and a real sense of story mean that this is still entertaining more than a century later, and if the effects are less awe-inspiring now, they’re still beautifully designed and executed. HO
Rex Features
29/42 Out of the Past (1947)
Cigarette smoke gives everyone a halo in this masterly, Jacques Tourneur-directed tale of a private investigator (Robert Mitchum) who can’t escape old associates – especially Kathie (Jane Greer), the doll-faced schemer who’s perhaps noir’s ultimate femme fatale. Aka Build My Gallows High, it’s a fatalistic masterpiece, with Kirk Douglas as the smarmy gangster setting Mitchum up for a fall. PS
30/42 His Girl Friday (1940)
A screwball comedy of substance, Howard Hawks's remake of The Front Page is an objectively odd mix of high stakes and high comedy. Yet it works because the machine-gun dialogue is so quick that there's never a moment to question what’s happening (the great screenwriter Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the original Broadway play, worked on it uncredited). Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, as the warring editor and star-reporter trying to work together long enough to land the story of the year, remain the standard by which all on-screen chemistry should be judged. HO
31/42 The Conversation (1974)
Who's eavesdropping on whom? Hatched before Watergate and speaking eerily to it, this audacious story of an obsessive surveillance whiz (a career-best Gene Hackman), commissioned to snoop but finding himself morally embroiled, is a slippery plunge into Seventies paranoia like no other. What a run Francis Ford Coppola had, slipping this one in between the first two Godfathers. PS
Paramount Pictures
32/42 Blow Out (1981)
John Travolta's Z-movie sound man, out recording one night, accidentally tapes what turns out to be a political assassination. Brian De Palma hit peak ingenuity and gut-punch profundity with this stunning conspiracy thriller, mounted with a showman's élan but also harrowing emotional voltage from its star. It’s one of the most delirious thrillers of the 1980s, with a bitterly ironic pay-off that’s played for keeps. PS
Filmways Pictures
33/42 City of God (2002)
There’s a deep contradiction at the heart of this acid-bright portrait of the violence in Rio’s favelas. On one hand these child hustlers and teen gangsters have an intense lust for life, an exuberance displayed in dance and play and love; on the other, they value life cheaply and take it without a qualm. Director Fernando Meirelles and co-director Kátia Lund cast a talented band of local kids to give it authenticity and then punctuated their story with Scorsese-esque violence that still shocks. HO
34/42 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
The diverging romantic fortunes of Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar, as did Michael Caine) provide an ideal structure for Woody Allen to check in on a midway state of adulthood, when there's already a sense of disappointment about squandered promise, but still much to play for. It hits the miraculous sweet spot between all Allen’s modes and tones. PS
Rex
35/42 Raising Arizona (1987)
The Coen Brothers had already established a ghoulish signature style with Blood Simple, but here they showed us how funny they could be, in a zig-zagging kidnap farce which manages the difficult feat of being both zany and adorable. Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter are the unlikely couple whose abduction of a spare newborn quintuplet, Nathan Jr, causes all hell to break loose. PS
20th Century Fox
36/42 Caché (2005)
This looks and acts like a thriller, but in reality Michael Haneke’s exploration of colonialism, guilt, paranoia and privacy cares more about subtext than about scares or mystery. A well-to-do Parisian family are tormented by the arrival of surveillance tapes of their lives, but it’s not clear who could be sending them or why, leading patriarch Georges (Daniel Auteuil, never better) to confront his own past sins. As a subversion of genre and viewer expectation, there are few to match it. HO
Rex
37/42 The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Straight up the best Bourne movie – an experience Ultimatum can’t help but want to repeat, more falteringly – because of Paul Greengrass’s phenomenal instincts for pace, Matt Damon’s unguessed flair for minimalism, and a script by Tony Gilroy that’s all about conscience. Barring Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s the best and most enduring action movie of the present millennium. PS
38/42 The General (1926)
Orson Welles suggested that Buster Keaton’s silent Civil War comedy might be the greatest film ever made, and who are we to argue? Keaton’s Johnny Gray is a key figure on the railroads of the Confederacy, but he and his engine, The General, must go above and beyond to defeat a Union spy. Ignore the dodgy politics and focus on the sublime physical comedy of Keaton’s beautifully composed routines. You’ll come out wondering if movies even need sound. HO
Rex
39/42 The Babadook (2014)
The Babadook is a black, hunched pop-up book monster who raps on your door three times before paying a visit. And you can’t get rid of him. Widowed mum Amelia (brilliant Essie Davis) can’t remember reading his book to her emotionally disturbed misfit of a son (Noah Wiseman) before. Jennifer Kent’s thoughtful Australian chamber shocker, a feast of inventive design, claws its way into you and leaves scratch marks. PS
40/42 When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Is it impossible for men and women to be purely platonic? It is according to Harry, in this beautiful, brainy comedy about two neurotic New Yorkers who become friends and then more. Directed by Rob Reiner and written by wonderful Nora Ephron, it's a paean of sorts to Woody Allen's early films, with razor-sharp observations about sex and dating ("I'll have what she's having"). It's still the pinnacle of both Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's careers.
