It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.

While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.

This is horror rooted not in misty Carpathian castles, but in recognisable modern life, with the satanists depicted not as outlandish fiends but the sort of everyday folk you might encounter on any urban street.

A promising idea, and yet ultimately too cute: it is a one-to-one allegory, and this much of the film is spent exploring this not very rewarding vein.

Something in its mandarin blankness and balletic vastness, and refusal to trade in the emollient dramatic forms of human interest and human sympathy. Kubrick leaves usual considerations behind with his readiness to imagine a post-human future.

Director Jack Hill went on to make plenty of classic exploitation movies, such as the more marketable Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters, but Spider Baby is him at his trashy, most eccentric best. [15 Jun 2013, p.23]

The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.

Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]

An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.

The sheer tactlessness of its racial confrontation has a forthright quality and a not entirely intentional documentary realism, especially in the scenes shot on location in Sparta, Illinois (standing in for a fictional Mississippi town).

What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.

Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.

Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer’s best Frankenstein sequels. 

Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.

Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years BC will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.

Blow-up is still an absolute must, such is the degree of visual and intellectual excitement of the film.

This 1966 drama ticks most of the right boxes when it comes to entertaining as well as educating.

Woody Allen acquired the rights to a terrible Japanese Bond-style extravaganza, re-edited it and provided an incongruous soundtrack full of New York Jewish gags. The joke wears thin, but there are good laughs along the way. Allen's then-wife Louise Lasser and friend Mickey Knox help out.

No matter how ironic and artificial the script, there's a lovely sadness in the corners of Karina's eyes, which makes many of the films they did together more hers than his.

Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.

This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.

John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.

Caine's star-quality and absolute ease in front of the camera are fully formed.

This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.

Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.

The anti-war sentiment is overplayed, but it's a good gritty war drama for all that. [08 Oct 2005, p.53]

George Seaton's 1964 36 Hours is complete tosh but clever and zestful tosh, and there's not a lot of that about. [13 Apr 1999, p.20]

Not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass...And it has the best villain.

Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.

Zulu is a brilliantly made dramatisation of Rorke's Drift, and it does a fine job of capturing the spirit for which the battle is remembered.

It may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.

Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.

The Evil Of Frankenstein, directed by camera ace Freddie Francis, looks stunning, although much of its budget was clearly spent on the cracking laboratory set. [20 Oct 2007, p.23]

It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.

I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear.

For all of its 113 minutes, Charade presents us with a temporary entry into that brighter place, into the possibility of adventure, the vicarious possession of beauty. Acted by two Europeans in a mythic, dangerous, beguiling Paris, it remains a quintessential Hollywood film.

One of John Wayne's jobbing westerns, a would-be comic transplanting of The Taming Of The Shrew. [08 Aug 2009, p.53]

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.

From a potentially creaky, cliche-filled premise (a gaggle of stereotypes are invited to a spooky old house where all is not as it seems), director Robert Wise leads us on a brilliantly unsettling journey.

8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.

Jolly sequel to the superior The Mouse That Roared, which flaunted a Peter Sellers tour de force. This returns to the little Duchy of Fenwick, where the inhabitants - by virtue of their wine, which makes rocket fuel of a rare vintage - beat the superpowers to the moon. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony.

The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.

Mifune's slob is deceptive, and the film builds slowly to a shattering ending.

The essential Hitchcock movie, the purest and most confident, a brilliant distillation of the themes that had fueled him ever since he sent the lodger creeping to his upstairs room.

I can't help thinking that the most interesting things happen in the precredit sequence - the fraught childhood, Blanche's sinister "accident" - but it's still vivid, barnstorming stuff.

A pioneering glory of the new wave.

DaCosta's musical is one of the most exuberant and purely enjoyable of the lot. Much of this is down to the infectious energy of Robert Preston, reprising his stage role as smooth-talking conman. [12 Nov 2005, p.53]

Although it is often seen as a precursor to the multiple parts played in Dr Strangelove, Sellers' turn here is a reminder of his true potential, soon to be swallowed up by a stream of ever more awful Pink Panther films.

Peckinpah's marvellous elegiac western incorporates the themes of The Wild Bunch - the end of the old west, friendship and betrayal - but is more moving than his blood-soaked epic. That's mainly down to the two stars, leathery veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. [12 Aug 2006, p.53]

This is a noble attempt to shed light on a woman's inner struggle for existence. [02 Jul 2011, p.43]

Another glossy, witty battle-of-the-sexes comedy featuring the squeaky-clean Pillow Talk pairing of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. [28 Jan 2006, p.53]

This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.

