An apt title indeed, as the film's extreme violence always explodes from nowhere, with the resulting sparks carrying far and wide. Yet the narrative moves at a contemplative pace, allowing each scene to gently yield its secrets. [26 Jul 1998, p.8]

Everything about Nil By Mouth rings true. [12 Oct 1997, p.10]

That Ho Chi Minh City is as rotten as the old Saigon, only more cynical and decrepit, is no great revelation, and we learn little of how ordinary people live or how society is organised in Vietnam today. [24 Mar 1996, p.12]

The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]

The boldness of this remarkable feature film debut resides in its reticence, and we experience the world through a special sensibility. [03 Apr 1994, p.5]

Walter Hill is the living director closest to the great film-makers of Hollywood's Golden Age such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford and Howard Hawks, and Geronimo is his finest movie to date. Certainly it is his most humane. [16 Oct 1994, p.9]

Farewell My Concubine is an exquisite film, subtle, well acted, deeply moving. It confirms Chen Kaige's position as a major figure on the world scene and Gu Changwei as one of the today's finest cinematographers. [09 Jan 1994]

Independently produced on a small budget and directed by the New York-based Taiwanese moviemaker Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet has the spontaneity, unpredictability and human warmth that are lacking in Sleepless In Seattle and The Fugitive. [26 Sep 1993, p.4]

This is not, by any standard, entertainment. It is, from time to time, almost too agonising to watch: but at least, in its unrelenting, occasionally powerful way, it shows how sex and violence can sometimes, in their capacity for degradation, be brothers under the crawly skin.

Harris has a good ear for teenage dialogue. But her heroine, who addresses us directly through the camera, is a pain in the neck. She is to assertiveness-training what Schwarzenegger is to body-building. [01 Aug 1993, p.48]

This gripping action movie is a cross between The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Treasure Island. [01 May 2011, p.47]

One for the buffs. [17 Feb 2008, p.3]

In the character of Joe, David Morse and Penn have created an authentic hero of everyday life, and in a generally well acted picture, Charles Bronson as the boys' father reveals for the first time in some years his more vulnerable side and demonstrates what a fine actor he is. [01 Dec 1991, p.60]

Skilfully crafted account of the final bombing raid over Germany in 1943 of a Flying Fortress, inspired by William Wyler's wartime documentary of the same title. Produced by David Puttam it avoids the worst cliches and gets affecting performance from its young all-American aircrew. [16 Jan 2005, p.87]

It is a rancid, flaccid affair, both cynical and sentimental. The characters are caricatures and seem to have more to do with Bogdanovich's feelings about Beverly Hills in 1990 than Texas in 1984. [09 Dec 1990, p.52]

Slick tongue-in-cheek thriller giving Rutger Hauer an unusually sympathetic role as a blinded Vietnam veteran who's spent 20 years in the jungle honing his other senses as well as his swordsmanship. [27 Oct 2002, p.9]

It's an accomplished, affecting, relentless work.

Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage are pleasant enough as the father and son who swap roles, but the result is less funny and less stylish than Peter Ustinov's period version of 1947 which starred Roger Livesey and Anthony Newley. [14 Dec 2003, p.8]

Raunchy, honest, non-judgmental comedy about two Yorkshire schoolgirls reacting against the inertia of their sink estate and sharing the favours of a randy estate agent. Adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her Royal Court play, directed by one of this country's great realists, and acted with gusto by Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes and George Costigan. [01 Jan 2006, p.63]

This humourless, portentous, beautifully made and exquisitely acted movie won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, though when the men in white coats came to take Josephson away, some sardonic observers thought they'd come for Tarkovsky. [12 Jan 2003, p.8]

Amusing and well acted. [16 May 2010, p.50]

It's a beautiful, elaborately textured film, by some way Tarkovsky's most difficult, and not to be approached without first consulting some exegetical text. [15 Aug 2004, p.9]

Visually unforgettable and possibly Tarkovsky's finest work.

Third and least good of the quartet of period Agatha Christie movies produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin. [04 Feb 2007, p.2]

Decades on, I found its loopy humour and skew-whiff child’s-eye observations reassuringly in place.

Politically, the film reflects post-Vietnam, post-countercultural blues.

