Ian Nathan

A flawed work held together by Alwyn’s tender presence.

Despite moody flashbacks to the Nazi takeover, Hirschbiegel draws a blank. Elser remains an enigma, a great what-if whose German torturers cannot comprehend acted alone.

Vallée’s post-traumatic stress comedy is more scientific than genuinely moving. Nevertheless, Gyllenhaal continues his post-Nightcrawler upgrade with another vivid performance in the key of strange.

For all the special effects and half-starved A-listers, this is a sodden beast. Perhaps there’s a reason that Melville only told half the story.

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

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.”

So godlike is Spielberg’s status that we often take his talents for granted. The strange, riveting mix of Bridge Of Spies is another sterling reminder that we shouldn’t.

Really smart people on a really smart person: Fassbender, Winslet, Sorkin and Boyle await Oscar nominations. But for all its relevance and grandeur, Steve Jobs is ridiculously entertaining. You might say, user-friendly.

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.

At times it feels as if five different films are going on at once, but Schumer’s whip-smart delivery and no-holds perkiness keeps it all in place. Just as her director wilfully mines his own life for laughs, there is a whole lot of Amy in Amy.

Easily, almost nonchalantly, best in franchise, Rogue Nation dispenses with the dead weight of realism or relevance for state-of-the-art thrill-making in a classical mould. The series has finally found its voice.

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.

Less vibrant than the original, but equally thoughtful and funny.

Max’s re-enfranchisement is a triumph of barking-mad imagination, jaw-dropping action, crackpot humour, and acting in the face of a hurricane.

On one level a fascinating refraction of the Amanda Knox trial into an examination of perception, on another an increasingly trying hall of mirrors.

Take it from us — ignorance is bliss. The less you try to figure out Anderson’s rambling, mesmerising mystery, the better. Just relax and let this beautiful, haunting, hilarious, chaotic, irritating and possibly profound tragicomedy wash over you. There is nothing else out there like it.

Oscar heralds will no doubt dub it "The Hurt Locker" for snipers, but the fitting combo of Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper have created a thrilling Iraq war story that manages to both honour the necessities of heroism and ruminate on what heroism might cost a man.

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.

Shimmering with awards potential, Leigh’s glorious picture is a hilarious, confounding, wholehearted and dazzlingly performed portrait of an artist as an ageing man.

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.

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

Weightless, but not without its enchantments, this is Woody Allen coasting. But where better to coast than the loveliest coast of all?

For all its chilled intelligence and topical ambition this is a bloodless adaptation, but worth seeing for Hoffman’s deft and ghostly presence.

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.

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

A superbly mounted, powerfully performed, if slightly underfed Apes sequel. That Reeves is set to direct Untitled Of The Planet Of The Apes next is cause for much celebration. This guy’s fur real. No pun intended.

For all it boasts in ingenious style, this genial American yarn lacks the delicious bile of Jenuet’s early days.

However familiar the terrain, this is a vivid, heartbreaking and captivating character piece and travel movie in one, guided by an outstanding Wasikowska.

Haunting and idiosyncratic, Jarmusch’s vampire marriage preaches to the converted, but he’s in fine voice nonetheless.

Jonze has made a sweet, smart, silly, serious film for our times, only set in the future.

Get this — Matthew McConaughey is currently the most exciting acting talent at work in movies. Next up, the simple business of a Christopher Nolan.

Defying rote heroics and sidestepping those solemn Frodoisms lurking in the role, Lawrence seeks out the complex, human and earthy in Katniss, still the beating heart and total triumph of these movies.

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.

Pop quiz, hotshot: you’re cut loose 375 miles above the Earth, oxygen is running out, communication is lost, catastrophic satellite debris is heading your way and you have no hope of rescue. What do you do? What do you do? The answer is the film of the year.

Good intentions, vivid setting and TLJ on top form do not make up for a lack of anything truly compelling.

However exotic the locations and starry the stars, there’s no escaping this is The Devil’s Advocate of online gambling. Fold.

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

The CG does its part of the bargain, but even more than the brighter, breezier original this is a pale imitation of Potter.

Del Toro is giving scope to a boyhood lust for mayhem, the multi-million-dollar equivalent of kicking over sandcastles and torturing insects. There is something infectiously juvenile in that.