Filmed with a luminous brilliance by cinematographer Freddie Francis, The Innocents is the apotheosis of old-school Brit spookiness.

It leaves the facts wounded and strewn haphazardly across the battlefield, but El Cid remains a flat-out terrific movie.

There is one especially lovely moment. At their first meeting, lovestruck Tony asks Maria if her kindness to him is just a joke. She replies: "I have not yet learned to joke that way. Now I never will." This is a real big-screen event.

The movie still looks very good, and you'd need a heart of stone not to love the cat. [Review of re-release]

The film is marred slightly by an over-abrupt ending and the irritating device of speeded-up clocks, but these are minor flaws in a film that has grown in stature over the years.

Corman enhances the narrative with assorted shocks and tinted flashbacks reminiscent of the silent cinema.

The plot is nicked from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, full of guttering candles, bumps in the night, and the kind of little shocks you hate yourself for jumping at. [08 Nov 2008, p.53]

Global warming? Walter Pidgeon's Admiral Nelson has the answer in this lively, colourful sci-fi adventure. [11 Mar 2006, p.53]

It is not free of plot-holes...but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is.

It is a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.

Wacky, bouncy Disney comedy.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

The classy cast is willing enough, but let down by Hugh and Margaret Wilson's stodgy adaptation. [28 Jun 2008, p.53]

A stirring classic.

The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.

It was Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like you.

Ocean's Eleven is devoid of morality other than a dedication to honour among thieves; it's consistently funny in a way that invites appreciative smiles rather than loud laughter; it's exciting without bringing disagreeable sweat to the palms; it's engaging, but never does anything as vulgar as taking us out of ourselves.

The movie, shot in CinemaScope and colour, is punctuated by shocking moments, but is more notable for its claustrophobic, doom-laden, necrophilic atmosphere and elegant camerawork than the kind of fashionable, in-your-face horror that was launched in the same year by Psycho.

Absolutely brilliant.

Private Property’s vicious form of prurience may make some queasy, and is hardly the type of movie that could get made today without great backlash, but there’s definitely more going on here than mere time-capsule curiosity.

Alternately corny and magical, scary and comic, naive and perverse, elegant and clumsy, The Mummy is always stylish and atmospheric, and Cushing and Lee became enduring world stars.

It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.

Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed.

[A] sublime classic.

Otto Preminger's fiercely austere courtroom drama was strong stuff in 1959.

Wild Strawberries, which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.

Over the course of Rio Bravo we are treated to an entertainment masterclass, a high watermark of Hollywood cinema in its heyday.

Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an “o”, or maybe “oh!” The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco’s creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo. [Rerelease]

It's often entertainingly creepy in a twilit world of its own.

Hairy-chested drama aboard a US submarine, cruising dodgy Pacific waters after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Clark Gable is impressive as sole survivor of a sunk sub, given command of another. [06 May 2006, p.53]

Brilliant.

Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.

It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.

This Korean war drama was as taut and gripping as one of [Malden's] performances, containing many of the pros and cons of his acting style, fervent but sometimes overemphatic. [02 Jul 2009]

For those of us who like to immerse ourselves in sense-assaulting love stories, this 1957 Leo McCarey classic is as good as it gets.

Cushing relishes the role of his career as the sociopathic dandy whose passion for science overrides all moral considerations, while Christopher Lee conveys the dire plight of the creature through body language alone.

It must be added that Giant, in spite of its length, seldom seems long – its story is too eventful, its effects too picturesque, and its director too skilful for that even over so long an expanse of time. It may not be a great film but it is certainly an awesome one.

The glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.

A watchable biopic, backed up with excellent historical research.

Wonderful entertainment.

Thematically, The Killing anticipates themes, motifs and incidents to come in Kubrick’s oeuvre, most famously the notion of master plans undone by human fallibility, that are also to be found in the tales of fate and life’s absurdity of by his mentors Lang and Huston.

The second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which Hitchcock made in 1956, is a curious film. Some of it doesn't really work.

The Americans got hold of the much superior Japanese original, Godzilla, and edited into it 20 minutes-worth of Burr, with his vacant and oddly stiff expression, in order to spice things up. Still, without Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, the awesome cinematic hero might have remained a merely regional success, a giant Japanese lizard confined to its own country.

This forthright and watchable picture, with its terrific cast of veteran players such as Jack Warner, Thora Hird and the totemic Sam Kydd, is entirely happy in its own B-movie skin, with the “X” in “Xperiment” gleefully signalling its identity as a pulp shocker.

