Peter Sellers, whose multiple role-playing sustained the earlier picture, is sadly missing here as the citizens of Grand Fenwick enter the space race. But a dull script is considerably enlivened by some inventive touches from Richard Lester, directing his first big-budget film, and he went straight on to A Hard Day's Night and The Knack. [15 Jul 2007, p.18]

A minor masterpiece. [05 Nov 1995, p.11]

This frightening, darkly comic picture is much influenced by Sunset Boulevard.

It's a beguiling, slightly indulgent work, featuring a film-within-a-film starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. [28 Nov 2010, p.34]

Robert Preston unforgettably reprises his greatest stage role in this old-fashioned musical that challenged West Side Story on Broadway and proved quite as popular. [13 Nov 2005, p.87]

The leads' subtle, honest performances bring pathos and poignancy to what is probably Peckinpah's most well realised film. [04 Jul 2010, p.52]

The film introduced a crucial theme that was to run right through Truffaut's work: how we cope with death and how we preserve our memories of those who have died. I don't think Jeanne Moreau gave a better performance than as Catherine.

Full of humanity, humour and moments of pathos. [08 Jul 2012, p.45]

Toshiro Mifune is electrifying as an unemployed samurai exploiting two embattled factions in an early nineteenth-century Japanese country town. [05 Nov 2000, p.11]

The action sequences are splendid, it's magnificently staged and photographed, but there's too much pretentious moralising talk. [12 Dec 2010, p.51]

It baffled popular audiences outside Europe, but its insouciant style, amoral attitudes and cultural sophistication made it an influential milestone of post-war cinema. [28 Apr 1996, p.14]

This flimsy movie about an American millionaire caught up with the English aristocracy is performed with considerable style by Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. [29 Jun 2008, p.18]

There are two epic set pieces (a slave revolt and a peasant fire festival), numerous battles (including an extended fight with lances between two samurai) and endless felicitously staged scenes. In his first widescreen picture, Kurosawa revelled in a shape disparaged at the time, and stuck with it thereafter. [24 Mar 2002, p.9]

Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying has superb lyrical photography and a heartbreaking performance by Tatyana Samojlova as a hospital worker who makes a bad marriage after hearing that her fiance has been killed in action. [28 Jan 2007, p.20]

Half-witted British comedy about a dim-witted gang's attempt at a big kidnapping. But it's worth seeing for a gifted cast, headed by Terry- Thomas (the victim's rich, shifty husband), that includes George Cole, Sid James, Bernard Bresslaw and John Le Mesurier. [25 Aug 2002, p.8]

Marketed as a glossy weepie but in fact an outstanding piece of social criticism that goes to the root of postwar American life. [26 Sep 2010, p.56]

A quite brilliant look at the hypocrisy and conformity of small-town life in the Midwest and those who challenge it.

Strong allegorical undertones reflecting the Cold War, then at its height, and an unforgettable score by Jerome Moross. [31 Dec 2006, p.12]

Clever, tongue-in-cheek and far more fun than the hi-tech remake. [05 Jan 2003, p.8]

Strongly scripted and deliciously acted, full of riveting confrontations as the emotionally intense events unfold. Though a feline Elizabeth Taylor overplays her role, Paul Newman is excellent as her brooding husband, but it's Burl Ives as dying patriarch 'Big Daddy' who's the ultimate revelation. [13 Aug 2006, p.10]

Though short on chills and thrills, Hammer Studio's third, handsomely mounted period horror movie confirmed that they'd discovered a formula for hitting the international jackpot. It's therefore a bloody landmark in British movie history. [02 Aug 1999, p.10]

Superb direction from Terence Fisher and a crisp, clean script by Jimmy Sangster are complemented by a rapturous score from James Bernard. [27 Oct 2013, p.6]

It all takes place before America's entry into the Second World War, and the three bids for freedom (the last from a prison train in Canada) are well handled. In his first English-speaking movie Kruger is impressive, though somewhat enigmatic. [26 Feb 2006, p.22]

A highly competent, conventional Second World War movie. [07 May 2006, p.10]

The Tarnished Angels is a polished psychological melodrama, meticulous in its subtle observation, but only the planes involved in the dangerous flying scenes are strictly of the 1930s.

Essentially this is a rip-off of the 1954 nuclear angst horror flick Them!, about mutant insects produced by bomb tests in New Mexico. Richard Denning and Mara Corday star, somewhat dimly. [21 Mar 1999, p.10]

Despite a curiously disjointed narrative and Frankie Laine on the soundtrack, it's well-staged, turning what in real life was a brief skirmish into a mythic confrontation. [29 Jun 2014, p.48]

Low-budget, sci-fi classic, one of the key Hollywood nuclear-angst pictures. [23 Jul 2000, p.10]

Henry Fonda brings an overwhelming sadness to his role as a New York nightclub musician who's almost ruined, and his wife (Vera Miles) driven insane, as the result of his wrongful arrest for armed robbery. An intriguing case of life imitating Hitchcock's art. [02 Nov 1997, p.9]

Polished melodrama of considerable psychological and social subtlety. [03 Feb 2013, p.43]

Gregory Peck's dignified Ahab is, like his leg, somewhat wooden, but the cast is splendid (not least Orson Welles's guest spot as Father Mapple), and Oswald Morris's experimental colour photography (based on old whaling prints) is commendable. [29 May 2005, p.79]

Inspired by the suspect career of a prewar Italian boxer, it's rather good, but inferior to the novel by Budd Schulberg, the expert on the fight game and Oscar-winner for On the Waterfront. [04 Jan 2009, p.06]

A minor classic. [02 Apr 2000, p.10]

The narrative is carefully paced, the central performance magnificent, the final effect overwhelming in a manner that recalls the great Russian writers Kurosawa admired.

