It's often entertainingly creepy in a twilit world of its own.

Hairy-chested drama aboard a US submarine, cruising dodgy Pacific waters after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Clark Gable is impressive as sole survivor of a sunk sub, given command of another. [06 May 2006, p.53]

Brilliant.

Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.

It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.

This Korean war drama was as taut and gripping as one of [Malden's] performances, containing many of the pros and cons of his acting style, fervent but sometimes overemphatic. [02 Jul 2009]

For those of us who like to immerse ourselves in sense-assaulting love stories, this 1957 Leo McCarey classic is as good as it gets.

Cushing relishes the role of his career as the sociopathic dandy whose passion for science overrides all moral considerations, while Christopher Lee conveys the dire plight of the creature through body language alone.

It must be added that Giant, in spite of its length, seldom seems long – its story is too eventful, its effects too picturesque, and its director too skilful for that even over so long an expanse of time. It may not be a great film but it is certainly an awesome one.

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 watchable biopic, backed up with excellent historical research.

Wonderful entertainment.

Thematically, The Killing anticipates themes, motifs and incidents to come in Kubrick’s oeuvre, most famously the notion of master plans undone by human fallibility, that are also to be found in the tales of fate and life’s absurdity of by his mentors Lang and Huston.

The second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which Hitchcock made in 1956, is a curious film. Some of it doesn't really work.

The Americans got hold of the much superior Japanese original, Godzilla, and edited into it 20 minutes-worth of Burr, with his vacant and oddly stiff expression, in order to spice things up. Still, without Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, the awesome cinematic hero might have remained a merely regional success, a giant Japanese lizard confined to its own country.

This forthright and watchable picture, with its terrific cast of veteran players such as Jack Warner, Thora Hird and the totemic Sam Kydd, is entirely happy in its own B-movie skin, with the “X” in “Xperiment” gleefully signalling its identity as a pulp shocker.

Impressively made though some of the acting lets it down: Robbie's a real scene-stealer. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

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.

It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.

The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.

This 1950s melodrama – as underscored by Todd Haynes' modern riff, Far from Heaven – offers smart insights into the American class system and carries a powerful emotional clout way beyond the usual limitations of its genre.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes

Very few films or plays can survive the stigma of having an exclamation mark after the title, but Fred Zinnemann's bigscreen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally released in 1955, still has some breezy charm and robust American music, under those vast cloud-dappled skies in Cinemascope.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

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

Joan Collins is the only person in this film who seems to be enjoying the fact it's a big camp mess.

The 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks. It was, however, laudable in its desire to showcase the talents of African-American performers who were denied opportunities in Hollywood.

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

What's extraordinary, for a film that works on these different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.

This is one of the better films of its kind. [31 Jul 1954, p.3]

The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.

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]

Salt of the Earth has humour, genuine feeling and great sincerity: it's a film about hope.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

A melodramatic tale at heart, but carried off with some wit and flair. [01 Feb 2000, p.24]

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.

The more you look at it, the more perfect it seems. Hollywood doesn't make films like this now because public taste has changed. But it's doubtful if they could anyway.

Wilder takes the Broadway play, as well as the genteel camaraderie familiar from the British POW films, shakes it all up, makes it tougher, funnier, cruder and subtler.

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.

Hitch would have played it for laughs; this is a little overwrought, but steamy enough. [22 Apr 2006, p.53]

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

As the synopsis suggests, plot is nothing more than an excuse to create a string of humorous set pieces featuring visual gags, snappy one-liners and lively song-and-dance numbers.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

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

The most distinctive things about the film are possibly Caron's personae-montage at the beginning, which showcases her virtuoso dance moves, and the final fantasy sequence, which resolves (a little hurriedly) the emotional obstacles to their love. An exotically contrived romance.

It's set on the suitably exotic locale of a Spanish fishing village – shortly before its obliteration by hotel development, you have to assume – and although everyone moves and speaks at about half normal pace, it all works wonderfully well: Gardner, especially, just glows on the screen.

It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their elegant perfection; I've never been able to rid myself of the feeling that, however superbly set up, the aftermath of the heist itself is ever so slightly lacking in tension.

It takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.

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

Every second of this noir masterpiece is gripping, and the chemistry between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is utterly thrilling.

Entertainment as wholesome as mom's apple pie. [13 Jan 2007, p.53]

Strangers is full of marvellous set pieces and uses the architecture of Washington to dramatic effect.

Structurally the film is a little shaggy but each time you feel it starting to dip, Stewart (and Harvey) brings it back on track.

If you're not interested in all the backstage tittle-tattle, just settle back and enjoy a film whose script is studded with barbed and quotable bons mots, the finest ever part by suave cad George Sanders and a memorable cameo by Marilyn Monroe as an aspiring starlet (practically everyone was playing variations of themselves).

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain.

An early masterclass in the art of the caper movie, John Huston's 1950 thriller stands up wonderfully well, even if we've got used to far more convoluted scheming by movie robbers in the intervening period

Stage Fright has serious fun with the business of acting, a trade that calls for both the cold, calculating Charlotte and the committed, caring Eve alike to transform into other people. And Hitchcock appreciates the charged atmosphere of an empty theatre, as well as the frisson when the doors are closed, the lights go down and audiences wait expectantly in silence, never knowing quite what will happen next.

It is not a simple film to summarise or describe as a comedy, satire or drama. Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title.

A gritty and restrained account of men at war. [04 Oct 2008, p.53]

It's a superbly crafted film by a cult film-maker and features a virtuoso bank robbery sequence shot in a single take from a camera in the back seat of a car.

Ray's assured debut as director is a brilliant noir combination of love story and crime thriller. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]

If Under Capricorn is not Hitch's crowning glory, it is undeniably his most underrated film.

A noir classic.

Cagney builds a weird tragedy, and there is no more apocalyptic ending than when he and his world blow up to his triumphant cry, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

Tight, claustrophobic direction by Ted Tetzlaff. [12 Apr 1990]

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.

It's a comical sentimental reworking of the journey of the Magi, with John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey Jr as the soft-hearted outlaws. [01 Mar 2008, p.53]

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

It's an authentically bilious look at the world and its morals as Tyrone Power, taking decisive strides from the standard romantic hero roles he had been typecast in, rises from a travelling carnival mind-reading act to a high society shown to be even more corrupt.

Brute Force was the first important assignment of leftwing director Jules Dassin.

It is a wonderfully fluent, engaging story, with beautiful cinematography by Guy Green.

The documentary vividness that Carol Reed brought to the streets of Vienna in The Third Man and London in The Fallen Idol, he here brings to Belfast in this fascinating but imperfect 1947 thriller.

The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.

The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.

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

The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.

The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.

With Hitch letting rip on the imagery - including a Dali-designed dream sequence - it's as colourful as black-and-white gets. [07 Aug 2010, p.43]

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

This glorious film is about the greatest mystery of all: how old people were once young, and how young people are in the process of becoming old.

It's a piece of almost instant history – and, as such, it gets the technical and cultural details of military life spot on.

An unmissable big-screen experience.

I love Double Indemnity because it's about a couple who are cheap and greedy, but achieve a kind of tragic heroism; because it has one of the great father-son relationships (although they aren't actually father and son); because it's a thoroughly cynical thriller redeemed by just a fading touch of romance. And it also has a trio of superb performances.

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.

Timeless entertainment. [24 Dec 2005]

This is Welles's warmest, most personal film.

There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.

They Died With Their Boots On is a shameful whitewashing of history. Great battles, though.

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.

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.

Stanwyck supplies a bravura double performance, a showcase for her brilliant versatility.

Kitty is a child of her age, and this melodrama aspires to state-of-the-nation commentary about the limits of the American dream for working-class women, while she cherishes a keepsake snowglobe like a distaff Citizen Kane.

Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.

Fantasia is mashed potatoes and gravy but there's more than a hint of beluga there too.

A breathless yarn with the most serious of intents that soars well beyond mediocrity but just below genius, yet remains a film that I feel should be included on the master of suspense's top table.

Glossy MGM weepie, a tale of loving sacrifice in the first world war to warm the cockles in the dark days of the second. [16 Dec 2006, p.53]