Ian Nathan

Delightful, athletic stuff with some unusual - but wonderful - location shooting. New York never looked better.

More story-led than the original with a high enough body count to make it a satisfying action movie.

Old-fashioned comedy with superb performances and insightful glimpses into the world of newspaper journalism.

Terribly dated, but worth watching for Caine's performance.

Enough large-scale spectacle scenes to outweigh the inevitable religiose sludge that creeps in between them.

Unshowy to a fault, Hytner delivers a fine, moving comedy of English manners between a writer and his eccentric tenant, which slowly deepens into an exploration of human bonds.

No less lovely than former films, in many ways lovelier, but Brave is boutique Pixar: less ambitious, more succinct, excellence at a lower ebb.

Brutal story-line which is about as close to an explicit allegory as the western has ever come.

Just as the film captures a world (Imperialism, hunting, colonialism) that has faded away, so this film feels like one of the last of it's kind.

For sheer old-fashioned, childhood rekindling adventure you really can't go past it - just don't take the rose-tinted glasses off.

A truly great Western from Clint that is bleakly atmospheric and charming in turns.

Stories about love in a world gone mad don't come any more gorgeous, or any more sweepingly epic, than this.

It is a complex and at times infuriating structure — it often helps to conceive of the film as the book of short stories it stems from — but simultaneously vivid and disturbing.

In the grand pantheon of Sinbad movies, those pleasurable Arabesques of silly beasts, big swords and scantily clad maidens, this lower league Ray Harryhausen stop-motion thriller squeezes between the better Eye Of The Tiger and the worse Seventh Voyage.

By smuggling canvasses out of Nazi Paris, she was “midwife” to Pollock and Rothko. “Art,” the doc claims, “was a mirror of her own strangeness.”

Action-packed, gorgeous, and faithfully whimsical: Hergé thought Spielberg the only director capable of filming Tintin. He was onto something.

An uneven debut from John Slattery that nonetheless shows flashes of flair and a jet-black sense of humour.

A splendidly detailed and rousing caper movie.

The Canadian horror maestro scrapes away the surface of Hollywood to discover a magnificently Cronenbergian outbreak of tortured families, reprehensible behaviour and extreme violence.

Okay, so it does cloy in places, but there is truth in its fractures and its seals, a soft-shimmering landscape of real people.

Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions ...and also makes you jump.

An unknown treasure of a fantasy film and well worth a look for fans of the genre.

While it's all grand opera, and driven by sweeping gestures and pompous, overwritten dialogue, it is prone to plain silliness - especially in granting us the big showdown at the close. But the sheer dynamism of the action, coupled with Hans Zimmer's lavish score and the forcefield of Crowe, still makes this a fiercesome competitor in the summer movie stakes.

If director Chuck Workman maps a familiar rise and fall of rule-breaking brilliance it is vindicated by the great raconteur and in-depth praise from an impressive roster.

Roald Dahl's immortal, sugar-coated morality play finds Gene Wilder as disturbing and fault-ridden but compelling as the book described. Okay, so its pacing may be slightly off (taking nearly 40 minutes to arrive at the factory gates), but this is still a Golden Ticket if ever there was one.

With Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, screenwriter Steven Knight has proved his ear for London's darker rhythms. Here, though, there's little to raise the pulse.

A solidly made, sternly acted, and faithful realisation of the distopian novel.

Charming in that neurotically adorable way Charles Schulz established over many years, this is a fond continuation of the Snoopyverse.

It doesn't have the dark edge of Joe Dante's other works, but brilliant performances by Martin Short and Meg Ryan make it a joy from start to finish.

Bond meets Star Wars in one of the series' sillier outings.

Frantic is Polanski's most satisfying film since Chinatown, and one of the best traditional thrillers to come down the pike in quite some time.

More than an average thriller, but far from Lumet's finest hour.

One of the least famous of Clint's Western this is an enigma of the genre with ambiguity and psychological depth all over the place.

