Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Fifty feelgood films revealed

At last! A film poll not topped by Citizen Kane. We pick the flicks that make hearts soar 50 BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) Michael J. Fox invents rock’n’roll and the skateboard and gets his own mum and dad together. Not bad for a shortarse. (Sun 19, Sci-Fi, 7.35pm)

49 SHREK (2001) DreamWorks’s spoof-happy animated fairytale actually has a tragic backstory. The spherical comedian Chris Farley was first in line to voice the ogre, but his drug-related death opened the way for his Saturday Night Live colleague Mike Myers. (Christmas Eve, BBC One, 6.40pm)

48 CHEERS: THE HEART IS A LONELY SNIPE-HUNTER (Series 3 DVD, 1985) The staid therapist Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) goes hunting with the regulars of Cheers, but is hoodwinked into searching fruitlessly for the mythical “Snipe”. It was performances such as these that earned Grammer his own spin-off show.

47 TOGETHER (2000) Lukas Moodysson’s compassionate snapshot of life in a Stockholm commune, circa 1975, elicits laughter and tears. “I actually think Together is my darkest film,” says Moodysson. “It’s about people who fail a lot.” Funny, then, how so many people think it’s just a comedy. The Swede’s latest, an unflinching study of amateur pornographers that opens in January, leaves no such doubt.

46 DIRTY DANCING (1987) Dirty Dancing delivers two decades worth of nostalgia in one; it’s set in the 1950s, but Patrick Swayze’s Wham!-style coiffure ensures it is also fantastically 1980s. Jennifer Grey was 27 when she played the 17-year-old Baby.

45 ROCKY II (1979) All the Rocky films feature rousing “DO-IT” climaxes, but the final half-hour of Rocky II has the cheesiest punch-the-air ending in cinema.

44 RAISING ARIZONA (1987) Raising Arizona’s husband-and-wife pairing of dreamy ex-con Nic Cage and go-to ex-cop Holly Hunter sparkles like the old Hollywood rom-com classics, but adds a crazed biker and vertiginous camera-work. It was the Coens’ last film with the cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who became a top director himself with Men in Black.

43 BABE (1995) Dick King-Smith’s tale of the gallant pig that learns to commandeer sheep while getting up to all sorts of mischief was responsible for an entire generation going off bacon sandwiches. There can be few who don’t enjoy shedding a tear at Farmer Hoggett’s highest expression of praise: “That’ll do, pig.” (Christmas Eve, BBC One, 2.10pm)

42 ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES: A TOUCH OF GLASS (Series 2 DVD, 1982) You know Grandad’s dismantling the wrong one. You know Delboy and Rodney are holding a sheet that will catch little more than dust. But when the cut-glass chandelier hits the floor you’d be a plonker not to laugh.

41 GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) Like its protagonist, a misanthropic weatherman who is doomed to repeat the same day of his life until he gets it right, this is a film you can watch again and again and again. An It’s a Wonderful Life for the 1990s with Bill Murray’s caustic wit preventing it from being too syrupy - Tom Hanks was rejected for being “too nice”.

40 BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961) Nowadays, if a single woman regularly sat on her window sill singing Moon River, smoked with a cigarette holder, drank in the morning and went shoplifting wearing a mac she’d be labelled an out-of-control Bridget Jones. Audrey Hepburn makes this seem both sophisticated and bohemian.

39 ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: MAGAZINE (Series 1, 1992) Or, Patsy actually goes to work. We discover that she was the executive fashion director of a glossy mag. The highlight was the merciless parodying of “meeja” types. Kathy Burke’s ball-busting editor, Adrian Edmondson’s aesthete food critic and Helen Lederer’s feeble features editor Catriona were among the grotesque caricatures.

38 THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)* When Katharine Hepburn’s boyfriend Howard Hughes bought her the screen rights, she wanted Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey to play her competing suitors. In the end, thank God, she had to slum it with Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart.