Impressively made though some of the acting lets it down: Robbie's a real scene-stealer. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

Olivier has made a superbly dramatic film, in which by variations of tempo, by superb acting on the part of the awe-inspiring cast, and by a wonderful knack of indicating the side-shows while maintaining the main theme of Richard's own drama, he has cheated the clock. His long film never, or hardly ever, seems long.

It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.

The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.

This 1950s melodrama – as underscored by Todd Haynes' modern riff, Far from Heaven – offers smart insights into the American class system and carries a powerful emotional clout way beyond the usual limitations of its genre.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes

Very few films or plays can survive the stigma of having an exclamation mark after the title, but Fred Zinnemann's bigscreen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally released in 1955, still has some breezy charm and robust American music, under those vast cloud-dappled skies in Cinemascope.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

Joan Collins is the only person in this film who seems to be enjoying the fact it's a big camp mess.

The 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks. It was, however, laudable in its desire to showcase the talents of African-American performers who were denied opportunities in Hollywood.

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

What's extraordinary, for a film that works on these different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.

This is one of the better films of its kind. [31 Jul 1954, p.3]

The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.

The result is a rather stagey film whose back projections look quaint, with 3D apparently used to foreground items of furniture, such as table-lamps, giving rise to some eccentric camera-angles. But the set-up is ingenious and the "kill" scene genuinely thrilling. [2013 3D Release]

Salt of the Earth has humour, genuine feeling and great sincerity: it's a film about hope.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

A melodramatic tale at heart, but carried off with some wit and flair. [01 Feb 2000, p.24]

I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.

The more you look at it, the more perfect it seems. Hollywood doesn't make films like this now because public taste has changed. But it's doubtful if they could anyway.

Wilder takes the Broadway play, as well as the genteel camaraderie familiar from the British POW films, shakes it all up, makes it tougher, funnier, cruder and subtler.

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.

Hitch would have played it for laughs; this is a little overwrought, but steamy enough. [22 Apr 2006, p.53]

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

As the synopsis suggests, plot is nothing more than an excuse to create a string of humorous set pieces featuring visual gags, snappy one-liners and lively song-and-dance numbers.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.

The most distinctive things about the film are possibly Caron's personae-montage at the beginning, which showcases her virtuoso dance moves, and the final fantasy sequence, which resolves (a little hurriedly) the emotional obstacles to their love. An exotically contrived romance.

It's set on the suitably exotic locale of a Spanish fishing village – shortly before its obliteration by hotel development, you have to assume – and although everyone moves and speaks at about half normal pace, it all works wonderfully well: Gardner, especially, just glows on the screen.

It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their elegant perfection; I've never been able to rid myself of the feeling that, however superbly set up, the aftermath of the heist itself is ever so slightly lacking in tension.

It takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.

Brando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way.

Every second of this noir masterpiece is gripping, and the chemistry between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is utterly thrilling.

Entertainment as wholesome as mom's apple pie. [13 Jan 2007, p.53]

Strangers is full of marvellous set pieces and uses the architecture of Washington to dramatic effect.

Structurally the film is a little shaggy but each time you feel it starting to dip, Stewart (and Harvey) brings it back on track.

If you're not interested in all the backstage tittle-tattle, just settle back and enjoy a film whose script is studded with barbed and quotable bons mots, the finest ever part by suave cad George Sanders and a memorable cameo by Marilyn Monroe as an aspiring starlet (practically everyone was playing variations of themselves).

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain.

An early masterclass in the art of the caper movie, John Huston's 1950 thriller stands up wonderfully well, even if we've got used to far more convoluted scheming by movie robbers in the intervening period

Stage Fright has serious fun with the business of acting, a trade that calls for both the cold, calculating Charlotte and the committed, caring Eve alike to transform into other people. And Hitchcock appreciates the charged atmosphere of an empty theatre, as well as the frisson when the doors are closed, the lights go down and audiences wait expectantly in silence, never knowing quite what will happen next.

It is not a simple film to summarise or describe as a comedy, satire or drama. Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title.

A gritty and restrained account of men at war. [04 Oct 2008, p.53]

It's a superbly crafted film by a cult film-maker and features a virtuoso bank robbery sequence shot in a single take from a camera in the back seat of a car.

Ray's assured debut as director is a brilliant noir combination of love story and crime thriller. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]

If Under Capricorn is not Hitch's crowning glory, it is undeniably his most underrated film.