Despite DiCaprio’s prize performance, purists will fume, but even as lit-crashing razzle-dazzle entertainment Luhrmann’s adaptation is a candelabrum too far.

Don’t let its commercial nosedive in the US tell the whole story. Cloud Atlas is a tough sell, but a rewarding journey all the same. It’s an adventure into the very concept of storytelling: magical, enthralling and thrilling as much as bewildering, pompous and potty. In other words, up in the clouds.

Hitchcock for dummies: brisk, jolly, well-played but oversimplified.

As unexpected as it is intelligent, thanks to virtuoso work from Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln is landmark filmmaking, while Day-Lewis is so authentic he pulls off that stovepipe.

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

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

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.

Family dysfunction to make Jeremy Kyle blush, but thanks to McConaughey's oily power and Friedkin's unflinching purpose it's a compelling beast.

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.

With so many films adapted from novels, it's nice to see cinema paying homage to unheralded greats of literature like Sebald. While this one often struggles to do justice to his sense of grandeur and poetry, it'll be manna for fans of the German's work.

A sequel confident in what it's about - bigger, better, funnier, without stretching the joke.

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

There's no question it's stunningly mounted, and Wasikowska makes a much stronger Jane than Alice, but the romance is overripe and the climax underdone.

It's nowhere close to "E. T." - what is? - but amongst the hullabaloo of summer, Super 8 is something to cherish: a beautifully made homage to better times, and better movies.

There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.

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

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.

Unfortunately, half the time this feels more like an Omen parody than a chance to give it a great send off.

For much of its slowburn build there is a classy, intelligent thriller at work, something closer in tone to The Odessa File. Still, you must remain guarded to how over the top and quasi-horror events will finally turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Pointless re-make. One of (the once great) Carpenter's worst.

As black, sinful and nasty as a weekful of Hitchcocks, this is as fresh and intoxicating now as it was back then. In a word: deadly.

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

The jingoism is blindingly awful, but by the time of the showdown, the film has descended into an unaware parody of itself.

Stunning cast and scenery cannot fill the hole where the heart of this film should be. A satire with an unnaturally soft centre.

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

A well-rigged whodunit based on the bestseller by Scott Turrow, that pretends to investigate the various political manipulations that haunt your average district attorney’s office but is in truth about the wages of sin.

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

About the dumbest movie Clint Eastwood ever put his name to.

Highly-evolved it ain't, but this Stone Age slacker is a lot of fun.

This gritty sci-fi is undeservedly neglected and underrated.

Well-paced and stunningly shot.

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.

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.

Technology, as ever, is examined through a pessimistic prism, but the script is equipped with enough jargon and detail to expose the work and responsibility of the filmmakers.

A fulsome, fascinating piece of 20th century Irish folklore.

It is the Road Warrior (as it was subtitled for the American release) that remains the definitive Max movie, hard as nails, hell for leather, it lands like a punch to the jaw. Don't drive angry? Yeah, right.

A stunner of unrelenting tension interrupted by action, violence and gore.

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

Danny Boyle's finest since "Trainspotting." In fact, it's the best British/Indian gameshow-based romance of the millennium.

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

The effects may have dated, as have the Cold War themes, but the almost real time adventure still has some tension to offer.

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.

Despite the always-good Harvey Keitel, this is just embarassing sci-fi nonsense.

It’s ragged round the edges, but then Fritz Kiersch is working with a budget Roger Corman would laugh at, and he does a good job.

A mighty accomplishment, and possibly the bravest Britflick yet made.

Perfectly tense atmosphere and performances, with the sparks flying between Bogart and Bacall.

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.

Smart and satirical but very dated, obviously.

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

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

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

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

Only distinguishable from the original movie by its obvious cheapness.

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

Huston revels in he opportunity for old-fashioned splendour, granting the film the sunset glow of Lawrence Of Arabia and the swashbuckling cadence worthy of the Errol Flynn days. It’s the artful mix of Kipling’s own writing, flights of fantasy with a political core.

An insanely effective no-brainer of a film, sparkling with a simple charm and energy rarely witnessed this side of illegal substances.

The definitive wacky screwball comedy that spawned a genre.

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

The genuinely witty and endearing Disney animation that everyone forgets.