A rather charmless remake of Hitchcock's classic 1938 comedy thriller, adding nothing of value and subtracting everything of significance. [04 Dec 2005, p.119]

Stunning adaptation of Catholic author Flannery O'Connor's novel about religious obsession in America's Bible belt. Brad Dourif is outstanding as an agnostic GI returning to the deep south after the second world war and becoming involved with competing evangelists Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty. [26 Sep 2010, p.59]

The acting by Melvyn Douglas, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn and Barbara Harris (particularly good as Aldas wife) is of a high order, the settings are authentic, but its all a trifle predictable. [30 Jan 2000]

Authentic, if unsurprising, look at the brutal, exploitative, drug-ridden world of top-level American football through the honest, if bleary, eyes of an over-the-hill pro, superbly played by Nick Nolte who attended several colleges on football scholarships. [02 Nov 2003, p.8]

The film is superbly paced, imaginatively designed, consistently suspenseful and never attracts an unintentional laugh. [2003 re-release]

The career of the man who directed The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington could only go up, and it rocketed with this very funny comedy starring George Hamilton as Count Dracula, who's driven out of modern Transylvania by zealous Communist Party officials and heads for corrupt Manhattan, hoping to meet a trendy model he's seen in a fashion magazine. [13 Mar 2005, p.83]

Bogdanovich's best film since his fall from grace in the mid-Seventies, and produced by Roger Corman who gave him his first jobs on low-budget drive-in movies. [18 Aug 2002, p.8]

The Deer Hunter is a rich and powerful picture that without a trace of patronisation or the slightest touch of cultural superiority, speaks eloquently for the inarticulate.

Aldrich is at his most crudely anarchic and macho celebrating the saintly community service and childish off-duty antics of Los Angeles's hard-nosed uniformed cops, starring Charles Durning, Perry King et al. [25 Feb 2007, p.6]

First-rate blockbuster preaching an anti-war message but laying on grand battle sequences as it recreates, coherently and convincingly, Operation Market Garden, the Allied Forces' airborne assault on Arnhem in 1944 that was intended to end the Second World War by Christmas. [19 Nov 2006, p.2]

James Mason as the commanding officer and David Warner as his adjutant are both first rate, as are Coburn and Schell. This was Peckinpah's last important work and his only war movie.

Early, low-budget Cronenberg horror flick, emetic in intention and effect. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

Coarse international thriller with a standard group-jeopardy dramatis personae set abroad a trans-European express train boarded by a plague-carrying terrorist. Saved from total mediocrity by an all-star cast that includes Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Ingrid Thulin, Martin Sheen, OJ Simpson, Richard Harris, and Alida Valli. [28 Oct 2007, p.14]

A generally lacklustre affair. [03 Mar 2013, p.44]

Far from the Rosemary's Baby it wished to be, but nonetheless unsettling at least up to the point that we see the devil's glove-puppet itself. [27 Jun 1999, p.10]

It's a bicentennial companion piece to Nashville, with a fabulous cast that includes Burt Lancaster (superb as dime novelist Ned Buntline), Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey. [22 Jun 1997, p.11]

Matthau is at his curmudgeonly best and Ritchie (at the time considered one of Hollywood's best directors) brings his usual sharp eye for middle-Americana to bear on a script by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt. [24 Oct 2010, p.46]

Charming, elegiac tragicomedy, scripted by playwright James Goldman, about being middle-aged in the Middle Ages. [03 Jan 2010, p.22]

One of the most beautiful of all Stanley Kubrick’s films, originally released in 1975, this slyly savage tale of social climbing in the 18th century is also arguably his funniest.

It’s not just Nicholson’s performance that makes this film a masterpiece; it’s the fact that Forman was able to prevent that performance from capsizing the whole enterprise.

At times T for tedious and P for pretentious, the film remains essential viewing for admirers of the great cineaste and showman.

