The lives of our greatest leaders have frequently been presented in movie form. A majority of films of this genre depict ancient leaders, but there have been a number of exceptional movies based on the lives of modern leaders. This is a selection of the 10 greatest portrayals in film of 20th century leaders.

Those looking for a thorough history lesson on North African geopolitics in this Milius sand-and-saber epic will be sorely disappointed. But it’s an enjoyable and completely watchable adventure flick, with Sean Connery starring as the Berber king and Brian Keith as the embodiment of America as a rising imperial power. His Roosevelt is at once admirable and despicable, affable yet flamboyantly arrogant, complete with TR’s trademark broad grin.

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I, like JFrater, am a lover of opera and have performed in a few as well. Here is my list of the 10 best operas of all time. The items are picked through online voting and my own personal preferences, here ya go! [JFrater would like to publicly protest the exclusion of any 20th Century operas, but defers to the wisdom of the contributor.]

This one is on the list only because it is the first opera ever written! Though almost none of it survives today, I believe the first of anything should be on a list! (Many historians, and JFrater, believe Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th century “Ordo virtutum” is the first opera, but it is not known if it was ever staged, Daphne was). The clip above is not from Daphne, but Peri’s music is very hard to find, so this is a clip of a counter-tenor singing an excerpt from Invocazione di Orfeo.

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[WARNING: this list contains images that may offend] This is a list of secret projects that have since been found to be true in light of released (either officially, or unofficially) documents. Some have long been the source of conspiracy theories while others have been accepted by the mainstream as real. In no particular order:

Sir Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, planned to execute Adolf Hitler in the electric chair if the Nazi leader fell into Allied hands.

Declassified documents reveal that Churchill was opposed to Allied plans for war crimes trials and wanted summarily to execute leading Nazi figures including Hitler who he regarded as “the mainspring of evil” and a “gangster”, and was also content to see Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi starve to death during a hunger strike in 1943.

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I’m a big fan of horror movies, and especially of a good vampire movie. While there are tons of cheap crap vampire movies out there, there are is also a wide array of great vampire movies that, best of all, vary greatly from one film to another. The trouble with making a top ten list for vampire movies is that some people like vampire comedies, others like the strange surreal vampire films, while others want blood and guts and the scariest movie they can find.

So for this list, my top ten vampire movie list is focusing on ten great, diverse vampire movies. This list is the top ten for variety among vampire movies. This list will show you the wide array of types of vampire movies, put in no particular order (since taste and preference and the differences between these movies makes it impossible to compare them on the same lines).

John Carpenter’s Vampires is one of the better recent vampire movies that actually takes the effort to be a vampire movie, and not an action film disguised as a vampire movie. James Woods plays the role of the main protagonist, a vampire hunter who is obsessed with wiping out vampires with his team after he witnessed his parents murdered by vampires when he as a child.

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