A noir classic.

Cagney builds a weird tragedy, and there is no more apocalyptic ending than when he and his world blow up to his triumphant cry, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

Tight, claustrophobic direction by Ted Tetzlaff. [12 Apr 1990]

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.

It's a comical sentimental reworking of the journey of the Magi, with John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey Jr as the soft-hearted outlaws. [01 Mar 2008, p.53]

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

It's an authentically bilious look at the world and its morals as Tyrone Power, taking decisive strides from the standard romantic hero roles he had been typecast in, rises from a travelling carnival mind-reading act to a high society shown to be even more corrupt.

Brute Force was the first important assignment of leftwing director Jules Dassin.

It is a wonderfully fluent, engaging story, with beautiful cinematography by Guy Green.

The documentary vividness that Carol Reed brought to the streets of Vienna in The Third Man and London in The Fallen Idol, he here brings to Belfast in this fascinating but imperfect 1947 thriller.

The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.

The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.

Notorious has fascinating echoes of other Hitchcock movies such as Rebecca and Psycho. A must-see or must-see-again.

The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.

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.

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.

Freaks is filled with poignancy; it offers a premonition of eugenics, as well as a provocative comparison with the alienated condition of women and the freakish nature of all showbiz celebrity. It is a work of genius.

This melodrama the director weakens by mistaking postponement of event for suspense. But the film has compensating strength in the star, who photographs more beautifully than before and, though she is acted off the screen by Anna May Wong, shows herself unique in Hollywood by being majestically beautiful.

A classic, not to be missed.

Garbo is deliciously watchable in this fictionalised but nonetheless well-researched biopic.

The deepest appeal of this 74-minute study in insolence is that Cagney is cock of the walk.

An ambitious epic of tremendous sweep and scope, with trench-warfare battle scenes comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory.

The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.

The last silent film by Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, it largely eschewed traditional master shots for a dazzling range of expressive, character-probing close-ups: no historical biopic has ever felt quite so unnervingly intimate.

Hitchcock's 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself.

FW Murnau's classic 1927 silent is one of the first movies with a really substantial feature-length narrative: an exuberant pioneer picture conceived on a big canvas, blazing an inspirational trail for just about everything Hollywood has done since. [06 Feb 2004, p.15]

The Ring is a showcase for the young Hitchcock's editing panache: the experimental, Soviet-influenced montage that would surface so violently in Psycho. [04 Jul 2012]

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

A Woman of Paris is a remarkable film, an historic film, a film to see and consider. But, it is wintry, and not everyone will find it to his liking.

A powerful humane statement and a towering work of art.

It is a bit stagey, but heartfelt and well acted.

[A] thin, slightly exasperating documentary.

This is a diffuse film, and lacks Afterlife's clinching motif. It is uncertain in both its tone and its message - if, indeed, any such message exists, or even needs to.... There is something melancholy and resonant about this film, and it has its own subtle, unsettling effect. [22 Aug 2001, p.12]

It’s a handsome film, but in the end perhaps Wes Anderson’s pastiche approach in The Life Aquatic (in which Bill Murray’s character is a tribute to Cousteau) more vividly brought to life the era of the last great adventurer-superstars.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

Loud and zappy, The Jungle Bunch trots out predictable be-kind-be-brave platitudes, but lacks anything distinctive of its own.

A chilling and utterly brilliant film whose final, excoriating sequence is frankly sufficient on its own to justify the genius tag.

As a film, it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.

It’ll annoy many with its refusal to take a stance beyond the absurdity of it all, but that lack of easy outrage makes it a true original. An important documentary for our times too, taking us deep into the heart of a bubble far from our own.

Worryingly, there is an actual film-maker in the story who appears to be intervening in the action and The Nothing Factory appears to retreat into self-reference when it could be offering concrete ideas on the issue of people keeping their jobs.

It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.

Season of the Devil is the work of a real auteur: every millisecond of his film has been rigorously created. There are moments of dreamlike intensity and the despair of the period is genuinely conveyed. Only the strongest devotee of Diaz could however deny the presence of longueurs in this film.

Mug is a strange, engaging film – well and potently acted and directed, a drama that puts you inside its extended community with a mix of robust realism and a streak of fantasy comedy.

Trapero creates a cinematic eco-system that moment by moment, scene by subtle scene, completely enfolds you.

There are some riveting revelations here.

The film feels more like an authorised biography than a documentary, and for that reason it’s a little dull.