A Bridge Too Far is a fantastic historical and cinematic achievement but, if you're not a die-hard war obsessive, prepare to snooze.

It is, on the other hand, enormous and exhilarating fun for those who are prepared to settle down in their seats and let it all wash over them. Which I firmly believe, with the extra benefit of hindsight, is more or less exactly what the vast majority of the cinema-going public want just now.

Cross of Iron is an atmospheric, unflinching tale of the German retreat, though its sedate pace holds it back from greatness.

A demonic limo, driverless behind its tinted windows, vrooms around killing people in this squashy horror that fails to match other vehicular creepies like Christine and Duel. [24 Sep 1999, p.20]

In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both.

Script and acting are equally shaky. [27 Sep 2008, p.55]

The problem is that Rosenberg's drama all but sinks under the weight of its serious subject matter and ponderous script; and there are too many iffy performances from the big-star cast (Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Orson Welles and all). [04 Feb 2006, p.53]

A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.

The film is immaculately cast...The principal figures in its ideological debate – the chilly, number-crunching executive Robert Duvall, godlike network supremo Ned Beatty and the ambitious, exploitative programmer Faye Dunaway – are vivid caricatures. But the movie runs out of steam as satiric invention turns into fervent, deeply sincere statement, and solid William Holden’s middle-aged producer becomes the representative of old-fashioned integrity.

The film is a deliberate parody of mass communication so it parodies the techniques.

The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps.

On first release, Arthur Penn's 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate.

Despite the twists, turns and exceptionally complex detail of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men manages to make it both comprehensible and watchable – with a few flashy fictional touches to gussy up the facts.

Sean Connery's weary Robin returns from the crusades to confront Robert Shaw's Sheriff Of Nottingham once more, but despite their heroic final duel, it's Connery's scenes with Audrey Hepburn's Marion that make the magic. [03 Jun 2006, p.53]

A film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues.

What a mad and brilliant film it is: 1,000-degree proof Seventies cinema. [30th Anniversary Release]

Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.

Here is the bruised-plum role that put Jack Nicholson into the biggest of big leagues.

Xala means sexual impotence, and the film, culled from his own novel, is a brilliantly funny, ironic satire about post-colonial Senegal. [21 Dec 2000, p.13]

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

A rollicking adventure that mixes Nazis, submarines and dinosaurs cannot be described as anything other than eager to entertain. [27 Jun 2007, p.3]

Elegant neo-noir with a perfectly cast Robert Mitchum, at 58 the oldest actor to play Marlowe.

This is a suspense classic that leaves teeth-marks.

It's a dazzling, emblematic portrait of America in 1975, both trapped in amber yet still vitally alive.

A tale of the losers and chancers rattling around Hollywood's fringe, the film fatally lacks the black humour and nightmarish edge of Nathanael West's source novel. But there are some good elements swarming through the muddle, not least the performances from Karen Black as a lowly starlet and Donald Sutherland as the emotional wreck who falls under her spell.

The material is superb, Neil Innes’ music is tremendous and Gilliam’s animations are timelessly brilliant.

Live and Let Die borrowed from blaxploitation; The Man with the Golden Gun took a couple of kicks at kung fu, though in a distinctly half-hearted fashion.

It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.

A garish cult thriller.

It is an intriguing movie that lives in the mind for hours after the lights have come up.

No other later horror film – and certainly none of the many sequels to this one – captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

There is genuine fear in its nightmarish tableaux: the breast-feeding woman holding an egg in the ruined churchyard is like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch. And that final sequence, with the eponymous Wicker Man, is inspired.

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

The dialogue is crackling ("Are you alone?" – "Isn't everyone?") and the set pieces, like the one in the antisemitic old people's home, are just superb. Polanski brilliantly shows that money and power are not what's motivating everyone after all. There's a lower stratum of sexual dysfunction and fear at work, which is difficult, if not impossible to understand:: the ultimate meaning of the chaotic "Chinatown" of the title. Unmissable.

One for the fans, perhaps, and a vivid Gradiva-esque glimpse of the past.

The Conversation is an immaculate thriller, a study in paranoia and loneliness, long in gestation, partly inspired by Antonioni's Blow-Up, and released as the Watergate scandal was unfolding.

It's a smart, cynical look at space travel, treating it as a blue-collar job and not a divine calling as Kubrick and others would have you believe.

The Exorcist is diabolically inspired: it’s still capable of making you jump and yelp.

The Sting is the most purely enjoyable film in Oscar history – and that, I think, puts it in the most valuable American film-making tradition of all.

A poignant, funny male-bonding tale, adapted by Robert Towne from Darryl Ponicsan's novel. [21 Dec 2013, p.54]

Sutherland and Christie are an overwhelmingly convincing married couple.

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.

A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness.

One of the best movies in the American Film Theatre Collection. [22 Aug 2004, p.12]

An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]

The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.

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.

The atmosphere and performances are sustained at a terrifying pitch, and the movie ends suddenly, leaving the audience to deal with the ideas and emotions aroused.

This is a jewel of American cinema.

Grand Guignol with nobs on: Vincent Price hams epically as bloodlusting luvvie Edward Lionheart, who with wacky daughter Diana Rigg starts taking gruesome revenge on the critics. One by one he dispatches them in macabre variations on great Shakespearean death scenes. [05 May 2007, p.53]

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie.

The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation.

For all the furious excitement of its river-rafting sequences, and the harshness and humiliation of its explosive central rape scene, Deliverance is an elegiac movie, mourning the rural mountain culture soon to be inundated by a new hydro-electric dam.

Le Samourai is as efficient a piece of cinema as it is darkly romantic.

It's an obvious rip-off of George Romero's superior 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. [12 Apr 2007, p.34]

Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.

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.

[Hara's] sad dignity and emotional generosity are compelling.

The screenplay by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (later to collaborate on The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (of subsequent Hill Street Blues fame) delivers its ecological message with humour and imagination, and Joan Baez sings the appropriate songs.

Yates paces the fast-moving thrills with precision. [25 Apr 2009, p.53]

Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.

It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.

Nicholas and Alexandra boasts terrific performances and gorgeous production design, but it's bloated and unwieldy. There is more history here than the film-makers know what to do with.

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.

Thankfully, Zappa was a far better composer than he was a movie director. Whereas the film, with its self-indulgent and incoherent celebrations of drink, drugs and groupies and its tiresomely scatological bent, was largely gale-force gibberish, its sprawling soundtrack, dissonant and atonal but rich in wit and humour, has aged surprisingly well.

Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.

The final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.

There is much to irritate in the film, but it's bold, individual and a landmark in British cinema, with outstanding performances.

Two-Lane Blacktop should have established Hellman as one of the great directors of his generation. Instead, its box-office failure made him an enduring cult figure.

Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.

If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.

A clever caper movie. [08 Oct 2011, p.46]

Offbeat comedy-drama about a former New York judge convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. Amiable, if a little too clever for its own good. [04 Jan 2000, p.36]

Schizophrenic performance from the estimable Walter Matthau, playing the central characters of three Neil Simon stories set in New York's Plaza Hotel. His barely contained rage as the dad who finds his daughter refusing to come out of the bathroom on her wedding day is particularly good, but the jokes are thinly rationed. [19 Nov 2005, p.53]

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

There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.