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.

A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness.

One of the best movies in the American Film Theatre Collection. [22 Aug 2004, p.12]

An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]

The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.

Playtime offers us an even clearer view of the contrast between Tati’s broad physical comedy as an actor and his superbly cerebral detachment as a director.

The atmosphere and performances are sustained at a terrifying pitch, and the movie ends suddenly, leaving the audience to deal with the ideas and emotions aroused.

This is a jewel of American cinema.

Grand Guignol with nobs on: Vincent Price hams epically as bloodlusting luvvie Edward Lionheart, who with wacky daughter Diana Rigg starts taking gruesome revenge on the critics. One by one he dispatches them in macabre variations on great Shakespearean death scenes. [05 May 2007, p.53]

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie.

The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation.

For all the furious excitement of its river-rafting sequences, and the harshness and humiliation of its explosive central rape scene, Deliverance is an elegiac movie, mourning the rural mountain culture soon to be inundated by a new hydro-electric dam.

Le Samourai is as efficient a piece of cinema as it is darkly romantic.

It's an obvious rip-off of George Romero's superior 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. [12 Apr 2007, p.34]

Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.