Wild Strawberries, which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.

Olivier has made a superbly dramatic film, in which by variations of tempo, by superb acting on the part of the awe-inspiring cast, and by a wonderful knack of indicating the side-shows while maintaining the main theme of Richard's own drama, he has cheated the clock. His long film never, or hardly ever, seems long.

Blessed with a characteristically brut champagne script by Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night is special even by the bright standards of the romantic comedies that Hollywood studios pulled off so breezily in 1940. It’s the cinematic equivalent of oven-warm gingerbread.

There's no mistaking its chilling charisma and style. [11 Jun 1999, p.15]

It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg's feature-length debut, to realize you're in the hands of a master director.

Garbo is deliciously watchable in this fictionalised but nonetheless well-researched biopic.

The film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity.

It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up.

Though this is familiar Lynch stuff, it is never dull, and I was often buttock-clenchingly afraid of what was going to happen next and squeaking with anxiety.

Memories of Murder is a great satire of official laxity and arrogance, and its final scene is very chilling.

Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

You, the Living is a very funny film - though in the darkest possible way. It is a silent comedy, but with words.

If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee.

There's some great Pinteresque dialogue, and the murky gloom is illuminated with flashes of genius. [07 May 2004, p.15]

I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.

While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.

One of the grittiest, least romantic movies ever shot in New York, it's incisively edited by Dede Allen, whose work ranges from The Hustler to Reds.

The result is a rather stagey film whose back projections look quaint, with 3D apparently used to foreground items of furniture, such as table-lamps, giving rise to some eccentric camera-angles. But the set-up is ingenious and the "kill" scene genuinely thrilling. [2013 3D Release]

What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.

The film’s final twist makes the story close with a satisfying click, though there is something a little smooth about it; for me it works against the story’s social-realist credentials and its evident ambitions for something more mysterious and spiritually resonant. Yet there is great pleasure to be had in those fervent, crowd-pleasing lead performances from Montenegro and de Oliveira.

For all its cheesiness, Notting Hill delivers a very great deal of pleasure.

Watched again now, I can respond more strongly to the heartfelt directness and empathy.

No matter how ironic and artificial the script, there's a lovely sadness in the corners of Karina's eyes, which makes many of the films they did together more hers than his.

It is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut which is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness - at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan - which underpins this picture's rich, sensuous style.

It is shot with fluency and energy; the dreamy chapter-heading inserts are striking, the final image is powerful, and of course Watson herself is a triumph.

Blade is an entertainingly macabre and excitingly staged action horror, with a propulsive energy and a prototype “bullet time” sequence one year before the Wachowskis made it famous in The Matrix.

The allegory is framed in fabulously lurid B-movie terms.

Akira’s strangeness is very startling and sometimes bewildering. But there is a thanatonic rapture to its vision of a whole world ending and being reborn as something else.

Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003.

Forrest Gump is Hollywood film-making at its most corn-fed, sucrose-enriched and calorific; you’ll need a sweet tooth for it.

It bends a few facts, and occasionally slips towards satire. But, for the most part, this is a remarkably enjoyable - and commendably fair - biopic of an unforgettable character. They don't make many films, or indeed generals, like this any more.

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release]

As for Williams himself, his wild-man routine is only in evidence in his opening scenes; otherwise he dials it down, perhaps sensing that the way to upstage the loony creatures is to be relatively rational. There is something touchingly innocent in his performance.

This Dracula isn’t from Coppola’s great 70s/80s period, but it has a melodramatic and operatic energy and draws on the look and feel of Hollywood’s pre-Code salaciousness and the silent movie madness of Nosferatu – though the expressionist shadows are blood-red, not black.

There’s no doubt of the rousing urgency and terrific design of this likable movie, and the scene where Atreyu’s beloved horse Artax begins to sink into the swamp is absolutely gripping.

The Goonies has a rich and indomitable air of all-American innocence.

A peculiar, potent film.

The effect of this movie by the Australian director Warwick Thornton is cumulative, subtle, almost stealthy.

Dunham, who pads through much of this extremely well-written, often funny and very touching film in the semi-nude, doesn't give a damn about any of it.

Between the kung fu, the gunplay, a gentle romantic subplot and the extreme gastronomy – there's something for everyone.

The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big goofy outrageous laughs is what it has to offer.

It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret.

It's the successul synthesis of the two – action and emotion – that means this Spider-Man is as enjoyable as it is impressive: Webb's control of mood and texture is near faultless as his film switches from teenage sulks to exhilarating airborne pyrotechnics.

The Hunger Games is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood action blockbuster that is smart, taut and knotty. Ably filleted from the Suzanne Collins bestseller, it's a compelling, lightly satirical tale.

Buckle up; it's quite a ride.

Black's performance is a revelation: foregoing his usual repertoire of jiggling, tics and head-waggling craziness, Black ensures Tiede is a satirical creation of considerable substance. Really impressive.

If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.

Rachel Weisz performs with enormous intelligence and restraint.