Not a masterpiece, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's pleasing to see a sequel strive so hard to reach the same heights. That it fails is through no fault of its own - the original simply raised the bar too high.

As a light family sports feel-good this works but don't look for anything more.

This is supposed to be serious hard-hitting but with most prehistoric depictions, only manages either school reconstruction or parody.

One of the most legendary tear-jerkers of the 20th century.

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

This magnificent, often anarchic pastiche of Russian literature’s portentous habits with a side order in Bergmanesque death wallowing actually finds Allen at his silliest. Which also means it is extraordinarily clever silliness, with designs deliberately stolen from Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers. It is film that explores comedy’s infinite variety via the medium of the existential philosophy of those big Russian sagas slumped in history like sulking teenagers.

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

Fairly routine western makes a disappointing swansong for Hawks. Still good fun though, if you like this kind of thing.

The Marx brothers on top form with their quickfire comedy and banter.

Joan Allen, Tom Noonan and Dennis Farina contribute to the class in a truly underrated chiller.

One of Heston's best work, this shows our lead at his most macho and heroic, inspiring a whole army while also managing to woo the stunning Loren in this romantic war epic.

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

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

The most literally exciting film you will see this year. Forget the off-putting banner of another Iraq movie -- go, watch, marvel, endure and book in the palliative of a stiff drink afterwards.

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.

Trying too hard and generally too trying. Seek out Howard Hawke's Bringing up Baby instead and be done with it.

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.

Lewis Gilbert, and two career best performances from his leading actors, give this film such energy it leaves the pleasant aroma of life and possibility.

Sedate and contemplative character piece but low on thrills.

Largely devoid of any charm or intelligence that made other Apes films entertaining, this one should be buried in the Forbidden Zone.

Those with the patience to sit through a slow first half will be rewarded with another gutsy ending.

Clint doing roughneck humour with an orang-utan, what's not to like?

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

Christopher Walken sleepwalks his way through playing smarmy Nazi geneticist Zorin, where you would think he would have a ball hamming it up as a Bond villain. Indeed, it is a rare moment when Grace Jones makes the biggest impression as an Amazonian (naturally) henchman called May Day.

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

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.

For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must), yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo.

What saves the movie is its relaxed sense of self-awareness. Reynolds all but winks at the audience with his collection of Dick Dastardly sneaks and dodges, but holds onto that winning, hangdog warmth that got him to the top of the pile in the seventies.

While you cannot dismiss its place in history, its power is in what it represented rather than what it did.

Definitely a Disney classic but misses out much of the darker side of J.M.Barrie's fantasy tale.

It's not a great film, but Lee's superhuman skills make it an occasionally jaw-dropping experience.

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

Exceptionally well-rendered and emotive war drama.

Willow is not without its charms - the effects are more than special, the set-pieces suitably epic but it just doesn't fulfill the promise of certain other fantasy films.

It was the complete nightmare that invented the "summer blockbuster", launched the genius on a global scale and delivered an astonishingly effective thriller built on a very primal level: fear.

Who could ever buy Atticus Finch as the demonic Ahab driven by hellfire to hunt down that dreaded white whale?

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

The luxurious feel of the film is a perfect counterpoint to the painful truths drawn on each brother's face, whilst Pfieffer is much more than eye candy.

As the drama circles their inaction, this trio of excellent performances fills the screen with a form of spiritual exhaustion, and the film slumps into noir’s typically happy-clappy comeuppance of failure, betrayal and ruin. But the mood has caught on, and the film, stamped with a stunning visual emptiness, haunts the memory for long after its sour close.

Arnie still swings that sword with aplomb, but with a story this ludicrous, he's on slippery ground.

It's mindless entertainment, but its critical and commercial failure doomed the pirate genre to a watery grave.

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.

Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had made Ghost and you're some way to this classily restrained oddity, but its morbid preoccupations and ambiguity might prove too cuckoo for most.

A placid, poignant, well-kept secret of a movie.

Shadowy political trickery is one thing, fabricating an entire NASA mission is near impossible to credit. Get over that and it’s a whole lot of fun watching Hal Halbrook’s — who played supergrass Deep Throat in All The President’s Men — wicked scheming unravel thanks to the gutsy work of Elliot Gould’s tatty hack.

