1000 films to see before you dieMoviesFilms beginning with Y
Y Tu Mama Tambien
(Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
This superbly made picture re-launched Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's career, and made a star of Gael García Bernal. It is thrillingly sexy: not just in that it's about sex, but its whole style and feel are sensual. Bernal and Diego Luna go on a road trip with a sexy older woman who is escaping from a failing marriage. Sexual tension burgeons, blossoms, triangulates.
Yaaba
(Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989)
The Burkina Faso film-maker composes this folk-tale with simplicity - although several sub-plots are woven in - and he tells it at a walking-pace. A young boy Bila (Noufou Ouedraogo) befriends an old woman Sana (Fatimata Sanga) despite the fact that other village boys torment her, believing her to be a witch. Bila stubbornly befriends her and calls her Yaaba, or Grandmother, and Sana repays the compliment by finding the medicine which will cure the fever of a friend of his - an achievement likely only to reinforce her "witch" reputation.
(John Duigan, 1987)
The first of a brace of pictures that paired British ex-pat director with his sometime alter-ego actor Noah Taylor, here is a pure and tender but never formulaic evocation of teenage disillusion. The year is 1962 and two childhood sweethearts are ripped apart when young female hormones go crazy, leaving 15 year-old Danny (Taylor) in a jealous fix that every jilted, unrequited lover will recognise.
The Year of Living Dangerously
(Peter Weir, 1982)
Weir's story recreates the pressure-cooker world of 1960s Indonesia, a turbulent world of violence and suspected coups. Mel Gibson plays a naive Australian reporter, who befriends Sigourney Weaver's embassy official and a Chinese-American cameraman, remarkably played by a woman, Linda Hunt, who received the Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actress.
Yellow Earth
(Chen Kaige, 1984)
The film that brought modern Chinese cinema to the world's attention, also focused it on the traumas of the Cultural Revolution. A lush, beautifully coloured drama about a Communist soldier's trip to a remote village, it opened up a previously hidden world.
Yellow Submarine
(George Dunning, 1968)
The acid-drenched visions of hippy-era Beatledom found perfect expression in this endlessly inventive cartoon; luckily enough, since the Fab Four were well beyond doing anything as uncool as acting. Musically, of course, it's the Beatles in their vintage years; the trip to Pepperland is great lark, with or without artificial stimulants.
Young Adam
(David Mackenzie, 2003)
A brooding adaptation of cult Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi's existential murder mystery, set on Glasgow's canals, and finding room for some of Britain's starriest actors. Stirring up the grit are a dour Tilda Swinton, sexually compulsive Ewan MacGregor, and Emily Mortimer, who undergoes a gruelling humiliation by ketchup and mustard.
Young Frankenstein
(Mel Brooks, 1974)
Unfeasibly funny stuff as Gene Wilder plays the grandson of the original monster-maker, sceptical of gramps's work until he inherits his Transylvanian bolthole and resumes the experiments. Peter Day's monster, fiancée Madeline Kahn, and - perhaps above all - Marty Feldman's Igor ("What hump?") are just perfect. As with all the best, it only ever gets funnier and funnier.
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