Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law.

Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd.

The 1994 film of the play by Alan Bennett is a model of historical accuracy and psychological tact. A triumph.

It is a film of much humanity and very far from smart European pap. But the external brilliance of its making does at times subvert its inner workings, as if its manufacture and its meaning were not quite in perfect harmony.

Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.

In 1994, all the talk was of former video store clerk Tarantino's indifference to traditional culture. That patronised his sophisticated cinephilia, and in fact, twenty years on, the writerly influences of Edward Bunker, Elmore Leonard, and Jim Thompson seem very prominent. Don DeLillo began the '90s by warning that the U.S. is the only country in the world with funny violence. Maybe Pulp Fiction was the kind of thing he had in mind. Unmissable.

Often, the film-maker seems to be on a journey without a destination, perhaps without a script. Occasionally, brilliantly, he goes entirely off the rails.

It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

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

Altogether, this is a dim affair, lacking Hollywood's usual, gooey efforts to convince one of the benefits of family values. [04 Aug 1994, p.T7]

The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.

Bertolucci has recently called himserf "an amateur Buddhist". But he is still very much a professional filmmaker and these two sides of him don't always match up. [08 May 1994, p.27]

Backbeat is a historically plausible take on the relationships between John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchherr, and a thoughtful, engaging film.

This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

The film is in the shape of 32 elegantly constructed sequences and balances [Gould's] music and his personality with rare skill. [14 Feb 1994, p.5]

Of all the American independent movies this year, Ruby In Paradise is one of the strongest because, for all its meandering style, it seems to know exactly what such a life as Ruby's is about. [25 Nov 1993, p.4]

Best of all, though, the film is a reminder of how deliriously odd Les Demoiselles was, with its MGM-style dance routines, kitschy pastels, and Gene Kelly as honoured guest hoofer. [21 May 1993, p.4]

This is a new twist on Home Alone, but not a very convincing one. [01 Apr 1993, p.4]

It’s a strange film in many ways, affectless and directionless, coolly refusing the usual dramatic beats and climactic moments, and as unreflective as MOR rock.

I love all those close-ups of fires blazing when the mood gets frosty. I love the lavish operas they attend, using the glasses to spy on each other. I love Elmer Bernstein's score, its ghostly waltzes and the way it seems to inspire the birds to soar upwards in the final heartbreaking scene in Paris, Wharton's adopted home.

The film is almost totally schematic and this weakens it. What strengthens it is the sheer emotional power of its making.

The stunts are wildly impressive, especially the motorbike riders who sail through the air in a ball of flame, and the gunplay is unique, although I have never found the term “balletic” quite right for something so brutal and quick. It is all so bizarre that you have to enjoy it.

I’ve never been sure exactly how profound this movie is, and it sometimes teeters on the edge of complacency, but it has a trance-inducing strangeness and Swinton is insouciantly magnetic at all times.

Made in America, from 1993, is essentially an extended episode of a lame, cheesy US sitcom from the late 80s/early 90s – more My Two Dads or Perfect Strangers than Frasier or Seinfeld. It's awesome.

There’s an undimmed freshness, warmth and freewheeling energy in this 1992 indie gem, and its director Leslie Harris – whose career since has chiefly involved writing and teaching – deserves a far bigger presence in US film history.

Certainly a film which preserved a decent even-handedness on the matter might have been considerably more intriguing. [17 Jun 1993, p.4]

The result would be hilarious if it weren't for its grisly and often deliberately pointed subject matter. There seems little to do but to laugh or retch. The fact that you may well do both at the same time is probably the film's intention. It has a serious point to make about the media's complicity in violence. But, in making it, it may well defeat its own ends with too many absurdist touches. [14 Jan 1993, p.8]

Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are joined by Caine as a hilarious Scrooge in this irresistibly sweet musical adaptation of Dickens’ festive tale.

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.

The New World is a disaster, moans Queen Isabella. Yes, that's about right.

A young Russell Crowe is spellbinding in this ugly but unforgettable film that remains hard-hitting and shockingly violent more than two decades on.

Few contemporary writers for the stage, TV and cinema have come close to David Mamet for the quality, quantity and variety of their work. Among its peaks, and characteristic of his highly individual ear for American demotic at its most creatively and colourfully obscene, is Glengarry Glen Ross.

Allen's best film for some time. As an examination of middle-aged, middle-class Manhattan mores, in fact, it is well nigh unbeatable. [22 Oct 1992, p.6]

Fire Walk With Me is not just an artistic triumph in its own right, it’s the key to the entire Twin Peaks universe...Lynch’s unsung masterwork.

It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.

The cast is skillfully alert and Schrader's vision is unencumbered either by sentiment or cynicism.

The plot is hardly the point here - the animation is delightful, colourful and detailed and the flying sequences in seaplanes as old-fashioned as this style of animation are exhilarating.

The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.

The man himself would have tried to hoodwink you into thinking he was a decent guy. Bugsy the movie follows suit.

The greatest ever making-of documentary.

The elusiveness of the film is precisely the point: it is as beautiful and mysterious as a poem and its formal elegance and conviction are unarguable. What makes it a must-see, however, is the generous, unselfconscious passion of Jacob's performance as a young woman - two young women - in love.

What actually happens is generally predictable, degenerating into violence as the brothers test each other to the full. But the way the story is expressed is more original, since Penn lingers long enough on his scenes of rural heartland life to get more out of them than would be vouchsafed by your average American family saga. [28 Nov 1991]

Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing.

Dodgy history and dodgier accents, but Kevin Costner's medieval romp still has some magic – and shouldn't be judged on the weakness of its imitators.