All gothicky, christmassy, romantic and Burtonesque. Worth a look.

A fascinating film that is by turns fascinating and mysterious.

A pretty craven attempt by Disney to cash-in on Star Wars blockbusting success, this lightweight but well-written sci-fi adventure movie is well pitched at the very young. More discerning fans of the genre would do well to smother their indignation at the levels of general plagiarism floating around the deck of the supership Cygnus.

One of the dreariest outer space swashbucklers of all time.

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

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

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 thumpingly good ode to friendship, hope, wit, wiles and wisdom, brimming with crackling characters and topped with the most twisteroo of twists since "The Crying Game."

The world Jordan envisions is desperate, but Hoskins’s human heart offers a lovely thread of hope.

The first of the silly VW Beetle with a cute personality comedies, is as childish dated and occasionally sweet as the others.

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

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

Intelligent and moving depiction of the futility of war with a superb script and mesmerising performances from all.

The film seems to be pitched at shrieking level, as if that’s the only timbre children can register.

Very hit and miss and not a patch on the first spoof but when a joke strikes home it'll have you going for a while.

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.

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

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

Although, beyond the calling of its plot, this set of likable characters do come intelligently alive and there is real directorial skill in the growing tension of the finale — this is not just a mater of blindly going through the motions. Violently out of fashion, perhaps, but inspirational in its own tidy way.

Rarely has a film bared itself to simple majesty...it feels epic yet runs barely over and hour and a half. [22 Oct. 1997]

Excessive and self-indulgent it's true but still the Pythons at their worst are still worth a look.

The Net entertains but is unlikely to hang around on the cerebral hard disk for too long.

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

For a kids film this is pleasingly dark with Gilliam delivering as much classical fairy tale as knockabout comedy.

Possibly Lean's most complicated movie, Kwai is a towering work.

Ridiculous premise and hilarious acting which is mostly famous for the Lolita-type Brooke Shields cavorting in tropical settings.

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

Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.

Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and -- to paraphrase our Ptolemy -- its failings are greater than most films’ successes.

Unoriginal, unfunny superhero spoof with a bewildered cast and an obvious plot.

A sci-fi which balances big themes and claustrophobic action with apparent ease.

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.

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.

Moore just looks confused. He obviously wants to do his thing then hit the bar for cocktails, but John Glen is nagging him to add a roughness to the slick exterior. Equally, it just doesn’t fit. The news is clear, there’s only so far you can push a Bond before it breaks.

A splendidly detailed and rousing caper movie.

Perhaps the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made.

Sequel manages to retain some pathos and credibility.

The sustained furore of humour, visual panache and headlong momentum makes for dazzling cinema.

That it is a cartoon that takes kids right out of the equation is the best recommendation of all.

Overlong, it'll most likely try the patience of audiences now accustomed to a bit more bang for their buck, but it's a great deal of fun for those with a penchant for old-style action.

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

This was sweet and charming at the time but now it just lacks either the comedy or sophistication of kids' fantasy film that we've all become accustomed to.

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.

Cruel comedy with a delicious light touch.

Here is a film fully xenophobic, abhorrent film, touting guileless version of military honour, but with Jack Cardiff’s furtive camerawork and some excellent editing, it sucks you in to its disturbing heroic sweep.

Michael J. Fox is a revelation as the mouse that roared, whilst the score, the direction, and the rest of the cast turn a risky film into a solid addition to the Nam canon.

A war film without the war but with some interesting observations nonetheless.

In typical Rob Cohen fashion, it does exactly what it says on the tin. But that's all it needs to be the visceral rollercoaster ride we all expect.

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

There is true beauty in the realism at the heart of what could come across a fanciful movie plot, with its documentarian coolness of execution, the crisp rhythms of Zinnemann’s direction, we feels we are staring through a window into the shadowy recesses of history.

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

The songs and set pieces are still fresh and infectious and most of the child cast are mesmerisingly good. I defy anyone not to be caught up in the charm and nostalgia.

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

A most fascinating disaster of genre making.

There are no gothic extravagances in Kathryn Bigelow's bone-dry, style-rich, noir-steeped vampire western. Instead it comprises a fascinatingly modern take on blood sucking mythology, shedding tradition to examine the creatures as human counterparts.

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

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

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

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

Not even a decent performance from Richard Attenborough can save this disappointing production.

