The polar opposite of a date movie, Possession is incredibly well directed and acted (great soundtrack and camerawork too). Neill and Adjani are both at the height of their powers here, free of ego and fearless. She, in particular, has one relentless freakout scene that you'll never forget. We're still no closer to finding a category for it, but it doesn't need one. [27 July 2013, p.23]

There are moments of dramatic licence, but overall The Right Stuff is a terrific historical film about the space race: accurately reflective of a complex reality, beautifully filmed, and done with wit, energy and an impressive sense of balance. Top marks.

On the surface, it is just another action adventure set in a well-known theatre of revolution, with a romance to set beside its thrills. But it contains within it the seeds of a political and personal drama that questions both American policy in Latin America and the exigencies of contemporary reporting. [19 Feb 1984, p.19]

A startling piece of film-making, floating free of the conventional demands of period and narrative.

Do you want to laugh already? Then laugh now, before you see this dispiritingly unfunny pirate movie. Later, it's difficult. Very brief moments only, I'm afraid. [25 Sep 1983, p.19]

This is not a very good effort, seeming tired without being emotional. It looks like the end of the line...Superman III never flies as it should, or only does momentarily. [31 July 1983, p.21]

You could say this is all good gory fun, and The Evil Dead remains a triumph of brains over budget. But in retrospect, you can’t help wondering if Raimi and co didn’t have some women issues to work through?

This is a film that carries you along and there is an added savour in seeing those cherubic faces which have since settled into middle age.

Nothing else comes close to capturing the atmosphere of the early days of hip-hop and spraycan art, of the burned-out and derelict Bronx; the only colour comes from the impressive artwork as b-boys and fly girls dream of making "cash money" while scratching and rapping in kitchens, dingy bars and, in an impressive DIY turn from Double Trouble, on stoops. This isn't old skool, this is pre-school.

With the help of his cinematographers, Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor, Attenborough has produced a very beautiful-looking movie that is maybe a little too seductive for its own good. But Attenborough shows once again his skill in managing the big set-piece.

It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.

More than just an Aussie horse opera, this film employs stunning scenery, technical flair and Kirk Douglas in two roles in its pursuit of an uplifting conclusion.

Like Solaris, his earlier meditation on the future, Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is mysterious and compelling though in my view not, like Andrei Rublev, in the realms of greatness: a vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg.

It's a stylish, entertaining movie, starring Frederic Forrest (a dead ringer for Hammett, bar the height) as a drinking, smoking, coughing and typewriter-bashing writer lured back into detection by an old Pinkerton associate (Peter Boyle) and stumbling into the plot of The Maltese Falcon.

Extraordinary.

The menace of the dark polar night and the claustrophobic confines of the base are utilised to raise the fear, tension and paranoia to unbearable heights. This is a creature that doesn't just hide in the dark, but could be your friend, your colleague, or the girl beside you whose hand you are breaking in a terrified vice-like grip.

It’s still entertaining and charming in its innocent idealism.

Films about film-making are usually deeply self-conscious, and sometimes deceiving. But there is one at least that succeeds in surpassing the movie whose making it describes.

What destinguishes the film is the intensity of the performances, with Steiger giving one of his perhaps over-familiar but still compulsive portrayals of an obstinate man beset by problems which render him almost but not quite paralysed. Those who admired him in The Pawnbroker will do so again in full measure. [27 Jun 1982]

A bold, intelligent, romantic film with all the lineaments of a classic, and a score by Vangelis as instantly hummable as the music for Jaws.

Hoskins’ bullish, black-comic Napoleonism makes this movie: pugnacious, sentimental, a cockney Cagney.

An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie.

One terrific moment in which Pat sees what he believes are the killer's shoes underneath a toilet stall door and berates him while Pamela climbs into the green van outside is reminiscent of another scene that arrived years later and was also labelled "Hitchcockian" – the footsteps down the hallway confrontation in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.

It's a riveting, provocative film that rewards several viewings.

It's an allegory about the Vietnam war, a study of American character and a national propensity for violence. Southern Comfort is a masterpiece.

For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel.

This is one of the finest films about the process of movie-making, a bleak, complex work that gives Travolta his most challenging role.

Enjoyable spoof horror in which a vampire lures a horror writer to a nightclub populated by ghouls and the like. [28 Apr 2000]