It is, in effect, a reworking of The Admirable Crichton, JM Barrie's parable about a servant taking command when a hopeless aristocratic family is shipwrecked. Far superior to the disastrous 2002 Guy Ritchie-Madonna remake. [30 Jan 2005, p.13]

Engagingly wry thriller starring Charles Bronson as a Texas adventurer hired by Jill Ireland to spring her innocent husband (Robert Duvall) from a Mexican jail. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

Amiable thriller merging Fabian of the Yard with Dirty Harry. [21 Mar 2004, p.91]

This colourful fable, scripted by William Goldman (who wrote Butch Cassidy and All the President's Men ) deserved far better than the critical drubbing and public rejection that greeted it. [20 Jul 2008, p.18]

Mel Brooks's send-up of 1930s horror movies is a mixed, always amiable affair, beautifully shot in monochrome with loving attention to detail. [12 Nov 2000, p.11]

Yella Rottlander is unforgettable as Alice. [06 Jan 2008, p.16]

This film is flawless.

Great acting, and a superb screenplay by Robert Towne, who re-united with Nicholson the following year on Polanski's Chinatown. [02 Apr 2006, p.10]

Arguably Price's finest single performance, certainly the one that called on all his varied talents as a comedian, aesthete, mellifluous speaker of verse, old-fashioned barnstormer and exponent of horror, is Douglas Hickox's classic black comedy Theatre of Blood, best of a string of horror pictures he made in Britain.

Incoherent, idiotic and exhilarating. [28 Apr 1996, p.16]

Enjoyable traditional western. [26 Apr 2009, p.18]

Adapted from the novel by the poet James Dickey (who plays the small, significant role of a sheriff in the moral coda to the journey), it's a riveting, resonant film, the male rape sequence as shocking as it was 35 years ago. [28 Oct 2007, p.20]

This 1953 classic is one of the cinema's most profound and moving studies of married love, ageing and the relations between parents and children. It is flawless and rewards numerous viewings.

Wittily adapted by William Goldman from a Donald E. Westlake novel, it's the best film Yates made between Bullitt and Breaking Away. [08 Aug 1999, p.10]

Skillfully adapted by prolific TV playwright Jack Pulman from Stevenson's classic adventure yarn. [02 Feb 2003, p.8]

A haunting study of middle-class paranoia scripted by seasoned horror author Richard Matheson, it established Spielberg in Europe as a name to be reckoned with before he'd been heard of in the States. [03 Oct 2004, p.83]

Regular horror ingredients are all mixed up into something truly terrifying. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

Jane Fonda gives what remains the best performance of her career as a confident, self-aware call girl in a riveting thriller by a master of paranoid conspiracy cinema that explores feminism and the darker side of inner-city life. [10 Jun 2012, p.48]

A truly great western.

An exciting tale with a cast that includes Christopher Walken and Martin Balsam, but its real concern is with a dehumanised, paranoid society dominated by electronic surveillance. [09 Oct 2011, p.46]

A confusing, unintentionally funny movie starring Jacqueline Bisset and a young Alan Alda. [23 Jun 2002, p.8]

Three thin but amusing one-act comedies spun around guests at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, adapted with minimum concessions to the cinema by Neil Simon from his own play which ran for three years on Broadway. [20 Nov 2005, p.115]

A self-consciously nostalgic piece, with Oscar-winning music, immaculate detail, and made while soldiers were dying in Vietnam. [05 Aug 2007, p.8]

Highly uneven, painfully drawn-out, deeply sincere, wildly misogynistic and at times agonisingly tedious. It is also intermittently brilliant, with moments of piercing honesty. There is, however, not a single memorable line of dialogue or anything that might pass for wit.

At the very least it’s a fascinating historical document. However, the fly on the wall songbook approach is draggy and repetitive – this remains a flawed and slightly frustrating music documentary. [2024 Restored Version]

Made at the height of the Vietnam war, this remarkable film presents the second world war on an epic scale while painting a warts-and-all portrait of the military genius General George Patton (George C Scott), part mystic, part mad martinet. [28 Sep 2014, p.47]

Pleasing, affectionate adaptation of William Faulkner's last novel. [01 Aug 1999, p.10]

A journey by car that becomes a journey into the inner self, Wild Strawberries played a crucial role in creating what is now thought of as an American genre, the Road Movie. [11 Jun 1995, p.12]

Veteran Hathaway skilfully balances humour and action in a classic western handsomely photographed by Lucien Ballard, one of the great cinematographers, who came to this task immediately after The Wild Bunch. [14 Nov 1999, p.10]