A resonant film which has a speudo-cult status as everyone has seen it late one night on TV and it's never left them.

Never revealing too much, Becker keeps us intrigued to the end, whilst Pacino and Barkin unexpectedly sizzle.

A bit silly really but it has a bizarre mix of a cast and some tension in places.

It's a slight tale, of course, and incredibly short, but the characters and songs are pretty much perfect viewing time and again.

Certainly not Raimi at his best, but some knowing genre nods and an array of great effects make up much of the deficit.

The sugar level is positively diabetic, but the whole aura of warmth and cuddliness is hard to resist.

Petersen pulls off the thrills at a stomach lurching pace, and with its requisite Hollywood ham - husband and wife reuniting over piles of haemorrhaging bodies - loud performances, crashing stunts and a fearsome, hypochondria-inducing conceit, there's barely room to catch your breath, let alone cry foul.

Buffeted by a lack of suspense, threadbare characters, and a very poor script, the stunning visuals, gloopy madness, and sterling Fassbenderiness can't prevent Prometheus feeling like Alien's poor relation.

A persuasive, warts-and-bolts depiction of warfare from the guts of a tank yoked to an overwrought, sub-Private Ryan account of innocence under fire — so a hit and a miss.

As a direct tribute to the dignity of the solider facing attacks on both their bodies and their souls it puts things in a salutary context.

The tale from the past is very nostalgic, heartwarming and mouth-watering and all, as Idgie and Ruth cook up a storm, are kindly to their black domestics and stand up to piggy men while events fitfully progress to a courtroom climax. And Masterson is a peach. But the best bits belong to Bates as her dreary Evelyn raises her consciousness, lowers her weight and starts speaking her mind. It's a nice, pleasant celebration of friendship, but without much meat to chew on.

The only movie to truly deliver the visceral power of a dental drill, John Schlesinger’s taut, well written if far-fetched and baffling thriller, is the film that gives you a tooth ache in a good way.

This is a criminally neglected piece of good gothic fairy tale fun.

This sprawling epic rewards patience with an emotional pay-off and non-triumphant ending that reminds us all too starkly of the sacrifices made during war.

Classic War caper with a few too many plot contrivances but high on adventure.

One for the die hards. The saving grace here is a knowing sense of humour so lacking in its predecessor, For Your Eyes Only.

So so adaptation of the Kipling story. The human performances are riotous but their animal counterparts are blank canvases yet to be coloured.

The acting is all first base, the script a laughable stream of gung ho-isms, the action merely solid and the effects indifferent. Yet, you still stroll out with a grin a mile wide.

Unpretentious, warm, at times hilarious, it's hard to find a bad word to say about Crocodile Dundee.

Already a hit in America, 42 is a well-told but square biopic doing justice to Jackie Robinson rather than exploring him.

It picks up in the last hour, though this is a very minor compensation in an otherwise long and listless film.

Deliberately provocative, infuriatingly melodramatic, this is a film that begs not to be taken seriously, and requires a ready suspension of moral discernment for maximum enjoyment.

Film is elegant but never beautiful, a pretence at Lean’s magnificence contradicted by a lavish but anachronistic score by Vangelis. It is the words and performances which excite; their director is out of his depth.

No matter how good the performer you can’t escape Christie’s leisurely approach to characterisation — simple concoctions of quirk, guilt and red herring. But Lumet is having loads of credible fun with the formula, keeping up a genuine sense of claustrophobia in this isolated railway car surrounded by crisp white snow.

What begins as a thrilling pastiche of comic-book formula gets bogged down in its own scientific prattle — not that you ever stop adoring Johansson’s magnificent heroine.

For exploitation-enthusiasts and Scorsese completists only.

Smart and satirical but very dated, obviously.

Sequel manages to retain some pathos and credibility.

Michael Caine as a Nazi and Donald Pleasance as Himmler...what more could you want?