37 FATHER TED: HELL (Season 2 DVD, 1996) The priests head for their annual summer holiday on a caravan site. Ted takes advantage of the long, dull days to try to “finesse” Dougal’s limited knowledge of, well, everything. Picking up a tiny toy cow, Ted says: “Dougal, for the 50th time, these are small, and those (pointing out of the window at cows in a field) are far away.”

36 THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980) Despite the director, John Landis, flushing thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine down a lavatory, John Belushi partied incessantly during film-making in the comedy king’s sweet home Chicago. There’s a manic edge to the movie’s rampage of mad car chases, Nazi violence and fantastic musical numbers.

35 THE ODD COUPLE (1968) Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made Neil Simon’s acerbic lines zing in this mismatched buddy movie. The second of their many collaborations won them Oscar nominations, Lemmon deserving his for improvising his character’s sinus-clearing “Moose call” alone.

34 HARVEY (1950) Elwood P. Dowd, the amiable drunk accompanied by an imaginary white rabbit, was a landmark role for Jimmy Stewart, his childlike purity humanising the movie’s broad social satire. The Jimmy Stewart Museum hosts awards in the movie’s name for erstwhile Stewart co-stars who best represent Jimmy’s “values”; the movie was also, of course, saluted by Donnie Darko.

33 LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) That the third Python film was released at all amid all the pious furore (it was still banned in Swansea until 1997) brings a warm glow to the heart. The group’s finest moment - naughty boys, fake messiahs, cheerful mass execution scenes et al.

32 THE BIG CHILL (1983)* This gathering of thirtysomething former college friends starts with You Can’t Always Get What You Want playing over a funeral (Kevin Costner’s acting debut remained on the cutting-room floor) and features city-slicker Jeff Goldblum’s immortal line while answering a call of nature: “The great thing about the outdoors is it’s one giant toilet.”

31 THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) Rob Reiner’s seminal “rockumentary” just seems to get more hilarious with repeat viewings. That it’s played straight (and for real) by the actors/ musicians makes it even more fun.

30 THE LADY EVE (1940)* Quite simply the greatest of all screwball comedies. This Preston Sturges classic stars Barbara Stanwyck as a conwoman and Henry Fonda as the poor sap she sets her sights on. Gloriously funny, heart-swellingly romantic and refreshingly cynical - Sturges was on his third divorce when he wrote it.

29 PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) Tim Burton’s first film is an anarchic road movie that sees overgrown child Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) set off in pursuit of his most treasured possession, a red bicycle. Reubens’s later problems with the law notwithstanding, the film has a disarming innocence and an exuberance that is infectious. Loosely based on The Bicycle Thieves.

28 THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL (2003) Mixing drama with documentary, with its climactic bonding ritual of a Mongolian mother camel and rejected child, added to a haunting soundtrack, this is an uncontrived, sweetly life-affirming sight to behold.

27 SAY ANYTHING. . . (1989) Singles, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous confirmed Cameron Crowe as Hollywood’s cleverest sentimentalist, but this film - voted the best modern movie romance by Entertainment Weekly - is probably his most poignant lesson in sexual politics.

26 MONKEY BUSINESS (1952)* It’s a crime that this wonderful Howard Hawks/Cary Grant comedy is available on DVD in the UK only as part of the Marilyn Monroe collection, since in truth Monroe plays a bit part to Grant’s wonderfully mad professor, who invents a potion that regresses him to his youth. Could put a smile on the face of a grandfather clock.

25 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) A three-hour prison drama featuring murder, suicide and male rape might not suggest itself as the apogee of feelgood. But do your time and you’ll be rewarded with one of the most righteously uplifting of payoffs. The final scene was added after test screening to lift the triumph quotient further.

24 MARY POPPINS (1964) While Julie Andrews deserved her Oscar, many think the gong was compensation for having lost the lead in My Fair Lady to Audrey Hepburn. That the magic lives on is evident from the fact that Mary Poppins makes its debut on the UK stage this month. (Boxing Day, ITV1, 10.50am)

23 SEINFELD: THE LIMO (Series 3, DVD, 1992) Jerry and George pose as absent airline passengers to score a limo ride back from the airport, not realising that said passenger was a neo-Nazi booked to address the Fascist rally that the boys are now speeding towards.

