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.