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]

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.

With great verbal athleticism, the film earns its reputation as one of the fastest-talking comedies ever made.

Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.

This is a sharp, elegant, unsentimental picture in which Stewart plays a character who is often gloomy and downright unsympathetic.

Despite its earnest endorsement of the idea that there's no place like home ... well, frankly there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nothing's like Oz.

It is an eccentric and entertaining movie soap-opera.

Stagecoach remains a tale for our times.

A pleasure.

Bringing Up Baby is very funny. It leaves one in awe at the speed and timing of Grant and Hepburn, as well as their goofy, lopsided humanity...Don't trust the public to recognise a masterpiece.

The humour in My Man Godfrey is madcap, but in the best way.

Vintage screen Dickens with a cutting edge: the French terror is vividly, hauntingly realised, all chaos and guillotine ghouls. [16 Aug 2000, p.23]

Top Hat reflects a transatlantic kind of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that loved PG Wodehouse.

It is witty, daring and exuberant; like his hero, Hitchcock shows himself to be energetic and resourceful in dealing with changes in locale. [11 Apr 2008, p.10]

Bride is a wild ride, even today. It flits between the classical and the gutter, the camp and the serious in a manner that's hard to pin down.

Scintillating partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, here still in supporting roles (to Irene Dunne), gives substance to otherwise flimsy fashion-set musical. [04 Oct 1990]

As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

The Invisible Man boasts a brilliantly chill and confident performance from (an almost entirely unseen) Claude Rains and a gloriously over-the-top supporting turn from Una O'Connor as his inquisitive landlady. Moreover, its tart, acid tone largely honours the spirit of the novel.

The movie is packed with brilliant, logic-chopping dialogue and surreal visual gags that, though familiar and often quoted, come up fresh at each viewing, none funnier than Harpo getting money from a phone as if it were a fruit machine.