22 FOOTLOOSE (1984) Kevin Bacon and Sarah Jessica Parker shake their stuff in the cheesiest slice of the Brat Pack era. The tale of good-time dancing triumphing over small-town prejudice was revived as a stage musical and toured across Europe in 2004.

21 WITHNAIL & I (1987) OK, so the final Regent’s Park soliloquy is on the downbeat side. But count yourselves lucky: Bruce Robinson originally wanted his cult tale of destitute thesps to end with Withnail topping himself. And overall, there are far more peaks than troughs - no film containing the line: “Flowers are simply tarts; prostitutes for the bees,” can be deemed a downer.

20 STAR WARS (1977) There’s a case for Return of the Jedi as the more feel-good film: the fall of the Empire, the fireside fiestas, the fluffy Ewoks. But our voters preferred the original space opera: the destruction of the Death Star, Alec Guinness’s ghostly reincarnation - and a complete absence of Ewoks. (Wed 29, ITV1, 12.50pm)

19 HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) Howard Hawks’s adaptation of The Front Page, a play by the legendary wits Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, changed reporter Hildy Johnson from a he to a she. Given Rosalind Russell to spar with, Cary Grant’s editor upped the comedy to supercharged levels.

18 THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) There will always be those who write off this film as a load of Von Trapp, but only the most cold-hearted can deny the life-affirming sight of Julie Andrews singing her heart out on an Austrian mountain top. It’s hard to imagine even Audrey Hepburn, for whom the role was originally developed, having quite the same effect. (Wed 29, ITV1, 2.45pm)

17 AIRPLANE! (1980) Forgotten B-movie star Leslie Nielsen was, surely, fantastic in this hilarious parody of the disaster movie fad. Just don’t call him Shirley.

16 THE SIMPSONS: ONE FISH, TWO FISH, BLOWFISH, BLUE FISH (Season 2 DVD, 1991) Poisoned by ill-prepared sushi, Homer shambles through his list of final wishes. The writers offer black humour by the bucketload, but the grim reality of Homer’s fate is never in doubt; his eventual collapse is deeply affecting. A great example of its fierce satire being offset by a potent emotional core.

15 THE BIG EASY (1987) The Big Easy located its lurid noir plot in New Orleans, with Dennis Quaid as a slightly crooked cop navigating a Mardi Gras of intrigue to bed District Attorney Ellen Barkin. The soundtrack featured Quaid crooning Closer to You, which he co-wrote, and a decade later there was an unsuccessful TV series, featuring none of the original cast.

14 SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003) Jack Black’s strongest comic role, in which his genuine passion for music (he’s had hits with the band Tenacious D) shines through as a failed musician- turned-substitute teacher. His clowning is well matched by a brilliant young cast, and a top soundtrack.

13 BRINGING UP BABY (1938) By the late 1930s, the doyenne of the American stage, Katharine Hepburn was nicknamed “Box Office Poison” after a string of what she herself called “very dull movies”. Bringing Up Baby - a riotous screwball romance between Hepburn’s flighty heiress and an absent-minded palaeontologist (Cary Grant), complicated by gangsters, psychiatrists and an escaped leopard - changed all that, and led to a string of box-office successes for both.

12 FIELD OF DREAMS (1989) As a rule women love weepies, blokes, emphatically, do not - with one exception. Much more than a baseball movie, this Kevin Costner vehicle is also about lost opportunities and that fragile bond between fathers and sons. The baseball diamond was built by the director Phil Alden Robinson on a 100-year-old farm in Dyserville, Iowa, and they still come: its owners have preserved it for public viewing.

11 SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952) Even people who come out in unsightly rashes from musicals beam at Gene Kelly’s twinkle-toed cloudburst slalom. “What a glorious feeling - we’re happy again”, he intones with abandon. The rain was actually water mixed with milk so that it would show up better on film. (Christmas Day, Five, 3.10pm)

10 TOY STORY (1995) Pixar’s computerised animations came of age with this blockbuster, but the technological wizardry would have fallen flat without a great script, Randy Newman’s bittersweet songs, or the unforgettable voice-performance of Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear.