Iron Man 3 is smart, funny and spectacular.

Hollywood has been waiting for this movie. Get ready for the year of the Tiger.

He lived until recently in bohemian chaos in one of the "artist apartments" in Carnegie Hall, and cares nothing for money or vanity. That's real class.

In its outrageous way, 21 Jump Street has real laughs.

For the animation studio's debut foray into fairytale, Pixar has delivered a rousing family melodrama.

The Dark Knight Rises may be a hammy, portentous affair but Nolan directs it with aplomb. He takes these cod-heroic, costumed elements and whisks them into a tale of heavy-metal fury, full of pain and toil, surging uphill, across the flyovers, in search of a climax.

A very charming, beautifully wrought, if somehow depthless film - eccentric but heartfelt, and thought through to the tiniest, quirkiest detail in the classic Anderson style.

As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies.

It is effortlessly and unassumingly funny – and terrifically smart.

The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture: it's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories.

Once you commit to the lexicon – to the blunderbusses, the silver, the loops that close and the loops let run – you're in for a breathless ride. It's been a patchy summer for sci-fi, absent of anything that really sticks in the mind. Johnson's deep, distinctive film plays on repeat.

People are unlikely to charge out of the cinema with quite the same level of glee as they did in 2009; but this is certainly an astute, exhilarating concoction.

In a world of compromised adaptations, Dredd is something of a triumph.

The film thrums with an ongoing existential dread. And yet, tellingly, Cuaron's film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.

Webb's film is bold and bright and possesses charm in abundance. It swings into the future and carries the audience with it.

Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.

There is release at the end of this fine film, but no euphoria; just a sense of having come through a period of evil, the memory of whose darkness will never entirely lift.

What makes this such a striking film is how the larger scope works perfectly in tandem with the very specific time and setting.

A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.

This a quasi-war movie set in peacetime; these men are fighting to the death, but not for nation or principle or ideology — or at least, not a conscious ideology: they are caught in larger economic currents.

It hasn’t anything as genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired subversion of Monsters Inc. and the Toy Stories which it certainly resembles at various stages. But it is certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of entertainment, taken at full-throttle.

The film is unafraid of emotion, unafraid of plunging into basic human ideas: the need for trust, and the search for love.

Could Nasheed be the political Prospero to save the island – and the planet? Well, now he is out of power, and the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment. Perhaps his advocacy will help to bring the climate change issue back into political fashion.

This is a fluent, confident and deeply felt movie: unmistakably, if not exactly nakedly, autobiographical.

A captivating examination of criss-crossing relationships permeated by incisive performances.

What results is an immensely detailed overview of Marley's life and times, from the hillside Jamaican shack where he grew up to the snowy Bavarian clinic where he spent his last weeks in a fruitless attempt to cure the cancer that killed him in 1981, aged 36.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

There are scenes of complete brilliance, Walken is better than he's been in years, cute plot loops and grace notes.

Kazan brings to the role a sweet and dignified vulnerability, keeping rigorously to plausible human behaviour.

Frozen hews to real, recognisable plumb-lines and casts a lingering spell.

In the first movie, an injection transformed wimpy Steve Rogers into strapping Captain America; similarly, this sequel gives the flagging comic-book movie an adrenaline shot of relevance. You've got to hand it to them.

An unexpected joy.

As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.

An intelligent and resonant work from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, a movie that yields up its meanings and implications slowly.

The soundtrack's ironic bent might dissuade older viewers (Simple Minds are venerated), but they'd be missing out on one of the best musical comedies since A Mighty Wind. The song's the same, but Pitch Perfect is a great cover version.

Never has grotesque wealth looked so unenviable, or its removal been so entertaining, as in this garishly watchable riches-to-rags documentary.

Just as 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes surpassed expectations, so this sequel delivers on its promise and leaves us wanting more – which we'll almost certainly get.

With a very simple premise, rapper Ice-T – this film's presenter and co-director with Andy Baybutt – has created a very enjoyable and often fascinating movie.

We've rarely seen comedy this smart since Woody Allen and Seinfeld left New York.

You've seen it all before, but lead Richard Gere drenches the proceedings in the old razzle-dazzle.

Follow the film-maker. Let him lead you by the nose. Lanthimos knows exactly where he's going.

The endlessly prolific Takashi Miike returns with this superbly acted revenger's tragedy.

Literary references and symbolism abound in Stoker. You can get tied up trying to figure out who is what. That is the idea. All the clues are there. You just have to look closely.

If only modern American politics were remotely as entertaining.

Part of the appeal of this affecting and powerful drama is that it puts the viewer right in the moment at every stage, using authentic locations and tsunami survivors to hammer home the reality of this tragedy.

It's ambitious enough to aim at polished, intelligent character drama, and pulls it off successfully.

Let's hope Klayman gets to make a sequel.

Dreams of a Life is a painful film, a Christmas film with no feelgood message, but one which I think would in fact have interested Charles Dickens. Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.