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.