It does slow down a bit too much for endless walking hither and thither scenes in the woods, as we ebb toward the grand reveal, but the mystery proves strong enough to hold you.

Despite the ridiculous premise and casting this is still a pacey little sci-thriller.

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.

You end up with this perky but pointless rehash of the cute alien format that became embedded in the late ‘80s.

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.

Mind you, Eastwood went on the star with an orang-utan, twice, so this is only his third maddest film. Although, it could be his dullest. Which was one thing no one would of expected of this madcap enterprise, born of a what-the-heck attitude from its macho stars — that it would struggle so hard to be fun.

Deliciously cruel to children, Roeg remains true to Dahl's underlying sense of real horror.

It’s a fairy-tale, a glittering New York fable told in a silvery black and white, laden with nostalgia for times and oddities long gone from the hallowed halls of Broadway. Another Allen gem.

For exploitation-enthusiasts and Scorsese completists only.

Superb performances, exquisite direction and that Ennio Morricone score create an authentic 1920s Chicago feel and a hugely entertaining crime drama.

This is a valiant but overcomplicated Western that aims to redraw the lines on Western mythology: with heroes as mere humans, and heroics as distortions of the truth.

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

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.

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!).

There were a few sci-fi movies in the 70s that managed to transcend the genre and become fairly well known in the mainstream. This weren't one of 'em and for good reason.

An often overlooked fine entry in the Kurasawa canon, this shows a good many western 'epics' how it's done.

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.

Lavish pirate adventure that launched Errol Flynn onto 1930's screens and ensured that buckles would be swashed for a good few years to follow.

Even if you're not a 'fan' of the musicals, Oliver is so witty, so bright and so endearing that even the iciest viewer should start melting in it's corona.

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.

This is not a film about boxing. This is a film about the human condition and about cinema itself.

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.

Whilst paranoid in a very 1950's way and a little downbeat at times this is very enjoyable.

Star Wars it wasn't and still isn't...camp 70's space stuff but the TV series spin-off is a fond memory for 30-somethings throughout the Western World.

One of the greatest behind-bars movies ever, the result finds director Franklin J. Schaffner making the most of both his sun-drenched locations and his leading man, who squintily acts even co-star Dustin Hoffman well off the screen.

A spectacular misfire from a director who should have known better.

Perhaps, it was the choice of material, a much more internalised story despite its glossy Raj setting, or the absence of Robert Bolt as screenwriter (it was he who put the fire in Lean’s belly), but the film, for all Lean’s innate elegance, is strangely remote and unmoving.

The Third Man finally endures because it offers a simple thing that so many modern films neglect: the power of story...Revolutionary film noir with a clutch of stunning central turns.

It’s "Ferris Bueller" with an existential crisis. Very funny and very weird.

Should be judged in context but even then it's a bit high on the melodrama and low on subtlety.

An outstanding thriller based on a stageplay (by Frederick Knott) that fits so much better on the screen because, as well as the expansive, cinema is really good at claustrophobia.

Despite a little dating around the edges this is a truly superb example of its genre and a cinema classic.

It’s juvenilia, straight-up goofballing, but there is a tittering innocence at work here.

Kubrick's superb version of William Thackery's first novel is meticulous and philosophically stimulating but it can leave some audiences unmoved on an emotional level.

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

A perfect ensemble of cast, photography and screenplay are all subtly handled through Huston's direction, bringing out Bogart and Hepburn's performances beautifully.

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

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.

Although evidently a rip-off — there were hints of Lucas even taking the matter to the courts — this spacebound wagon train, whose limits are readily apparent, is great fun.

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.

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.

Never managing to look more hi-tech or further on from 1987 than, well, Hi-tech trainers, this Arnie vehicle still runs it's bloody course without dropping many gears. A brainless, breathless thrill.

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

One of modern American film’s most intelligent and provocative accounts of a nation’s political failings, and a near-perfect depiction of journalism at its purist and most inspired. To be more succinct, it is quite brilliant.

A classic, of sorts.

Disjointed but it still rocks.

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

A rerun of the first one but satan junior is now a teenager.

Jaws but bigger, more mammal, and just plain bad.

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.

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

A 50s horror classic that remains a gem of allegorical paranoia.

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