Peter Bradshaw

Coppola’s epic storytelling sweep is magnificent: there is an electric charge in simply the shift from New York to California to Sicily and back to New York.

Sublime moments, of which the most extraordinary must still be Everett Sloane, playing Kane's former business manager Mr Bernstein, remembering the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all – but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." I'll bet a week hasn't gone by when I haven't thought about that line and pictured the girl so clearly that she has become a false memory of the movie itself.

Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose.

With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.

Notorious has fascinating echoes of other Hitchcock movies such as Rebecca and Psycho. A must-see or must-see-again.

Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an “o”, or maybe “oh!” The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco’s creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo. [Rerelease]

Playtime offers us an even clearer view of the contrast between Tati’s broad physical comedy as an actor and his superbly cerebral detachment as a director.

Brilliant.

The glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.

A pleasure.

Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

[A] sublime classic.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.

I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear.

There’s a real tragic power in this almost unbearably brutal and shocking movie from writer-director Jasmila Žbanić.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

Brando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way.

The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face.

At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.

Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful.

This is a sharp, elegant, unsentimental picture in which Stewart plays a character who is often gloomy and downright unsympathetic.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

Spacious, shrewdly detailed and conceived with compassion and wit, it unfurls at an unhurried walking pace, spreading itself across a very American urban landscape.

Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.