Films beginning with K | Film

1000 films to see before you dieFilm

Films beginning with K

Kanal
(Andrzej Wajda, 1957)
Wajda cannibalised his own experiences as a resistance fighter for his tough, intense tale of the Warsaw uprising. Kanal is a dark movie, both literally and figuratively, as it chases its desperate fugitives through the city sewers. All of them, we suspect, are destined to end up in a hole.

Kandahar
(Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)
An enigmatic movie from the Iranian arthouse master: part documentary, part parable. An Afghan woman who has grown up in Canada receives word from her sister in Kandahar that she is about to commit suicide: she makes a dangerous journey through Afghanistan to find her. The film became notorious for featuring Hassan Tantai (formerly David Belfield) who is wanted in the US for the 1980 murder of a pro-Shah Iranian diplomat.

The Karate Kid
(John G. Avildsen, 1984)
Ralph Macchio stars as a bullied kid who needs to toughen up. Luckily, a martial arts expert is the local handyman, and Macchio becomes his student. After months of training he is ready for the local hardass. The action climaxes at the All Valley Karate Championship with Elisabeth Shue in a cracking pair of knee-high socks.

Keane
(Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)
The ghost of a missing child haunts Kerrigan's spare, extraordinary tale, shot in the concrete outskirts and transport inter-zones of New York City. The camera sticks closely to its mentally disturbed protagonist (played by Damian Lewis), who forges a fraught bond with a little girl and her troubled mother.

Kes
(Ken Loach, 1969)
In the absence of an industry, Ken Loach means British cinema ("Mike Leigh" is the other shorthand), and the much-loved Kes is a big part of the reason why. An unaffected tale of a lonely Barnsley boy who finds a taste of freedom when he gets to train a kestrel, it's in the best of spots for British naturalism: halfway between the gutter and the stars.

Kids
(Larry Clark, 1995)
Larry Clark reworked the teensploitation movie of the 1950s with an unflinching voyeuristic lens, the help of a young skateboarding scripter named Harmony Korine, and future indie queen Chloe Sevigny in the starring role. He tapped serious social neuroses, from drugs and under-age sex to HIV. A vital, moral vision of early 1990s youth that spawned a new generation of dark teen films.

Killer of Sheep
(Charles Burnett, 1977)

Italian neo-realism, enhanced with bleakly poetic black-and-white cinematography, comes to 1970s Watts in Charles Burnett's UCLA dissertation movie, immediately recognised as a landmark in American (not just African-American) cinema, but lost to us for 30 years over rights issues concerning its stunning sound-track of blues, gospel and 70s black pop.

The Killer
(John Woo, 1989)
This Hong Kong thriller set a new standard in cinematic gunplay, and claimed many casualties in the process. The plot, concerning an honourable assassin (Chow Yun-fat), has its slushy moments, but otherwise it's relentlessly action-packed, with Woo's much-imitated kinetic camerawork and skilful choreography sustaining the excitement.

The Killers
(Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Siodmak's noir visions always harked back, more even than those of his fellow emigres, to German expressionism's narrow palate of intensely expressive monochromes: a funeral under black umbrellas, a payroll heist in a 90-second single take, a doomed young Burt Lancaster - and Ava, perfect, perfidious Ava, in all her intoxicating ripeness.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(John Cassavetes, 1976)
Shapeless yet utterly compelling Cassavettes melodrama about a stripclub owner in hock to the mob for gambling debts, this is the director's male counterpart to A Woman Under the Influence's account of female disintegration, a chaotic discourse on masculine self-destruction. Ben Gazarra's finest hour.

The Killing
(Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
The movie that put Kubrick on the map, a geometrically precise, furiously detailed and polished racetrack-robbery thriller that prefigures in miniature all his fatalistic themes. Fifty years later, it still looks like it was made tomorrow. Killer line: Sterling Hayden's last words, "Ah ... what's the difference?"