9 A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946) In the same year that It’s a Wonderful Life boosted postwar moods, Powell and Pressburger offered their own whimsical take on the heaven/earth debate. An RAF pilot (David Niven) cheats certain death, falls for an American and argues for his life before a celestial court in a cosmic romance commissioned by the Ministry of Information to bolster Anglo-American relations.

8 GREASE (1978)

The ultimate in musical wish fulfilment, Randal Kleiser’s extravaganza cartwheeled the seedy 1970s into the feel-good 1950s. Even the cast were transported back in time - 29-year-old Olivia Newton-John worried she was too old to play a high-school student, but Stockard Channing was 34. John Travolta (above, with Newton-John), meanwhile, secured his leading role only after Henry “Fonz” Winkler turned it down. The Fonz, apparently, didn ’t want to be typecast. 7 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: ONCE MORE WITH FEELING (Season 6 DVD, 2002) How many TV shows feature demons turning your favourite characters into all-singing, all dancing puppets? The lyrics, in which Buffy and pals reveal the skeletons in their closets, display a dark subtext, but you’ve gotta love the chirpy tunes.

6 AMÉLIE (2001) Who said that Gallic cinema was all about Gitanes-wreathed pontification? French intellectuals carped at the quirkiness of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Montmartre, but Audrey Tautou’s eccentric, philanthropic mademoiselle could warm the frostiest of cockles.

5 THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) Nearly 30 years on, Richard O’Brien’s musical paean to polymorphous perversity and B-movie pastiche still inspires wild audience participation (www.singalonga.com): rice thrown in the wedding scene, toast when Frank N. Furter proposes a toast. Where are they now? Frank, Brad and Janet all became stars (Tim Curry best in Muppet Treasure Island and Home Alone 2; Barry Bostwick in Spin City; and Susan Sarandon a truly A-list Oscar-winner); Nell set up her own New York nightclub; Riff-Raff presented Crystal Maze. And the muscular monster Rocky? He’s now an antiques dealer in England. Singing: “Don’t dream it . . . be it.”

4 CINEMA PARADISO (1990) Cheering, laughing, crying, jeering: the Sicilian cinemagoers in Giuseppe Tornatore’s fable are our sweetest demonstration of the power of the silver screen. What would they have been like if the town priest had not forced Alfredo the projectionist to remove the love scenes? Add Marco Leonardi’s cute juvenile cinephile and you have a throat-tightening arthouse landmark.

3 STRICTLY BALLROOM (1992) This fantastically camp updating of the Ugly Duckling tale, about a renegade ballroom dancer, is the first in Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain trilogy. It lacks the sweep of its later sisters (Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge!), but then, the budget was more Oz than Hollywood. Worth watching for the sculpted hairstyles alone.

2 THE OFFICE XMAS SPECIAL (2003)* It’s all about the contrast. The last episode was shaping up to be another exercise in excruciating naturalism. Until Dawn opens Tim’s secret gift and its message to “never give up” her creative aspirations, and returns to deliver the snog that he (and we) had doubted would ever happen. It still sends shivers down the spine.

1 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) For a much-loved family classic, It’s a Wonderful Life is the most brutal of Cinderella stories. Divine intervention saves James Stewart from suicide, but only to persuade him to resume his life as before, trapped in small-town America.

Only now, as he discovers in the throat-clogging final epiphany, he no longer minds. He has friends and family, and that’s enough. The film has cartoon villainy, and a rather square view of hell, as seen in the jazz bars of Pottersville, but its belief that the sacrifices of the humble man will be recognised helped it to be rediscovered as a Christmas perennial in the 1970s. RKO’s failure to renew the copyright, making the film free to television stations, didn’t hurt either.

The director Frank Capra had returned from the Second World War, aged 49 and severely shaken. Feeling his creative boldness slipping away, he sensed that the film would be a last meaningful statement. He was right, and it helps to explain the film’s power: its desperation is as keenly felt as its climactic reassurance.