Kim Newman

This is a must-see film for its unashamed romanticism, its breathtaking visual delirium, the excellent performance of Cusack as the only rational person in the county and the sheer spirit with which the fundamental daftness of the plot is served up.

A riotous, rough-hewn and rousing punk reinvention of ’70s-style grindhouse exploitation-with-a-brain-cinema.

As good an all-out, non-camp horror movie as we’ve had lately.

A mixture of tough and wistful and reflective and brutal, this is the ideal vampire movie for Twi-hards who’ve had their hearts broken for the first time and want to move on to a less cosy vision of eternal romance with a side order of addiction.

A bravura monster movie which just doesn’t let up, ratcheting tension with nary a word uttered on screen. It also boasts great creature design and a breakthrough performance from young Millicent Simmonds.

Not as dark as its source material, Wanted works exceptionally on its own terms. McAvoy crashes the A-list, Jolie finally gets to be as big a star on screen as she has been in print, and Bekmambetov proves the most exciting action-oriented emigré since John Woo.

A little slow and vastly outdated now, but nonetheless very watchable.

Top-flight muscleman entertainment that is not afraid to have a brain or two in its head.

A surprisingly yet successfully restrained lesson in how to haunt a house.

An ambitious physics and time-bending, relationship drama with solid performances from the two main characters.

A well-above-average ho-ho-ho-horror film with a shivery sense of winter weirdland and anarchic ultra-violence, it’s also a strong candidate to become a holiday favourite thanks to a perfectly judged punchline.

As befits a distillation of 1,318 pages of the story so far, Akira the film is teeming with incident and detail.

A worthy, exciting, emotional addition to the venerable monkey movie marathon. Apes will rise. Sequels are likely.

Featuring excellent work from grandstanding Cox and just-lying-there Kelly, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe creates a successful feeling of mounting dread punctuated by crashing thunder and surgical viscera.

This needs its 'based on a true story' caption because otherwise you'd never believe it.

A classy French-Belgian horror with an unusual female perspective on monstrous taboos. Shocking but not sensationalist, this is a strong cannibal movie worth chewing over.

A funny, affecting, twisted tale, which demands you pay close attention to every throwaway detail.

If you're a bah-humbug type looking for an alternative to Santa Claus: The Movie or Miracle On 34th Street, this could be a holiday perennial. May be too strange for normal people, but weird kids will love it.

You have to be in the right mood for it, but this is one of the season’s finest films.

With its driving jazz score, hilarious dialogue and overdrive melodramatics, this is the ultimate expression of the American cinema's greatest fetishes: big breasts, fast cars, tight jeans, and sudden death. This is, in its own way, one of the great films of the 60's.

Unpretentiously and likeable Peter Hyams is one of the few hacks still working at this budget level, and he relishes the chance to make an audience jump, not only with some neat monster effects and a pile of mutilated corpses but also with some subtleties of editing and lighting, plus one of the loudest jump-out-of-your-seat soundtracks in a recent memory.

A true evocation of the spirit of the Strand Magazine, this is the best Holmes movie ever made and sorely underrated in the Wilder canon.

Impressively nightmarish.

While not to everyone's tastes, this is without doubt one of the most exhilarating films of 1994.

A pick-up after the second film, if not as assured as the first. Rapace sets a high watermark for Rooney Mara in David Fincher's remakes.

Though the clumsy geometric tentacle that does most of the machine’s evil will cries out for morphing, this is remarkably prescient in its tackling of issues the cinema is only now catching up with, and Christie adds depth to the lady-in-peril heroine. Well worth reassessment.

Terrific performances, especially from the menacing, lazily charismatic Henshall, and debut director Kurzel's expressionist storytelling make for an Aussie film well worth hunting down. A tough but seriously rewarding watch.

Full of character-based suspense, it’s dramatic and ramped-up with tension. Existing between a Sundance and a FrightFest film, this is a challenging, horribly plausible future vision.