Kind Hearts and Coronets
(Robert Hamer, 1949)
Perhaps the most acidic of all the Ealing comedies, dispatching Dennis Price's embittered bastard son on a mission to bump off the heirs to the D'Ascoyne family fortune. Meanwhile, Alec Guinness pulls on a myriad of guises as the various victims, including - most memorably - the imperious suffragette who "falls to earth in Berkeley Square".

King Kong
(Merian C Cooper, Ernest B Schroedsack, 1933)
Go to Skull Island. Face down the "natives". Survive the ordeal, if you can. And pray for decency's sake that that Kong guy leaves a few clothes on Anne Darrow. This is what innocent sensation was meant to be. Beauty and the Beast with an update - and the most frightening monster is the film producer.

King Lear
(Grigori Kosintzev, 1969)
A thunderous Soviet adaptation of Shakespeare's politicised tragedy, with the USSR's Baltic coast providing dramatic, beetling backdrops, and veteran Estonian actor Jüri Järvet creating a Lear of unquenchable nobility of spirit.

The King of Comedy
(Martin Scorsese, 1983)
Robert De Niro is cruelly brilliant as aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin, who goes to creepy extremes to win a spot on a late-night talk show. It failed to find an audience on its release in 1983, but Scorsese's film is now regarded as a prescient commentary on celebrity worship.

King of New York
(Abel Ferrara, 1990)
An inscrutable Christopher Walken emerges from prison determined to rule the New York drug trade, the better to start financing hospitals and relief programmes for the city's poor. Part modern Robin Hood, part Pablo Escobar, Walken remains implacably, eerily still as ultraviolence rages entertainingly, perhaps satirically, all around him.

Kiss Me Deadly
(Robert Aldrich, 1955)
The apotheosis of film noir, all insanely skewed angles and hellish chiaroscuro, inventive brutality and leering sexual innuendo. KMD is Robert Aldrich at his aggressive, cynical, ultraviolent finest, marrying the conventional gumshoe flick to the mortal considerations of 1955, principally the atom bomb, or as Mike Hammer calls it, "the big whatsit".

Kiss of the Spider Woman
(Hector Babenco, 1985)
Two-hander set in a cell in a never-named Latin American country, with flamboyant gay movie lover William Hurt escaping dangerous realities by recounting scenes from his favourite pulp movie to his political-prisoner cellmate, radical Raul Julia. Babenco's compelling adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel zeroes in on issues of manhood and heroism, as well as making brilliant use of a movie-within-a-movie structure.

Klute
(Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
An out-of-his-element Ohio cop and a NYC call-girl (Jane Fonda) comb New York for the man who killed his best friend. A reverse-western in formal terms (like Coogan's Bluff with ice in its veins), it offers a paranoid template for Pakula's 70s thrillers, and an unnervingly static performance from Donald Sutherland.

Knife in the Water
(Roman Polanski, 1962)
The terse dynamism that would spill out in Polanski's later films is shown in its raw prime in his feature debut, a claustrophobic three-way drama in which a middle-aged couple pick up a hitchhiker and invite him to join them on their yacht. The male-ego psychodrama that follows is a masterclass in tension, heightened by the wide-open waters that surround it on every side.

Koyaanisqatsi
(Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
Hypnotic portrayal of collective life on Earth in the 20th century, building up from awe-inspiring natural panoramas to the time-lapse insanity of urban life, set to an incantatory score by Philip Glass. Are we a continuation of nature or some disastrous, cancerous offshoot? If we are going down, then at least we produced art like this.

Kwaidan
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
Japan's most expensive production when it was released in 1964, this portmanteau of four supernatural tales adapted from ex-pat writer Lafcadio Hearn musters eerie strength. Kobayashi intensifies everything by placing meticulously posed actors on expressionist sets - a giant celestial eye rages in the background of one - giving these folktales a grand, mythic resonance.

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