Adam Smith

Certainly difficult to define, this period piece messes with genres, power relationships and your head.

Halloween remains about as distilled, raw an experience in terror as is ever likely to be committed to celluloid.

Jarecki's film brilliantly illustrates the fallibility of memory, the slippery nature of 'facts' and even people's invention of events that may never have taken place.

Among the plethora of innocent charms on offer, there's the near perfect script by Zemekis and Bob Gale which not only negotiates its time travel paradoxes with deft, exuberant wit but invests the light-hearted plot machinations with a seasoning note of honest drama.

The Wicker Man is, more than anything else, a film about what people can do in the name of religion or, more generally, belief. Its power comes not from appeals to the supernatural but from a deep understanding of our own undeniable nature. Horror doesn't get much closer to home than that.

Pacino simmers in this daring and brilliantly constructed treatise on the many facets of a crime.

A typically quixotic documentary in which great unknown artists from 35,000 years ago collaborate with one in 2011. Profound, mysterious and utterly absorbing.

The comparisons are inevitable, so let's get them out of the way. Hero is a better film than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Gilliam's dystopian epic remains among his best, blending his trademark visual inventiveness with a vicious brand of social satire. Unique and essential.

A perfect example of early Brooks firing on all spoofily comedic cylinders.

Cronenberg's best for a long time -- broad and entertaining enough for those unacquainted with the director's work, but layered with the themes of infection and mutation that have defined it.

Painful, funny and beautifully acted, by Jeff Daniels particularly, who gives a career-best performance.

Sure there are niggles, the most obvious being the length, which could have been reduced by trimming the prison sequences, but in the end this may be his finest moment so far which, by default, puts it in as having a strong claim on the title "best action movie ever made". Really.

Brutal and brilliant.

The film's amazing strengths easily outweigh the odd outbreak of hammery.

This story is emblematic of the passion, obsession and solitary poetry of surfing.

A deftly directed, superbly acted and occasionally witty biopic which is not afraid to engage with the complexities of its central character.

Superb performances and a compelling script have made this film a strange mix of Oscar-winner and Cult Classic.

Huge ghostly fun, and a fine achievement from the early days of CGI.

Oh alright, it ain't "Shane." But it is about as much shamelessly disreputable, stylish, ultra-violent fun you're going to have at the movies this year.

An exhilarating fight-flick that, like its scrappy central character, is impossible not to root for.

Suspiria is the perfect antipasto.

Hard to call something this gratuitous entertainment but certainly lingers in the memory, thanks mainly to the bombast of Stone's script.

The distinguishing feature of what many people consider to be the funniest movie ever made is the sheer number of gags.

Smart, sassy and sweet. This showed John Cusack's promise as a romantic lead, and some.

Some plot developments are more convincing than others, but it’s still a compelling drama with an impressive turn from Garfield as well as Shannon and Dern as Garfield’s concerned mother.

There are effective moments, a dime clutching tot watching an ice cream van plough gently into a garden wall after its driver has a heart attack, gives a stylish laugh, but at the end of the day perhaps a trip to the bar will be more fun.

While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.