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]

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.