A diabolical treat with Rourke and De Niro in fine form.

Director Lewis Gilbert effortlessly marshals the intricacies of the plot (a nutty plan by SMERSH to ignite a world war), the exotic Japanese locations, and the extravagancies of having hundreds of ninja warriors abseiling into a huge enemy base unfathomably constructed in the belly of an extinct volcano (quite the engineering feat!).

Slow and foreboding with a memorably creepy Christopher Walken. If you're looking for fun, this ain't it.

As earnestly as they have tried to continue the formerly excellent spy series, everything Gilroy and crew concoct only serves to mock the excellence and passion with which Greengrass delivered his films.

A general disappointment, but then with David Bowie and Patsy Kensit what did you expect.

Running at just over four hours, it is as spectacular, lush and extravagant as the studio would have liked its audience to believe. But it also has moments of mind-numbing boredom as the plot,– slowed by extraneous dialogue, drags from Egypt to Rome.

Wise (and Crichton) concoct the most absorbing, riveting take on science fiction tempered with science fact.

This has some very, very funny bits...interspersed with a very slight film.

Great performances and an innovative approach to a tired old story make this one to watch out for.

What a peculiar but effective children’s adventure movie this is.

Like Lansbury, the film has aged well and retains almost all of it's magic.

Lavish and sporadically powerful, Jolie's POW biopic may have just enough gravity to entice the Academy, but struggles to bring truth to an unbelievable truth.

Derivative sci-fi hokum but some imaginative touches here and there.

Genuinely creepy, satirical and occasionally daft horror tales with a distinctly moral bent.

Ustinov may not be the Poirot that we all think of now, after the David Suchet series, but this is pure Agatha Christie, steeped in nostalgia and atmosphere.

The definitive wacky screwball comedy that spawned a genre.

Connery has a ball with great stunts, snappy dialogue and a bevy of typically Bondish beauties.

Not one to let slow-building tension and mystery get in the way of wild flourishes of extremism and shock, Ken Russell hit upon a story that more or less handled his structural excesses and tendency toward blasphemy.

Everything from the style to the casting feels grubby and worn.

This no-brainer is fine if all you're after a bit of escapism, but don't look for anything deeper than that.

A classic, of sorts.

An uneven mix of impressively executed, violent clichés about good ol' boys defending the American right to flout the law.

Clearly not a |Disney classic as almost no-one has heard of it, this is vaguely enjoyable 70s hokum.

This has grit coming out of its ears but not the greatest Eastwood feature by a long shot.

Hardly a barrel of laughs then, but this slowburn tale sears its way onto the synapses and then flat refuses to budge.

Foxes with bows and arrows..what could be better than that?

Peckinpah is never quite as comfortable with the high-rise terrain (including sloppy kung fu) as he is with the dusty rawhide of the West, but it still shows up the slick trigger-edits of new action cinema for the gutless vacuum it has become.

A tormented movie about torment; loopy, over-reaching and occasionally suspicious. Simultaneously, it is a daring artistic endeavour.

It's not the plot that disappoints, it's the poor dialogue between action sequences. Sadly another film to file under not as good as the book.

Forgettable, innocent, old fashioned fairy tale with not nearly as much sexual chemistry as is required.

Okay, a couple of sniggers sneak out, but on the whole the effect is stone cold.

More style than substance... but such sexy, sexy style...

No matter how well dressed, the movie can’t escape the gravitational pull of formula. Without a convincing subtext, Black Rain is pretty dull fare indeed.

A modernised Bond is dragged kicking and screaming into the 70s.

As with all great spoofers, you can feel the love the director has for Hitchcock, the thoroughness of his jokes vouches for that and the entire plot is loosely based on Spellbound. Perhaps, he was too devoted, the film lacks daring, it’s soft, Hitch would have sneered at such weakness.

Passionate performances from De Niro and Jeremy Irons in this stark but thematically complex historical drama.