Columbia Pictures
41/42 Inside Out (2015)
Toy Story revolutionised animation; Up and Wall-E vie for the best opening of any film this century, but for sheer audacity Pete Docter’s head-trip must prevail. As a little girl struggles to adapt following a family move across country, her emotions go on a madcap adventure through the mind itself. What’s dazzling here is that two completely separate films unfold at once. Kids watch brightly coloured sprites on a quest; adults watch a psychologically dense depiction of how we think and feel. It’s wonderful.
Getty
42/42 True Romance (1993)
Disinterred from a script Tarantino wrote in the mid-Eighties called The Open Road – the same screenplay that also spawned Natural Born Killers – Tony Scott's True Romance is a pulpy, hyperviolent twist on a damsel-in-distress fairytale, with a plinky-plonky score that is based on Badlands. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the lovers on the lam, chased by Christopher Walken's suave mafioso. Bombastic, brash – and totally brilliant.
Rex
She admires the women who have revealed experiences of assault or harassment recently – even if they did so some years after the incident took place, or after another victim had come forward. “It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking, ‘Oh, that made that path easier, didn’t it? You followed someone else’,” she says, “when it should be, ‘Bloody well done. I wish you could have done it when it happened, so you wouldn’t have had to have years of s***. But at least you did it.”
“To come back to [my experience],” she continues, “I don’t know why, but I will call it out, and I did that time. And it did make a difference, and that was enough for me. But that was an easy one. That was in the open, on set, among hundreds of extras. That was not me alone in a corner somewhere.” Besides, she adds, “it probably has happened to me without realising other times, [and I’ve thought], ‘This is OK, this is just how it happens, this is the business’.” She hopes her baby daughter, with whom she was pregnant while filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout, grows up to never think the same. “I want my daughter, whenever she feels unjustly treated, whenever she feels uncomfortable, whenever her gut says ‘no’, to speak up.”
Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ (Rex)
Ferguson has two children – baby Saga, with her husband Rory, and 12-year-old son Isac from a previous relationship. “He’s the new man for the new society,” she says. “When he asks things, I’m very honest. We had lots of conversations about sexuality when he was younger. He would say, ‘How do Olaf and his boyfriend have children?’ And you have to sit down and go, ‘These are the options: you have surrogacy, you have this…’ So at the age of five, my kid knew all about bees and bees, or flowers and flowers, or flowers and bees. We have a lot of discussions about trafficking, prostitution, rape, all of it.” Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.
She’s also determined to never tell him he can’t cry. “When people say that to their children, I’m not kidding, I want to slap the parents over the face. There’s nothing that makes me more pissed off than unfairly treated children. Religion as well, when you force that upon your children…” Her publicist interrupts. We have a few minutes left. “So The Kid Who Would Be King then!” she cries. “We’ve done #MeToo, we’ve done gender, we’ve done politics…”
She wasn’t planning on venturing into these areas – particularly not #MeToo. “It’s such a sensitive subject,” she says. “It’s our trust in your writing. That’s the issue. The more fairly and justly it’s portrayed… that’s how you help equality.” She smiles, and points a finger at me. “That’s your job, love.”
The Kid Who Would Be King is out in UK cinemas now
Tickford drivers 'bitching and moaning' despite rapid test pace
Looking to bounce back from a difficult 2018 campaign, the Ford squad made a promising start to the 2019 season with a strong showing at last week's Phillip Island test.
A flurry of late laps on green rubber saw Cam Waters top the overall times, while Chaz Mostert slotted into third.
Will Davison was fifth quickest in the new 23Red Racing customer car, new signing Lee Holdsworth capping off the impressive showing in 10th.
However single-lap success hasn't left the Tickford quartet satisfied with the new Mustang.
Team boss Tim Edwards says his drivers were still "bitching and moaning" about the car's handling, as the squad deals with the switch to linear springs thanks to the twin-spring ban.
"The reality is that the cars weren't behaving the way we wanted them to behave, but we've also lost trap springs as well so that's changed the philosophy on the suspension as well," Edwards told Motorsport.com.
"The geometry route that we're running is not the geometry we were running in Newcastle last year. So you're dealing with that.
"That's what we were working on all afternoon [at the test], trying to make headway on that.
"We ran good rubber at the end and they kept chipping away at it. By no means have we found utopia, the guys still weren't happy. On the last lap of the day they were still bitching and moaning about the handling of the car, so we've got plenty of work to do.
"It's a different philosophy not having the twin-springs, you've got to mechanically balance the car around that, so we've got to work our arse off to figure it out."
