It opens with a funeral. We are told Alex is dead, and while we never quite see Kevin Costner playing him, the rest of the stellar ensemble cast looks heartbreakingly plunged in gloom. Glenn Close, William Hurt and the others sit in church, inconsolably sad as the offscreen priest details the funeral arrangements, and JoBeth Williams solemnly moves to the piano to play one of the late Alex's favourite songs. Without warning, she invokes the Rolling Stones with a couple of immediately unmistakable keyboard notes, making the others grin. Big, sad, unstoppable grins. Goose-pimpling never comes this automatic.

As the coffin is wheeled out and Jagger's voice cuts through to a defiant background score, his song sounding more melancholy than ever, the friends meet and hurry to their cars. And the vividly varying sets of headlights show exactly why this is one of the finest soundtrack choices of all time: You Can't Always Get What You Want.

An exceptional film about generational angst, The Big Chill is about a group of 60s idealists -- beatniks, treehuggers, radicals -- finding themselves cocooned in the complacent safety on the 80s. Radical journalist Jeff Goldblum now writes for People; frontline protester Tom Berenger now stars in a primetime TV series. More than that, however, the film is about disillusionment to a frighteningly nihilistic extent, eventually emerging heartbreaking and life-affirming all at once.

The humour is warm, yet savage. In an early scene, Mary Kay Place tells William Hurt that the last time she spoke to Alex, they had a fight and she yelled at him. 'That's probably why he killed himself,' Hurt half-smirks, and the film cuts away for a couple of seconds before he asks what the argument was about. 'I told him he was wasting his life,' says Meg.

It's one of the finest films about friendship, and despite the potentially dismal subject matter, contains more smiles than sighs. It is, after all, about how death of a friend brings about an immensely cathartic reunion for all his closest friends. Every bit of the cast is incredible, and just to give you a glimpse of that awesome Stones song at full healing force, here's the opening scene: Click here for video, and watch out for Jeff Goldblum's lips twisting into a wicked grin.

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