Sharp small-scale western set in a nasty frontier community that finds its incorruptible old-style sheriff (Richard Widmark) a barrier to its joining the 20th century. Widmark is excellent, as is Lena Horne as the handsome saloon-keeper he marries. [17 Apr 2011, p.52]

Grand adventure yarn, based on an Alistair MacLean verbal comic strip about a Cold War race to grab some top secrets from an Arctic weather post. Like the nuclear submarine on which it's mostly set, the film cracks, leaks but finally stands the strain and has weathered well. [03 Feb 2008, p.2]

Yates (hired on the strength of his taut British crime flick Robbery) eschews fashionable camera gimmickry and facile psychiatry, and concentrates on telling a fast-paced story of decent San Francisco cop Steve McQueen doing his job. The set-pieces (the car chase, the airport shoot-out) are famous, but the film lives on through its tone of romantic realism. [23 Jan 2000, p.10]

This semi-documentary account of the terror in the Boston of the early Sixties sparked off by the serial killer Albert de Salvo has a creditable central per-formance from Tony Curtis and an admirable suppor-ting one by Henry Fonda as the chief investigator for the state attorney general. [12 Aug 2007, p.14]

The 1947 Broadway hit (which flopped in the West End) is an uneasy blend of Irish blarney, American whimsy and social satire (directed against Southern racists), but it's handled with freshness and vigour by Francis Coppola in his first job for a Hollywood major. [08 Mar 1988, p.13]

It’s an overpowering experience, awe-inspiringly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, groundbreakingly enhanced by Douglas Trumbull.

Superior social western in which a torpid backwater community and its irresolute part-time sheriff (James Stewart) are redeemed and revivified through a menacing visit by ageing outlaw Henry Fonda's gang. Weathered oldtimers Dean Jagger, Ed Begley, Jack Elam and Jay C Flippen provide authenticity. Excellent photography by William Clothier. [15 May 2005, p.91]

Brilliant study of hero-worship and bloody-minded individualism centering on doomed outsider Paul Newman, jailed on a minor charge, bullied by guards, and winning the respect of fellow convicts on a southern chain gang. Superb cast, unforgettable moments. [29 Nov 2009, p.29]

An intelligent film reflecting the troubled Vietnam era. [21 Jan 2007, p.2]

A landmark in the history of the crime movie, Point Blank's expressive feeling for landscape and architecture anticipates Michael Mann's Heat.

Overall this elegiac, monochrome movie, shot in the snow and mud in wintry landscapes, is a rich masterpiece. [28 Jun 2015]

Attractive comedy-thriller in the Topkapi vein starring Michael Caine, shortly after his international success in Alfie, as an over-ambitious cockney crook in Hong Kong. [30 Apr 2006, p.14]

Good in parts, mainly due to the excellence of Vivien Merchant, Jane Asher, Julia Foster, Shirley Anne Field and Shelley Winters as his various conquests and, in a brief but memorable role, Denholm Elliott as a sad abortionist. [28 Mar 2010, p.57]

Superior western starring John Wayne (just out of hospital and boasting that he had beaten 'the Big C') as an honest gunslinger rallying his wayward brothers (Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, Michael Anderson) to regain the family ranch from a crooked land baron and avenge their mother's death. [30 Jul 2000, p.10]

The movie is brilliantly photographed in black and white by Boris Kaufman (who lit On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men ), but this ambitious work strains for effect in trying to make Steiger's character the focus for half the problems of the twentieth century. [9 July 2000]

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.

The movie defines the violent, complex persona that would make Marvin a star, and he's cast alongside the irresistibly alluring Angie Dickinson.

Marvellous, macabre horror story from Corman's Edgar Allan Poe series. Vincent Price is a diabolical delight, his 12th-century Italian tyrant Prince Prospero a worthy model for Machiavelli. [21 Feb 2004, p.53]

Much of it borders on the inept and the embarrassing, and that goes for the title song sung by Matt Monro, the "singing bus-driver".

As well as being a skilfully developed thriller and a study in moral dilemma, High and Low is a precise and devastating anatomy of postwar Japanese society. [31 Jan 1999, p.11]