Not that it was all long faces in the Tickford garage; just getting four Mustangs to the test – let alone actually being quick – is something Edwards says was a huge achievement for the team.
"Irrespective of the laptimes I'm just really happy with how the cars ran," he said.
"The guys have put in so much work over the last few months – in particular the last two weeks. The lights have been on in the factory most of the night.
"Just for the team alone, to have four cars running successfully, they pretty much ran faultlessly, and that's a huge achievement.
"If you look at it from the outside you don't really how much work goes in to doing something like this."
Laura Muir routs Kirsty Wade’s 31-year-old British indoor mile record
© Action Images via Reuters Britain’s Laura Muir celebrates winning the women’s one mile Final and setting a new national indoor record.
No sooner had Laura Muir obliterated the 31-year-old British indoor mile record by an astonishing five seconds than she started wrapping herself up in cotton wool. She knows the biggest danger of retaining her European 1500m and 3,000m titles in Glasgow could be the February flu rather than anything on two legs. So instead of posing for selfies, as usual, her coach Andy Young handed fans autographed photographs instead.
A smiling Muir said: “I signed 66 cards ‑ so I hope that’s enough for everyone! I didn’t want to leave the fans without things but I’ve got to look after my own health.”
It is surely a wise precaution given how supreme and sublime Muir looked in chasing down Kirsty Wade’s old best of 4.23.86, set in 1988, to claim her sixth British record. For good measure her time of 4.18.75 was also the third fastest mile in history and broke her own 1500m national indoor record.
© Thomson Reuters Laura Muir celebrates victory in the women's 3000m Action Images via Reuters/Andrew Boyers
Initially Muir’s pace was steady as she went through halfway bang on schedule in 2:12. But when her pacemaker dropped out and it became a four-lap time-trial the 25-year-old Scot hunted the record down with zealous intent before tumbling over the line.
“It’s pretty special to get the record, especially one which has stood such a long time and from an iconic runner with Kirsty,” insisted Muir. “It’s a world lead, the third fastest ever behind the European and world records so I’ll take that.”
“For the next two weeks I’ll try to stay away from as many people as possible – not that I don’t like people, it’s just colds are everywhere.”
© Thomson Reuters Laura Muir celebrates winning the women's one mile Final and setting a new national indoor record Action Images via Reuters/Matthew Childs However there was no such joy for double European 60m champion Richard Kilty, who saw his chances of a historic treble evaporate when he fell just short of the 6.60sec British qualifying standard in the men’s 60m final.
With the country’s two best 60m sprinters, Reece Prescod and CJ Ujah, swerving Glasgow it is possible that no British male sprinters are selected for the team.
What frustrates Kilty is that while European Athletics allow anyone who has run 6.78sec to compete in their championships, British Athletics have insisted on a much stricter criteria - which he has failed due to meet because of foot and Achilles’ injuries.
It has left Kilty, who finished fifth in the men’s 60m final won by China’s Su Bingtian in 6.47sec, relying on the unlikely possibility that the selectors hand him a reprieve when they announce their team on Sunday.
“During the last two Euros, 6.60 has got at least a bronze so I would be in with a shout of a medal if I went,” he said. “I know I am capable of running faster than that, which puts me in a chance of defending my title. I really do have faith in myself.
© Thomson Reuters Laura Muir in action as she wins the women's one mile Final and sets a new national indoor record Action Images via Reuters/Matthew Childs “My message to selectors is that I am a championship performer who has never been beaten in a major championship. Hopefully they have some faith in me. It would mean the world to me to stand on the line after the year and a half I have had.”
As things stand the British selectors could only name Ojie Edoburun, who finished last in last week’s trials, and Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, who didn’t even get out of the semi-finals - both of whom would qualify having run 10.20 outdoors last year.
© Thomson Reuters Laura Muir poses after victory in the women's 3000m Action Images via Reuters/Andrew Boyers However Asha Philip, who finished second to Jamaican Olympic champion Elaine Thompson in the women’s 60m final, said she would take Kilty.
“He’s had a few injuries and niggles but I know that he’s capable,” Philip said. “I would put my money on Kilty if they take him.”
Holly Bradshaw produced her second best pole vault since 2012, clearing 6.81m to beat a stacked field which included the Greek Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi - and afterwards revealed that she had been dropped by her sponsors Nike in January.
“Obviously a little bit harder but I’ve been really sensible over the past couple of years,” she said. “Hopefully if people see me performing they might want to sponsor me.”
However she denied that being dropped had given her a ‘kick up the arse’. “No, not really. Stuff like that doesn’t spur me on. I’m just trying to do good for me. I love pole vaulting and I love the feeling of flying.”
There was also a world record in the men’s 1500m as the 19-year-old Ethiopian Samuel Tefera won a sprint finish against his compatriot Yomif Kejelcha to beat Hicham El Guerrouj’s mark and win in 3.31.04. “I can’t believe that,” said Tefera.
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