The first movie was a real tough act to follow but Yuzna - who produced the first instalment - has a real handle on the necessary sick OTT humour. [18 Oct 2003, p.83]

Reiner’s film, the perfect 90-minuter, is sometimes a little stretched at 107 minutes. Nevertheless it maintains its tension well, plays enough tricks on us so that we don’t ever treat anything quite seriously and Goldman’s script has enough good lines and situations to keep one interested in exactly what is coming next.

An elegant midsummer, end-century night’s dream of a film, with an elusive, gossamer lightness.

Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.

The Killer is quite a spectacle and, incidentally, much more pessimistic than Sirk.

It was not clear to me why Phillip Noyce, the Australian director of the fine Backroads and Newsfront, should want to make this comedy thriller as his first American picture. But possibly his vision was impaired where the script was concerned. [12 Jul 1990]

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.

Ski Patrol is produced by Paul Maslansky, who was responsible for the Police Academy series. Substitute a ski lodge in Utah for the well-known Academy and you have the film in one the kind of baleful adolescent material that would knock the warts straight off Cromwell's face. [14 Jun 1990]

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.

This film is a true story and a brilliant depiction of friendship that manages to be witty, warm, uplifting, and, just when you thought you were safe, utterly heartbreaking. It’s also frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

The film is beautifully shot in saturated colour by Robby Muller, the cinematographer of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and many other remarkable looking films, but has one of those minimalist screenplays that drives one mad since nobody says anything which makes much sense at all. Its direction seems to ask us to look past the characters for significance, while enjoying their offbeat lifestyles. [07 Dec 1989]

There’s a fair bit of posturing and radical chic happening in this movie and it’s sometimes a little glib. But the droll double-act chemistry between Paterson and Swinton is unexpectedly great, especially considering the enigmatically childlike and lovably humourless demeanour that Swinton often projects.

The film clearly nods to old-school Hollywood and Vegas, but it has a sharp edge that keeps it funny and authentically modern, with Steve Kloves's streetwise and sometimes surprisingly elegiac script summing up the seediness and melancholy of 80s glamour.

Campion offsets what could have been a morose drama with an atmosphere that becomes increasingly, and unnervingly, mystical.

The vague ending may be a bit of a cheat; but with its sly asides and unembarrassed absurdities, this Outer Limits-style yarn, directed in suitably plain fashion by the veteran Michael Anderson, manages to be more self-convinced, and more diverting, than a mega-buck offering like The Abyss. [19 Oct 1989]

An impressively faithful and highly effective film, aside from the misjudged [spoiler omitted] ending.

This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making overtly racist gestures: omission or erasure is equally insulting.

If you're determined to make a fun, feelgood movie, a marriage between a manipulative bigamist and a terrified minor that spirals off into alcoholism, violence and ruination may not be the ideal subject matter. Even if the music is really, really good.

How To Get Ahead In Advertising is often an uneasy mixture of satire and parody that plunges past anarchy into the most foursquare polemic imaginable. But at least it has the courage of every one of its convictions and Grant's doughty performance at its centre almost persuades one that he was not a little miscast. [27 Jul 1989]

It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.

It’s Nicole Kidman who steals the show. Forced to endure the brunt of Hughie’s attacks, Rae is both cool and desperate, calculating and vulnerable, with a strange energy that feels young and tender but wise beyond her years.

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

Ken Russell's phallic farce starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi is drearily sexist, accidentally absurd and undeniably a stinker. But its defiant disrespect for plot and taste win me over.

Lance Henriksen's gaunt, anguished features have rarely been put to better use than in this superior horror story...Pumpkinhead would give the Predator nightmares. [23 July 1999]

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

Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

LaLoggia directs with creepy effectiveness.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

The story almost comes off the rails, but Beetlejuice’s charm lies more in the execution. The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy. The living world is no less outlandish, especially with those eye-popping interiors and costumes.

The film never really carries out its implied deconstruction of the all-American family, but Poitier and Phoenix form an enjoyable bond. [23 Jun 2007, p.53]

Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

It's the sort of film you either go along with or fall into a stupor watching. [28 Dec 1989]

With Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm.

A well-meaning film about the white liberal experience in South Africa – but, if you want to know about Steve Biko, look elsewhere.

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

What Pagnol wrote about his book was much more affecting than anything in this cliche-ridden film, full of cardboard characters and pretty views.

Timothy Dalton's monogamous, deadpan 007 brings a more nuanced interpretation to the central character, whose relationships evolve in ways rarely seen in the earlier films.

RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come.

A queasy humour remains, thanks hugely to salt-of-the-earth per-formances that hardly look like acting. [15 Nov 2006, p.33]

This is a ramshackle, exuberant affair, peppered with larger-than-life inhabitants, ludicrous scenes and quotable dialogue that have long since grown worn from frequent use.

A self-assured gem constructed like the bowl of classic ramen the characters strive to cook: a collection of individual parts perfectly arranged.

This 1987 adaptation of John Lahr's biography of rebel playwright Joe Orton still stands up extraordinarily well: mostly because of two outstanding central performances, Gary Oldman as the talented, blase Orton, and Alfred Molina as his thwarted, Hancock-esque murderer Kenneth Halliwell.

Tremendously acted by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb with exactly the right absence of sympathy, although Cox arguably loses his nerve on this score in the film’s dying moments.

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".

Powerful and atmospheric, if oddly structureless, The Mission is a magnificently filmed and strongly political view of the conflict between church, state and capitalism.

For a long time Crocodile Dundee isn't so much a collection of jokes as a stiff-jointed opposites-attract romantic drama goofed up with stereotypes.

Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy.

The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama.

A very uneasy, uncertain shocker, quite unable to digest the mix of horror and black comedy which became a genre-must after the first TCM.

Hard to believe that this barely watchable animated cash-in from the heyday of those Robots In Disguise was the cinematic swansong of Orson Welles. [05 May 2007, p.17]