A sharply observed indictment of 1950s country club conformity. [07 Jul 2013, p.45]

It's a skillful blending of the folksy and the sophisticated, shot almost entirely on location. With evergreen songs, delightful choreography by Agnes De Mille, and charming performances from Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae as the romantic leads, Charlotte Greenwood, and Gloria Grahame as the girl who can't say no. [22 Dec 2013, p.40]

An engaging comedy thriller, one of the Master's rare straightforward whodunnits, producing real cinematic chemistry between Grace Kelly (her third and last Hitchcock film) and Cary Grant (his third and penultimate Hitchcock picture). [19 Oct 2014, p.48]

Unforgettably haunting images (a car submerged in a watery grave; a spider's web view of the children fleeing in a riverboat to the strains of Pretty Fly; a silhouetted angel of death) make this a perennially unsettling masterpiece from which modern chillers could learn much.

Uneven, oddly distinguished attempt to examine the pyramid-building obsession of the Pharaoh (Jack Hawkins) and how it was affected by his second wife (Joan Collins) and his architect (James Robertson Justice). Some excellent sets by the great Alexander Trauner, much turgid dialogue and a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. [11 Jun 2006, p.18]

It's creaky sentimental stuff, redolent of the Eisenhower era, but the songs are (mostly) excellent, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney are delightful. [14 Dec 2008, p.17]

Pretentious, highly entertaining melodrama about the international movie business, giving Ava Gardner an iconic role as a wayward actress who takes a dangerous step too far when she marries an impotent Italian aristocrat (Rossano Brazzi). [01 Oct 2006, p.14]

Less magnificent than the Ambersons or the Seven perhaps, but a minor classic nonetheless. [26 Mar 2006, p.14]

It moves fast and is superbly silly. [01 Aug 1954, p.6]

A well-acted, soft-centred example of pre-rock rebelliousness with one of Brando's finest performances, it features the celebrated exchange between local lawman's daughter Mary Murphy and Brando: "What are you rebelling against?" - "What have you got?" [31 Aug 2014, p.48]

An excellent 1954 John Wayne Western, in which he plays a cavalry scout with Indian sympathies fighting Apaches in New Mexico.

Boisterous fun, with Day’s performance – as the song goes – as busy as a fizzy sarsaparilla.

Clark Gable, 21 years older, repeats his role as an expatriate adventurer; Ava Gardner's brunette temptress looks great but is an inadequate replacement for Jean Harlow's wisecracking blonde broad; Grace Kelly is the frigid upper-class visitor (a role originally played by Mary Astor). John Lee Mahin wrote both but did a better job first time around. [26 May 2010, p.51]

An effective, superficial film, much inferior to All the Kings Men, which was also based on Louisianas governor Huey Long. [30 Jan 2000]

[An] expertly wrought movie.

An exciting, frightening movie, and a landmark of the genre, it stands up surprisingly well. [16 Jul 2006, p.20]

Shane is a beautiful, deceptively simple movie that takes on different meanings for each generation. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

Best of a series of lavishly mounted MGM historical yarns made in England in the early 1950s with American stars and British supporting casts. [03 Jun 2012, p.46]

This gripping thriller, an early film noir in colour, features the Niagara Falls thundering grandly in the background and Marilyn Monroe wiggling sexily in the foreground as a treacherous wife whose scheme to murder her middle-aged husband (Joseph Cotten) goes fatally wrong. [27 Sep 2009, p.29]

An immaculately cast and acted film that paints a warts-and-all portrait of Hollywood at its zenith. [22 Apr 2012, p.24]

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby milk a familiar formula for all its worth in their penultimate 'Road' movie (the only one in colour) which takes them on a wise-cracking journey to the South Seas where Dorothy Lamour is inevitably on hand as an Indonesian princess to be rescued and fought over. [13 Oct 2002, p.8]

It's a verbose, technically creaky work, both sentimental and self-indulgent, and never very funny except for a brilliant scene with Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a disaster-prone musical duo. However, there are sublime, deeply affecting moments and for those who think Chaplin one of the key figures of 20th-century popular culture, it is a crucial movie.

A triumph of true sentiment over lurking sentimentality starring John Wayne as an Irish-American boxer returning to Ireland in search of peace and a wife (Maureen O'Hara) and finding himself in the middle of a brawling, drinking, singing, timeless Oirish Neverland. [03 Oct 2010, p.47]

This undervalued comic masterpiece, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, would be a fine film even if it didn't try to be funny, which it so successfully does. [06 May 2007, p.64]

This sublimely orchestrated marvel takes fantasy film-making to a new level, looking back to the dramatic choreography of silent cinema and forward to the colourful ecstasies of Ken Russell.

Carefully restored Powell and Pressburger minor masterpiece in glowing Technicolor, doing more than justice to Mary Webb's melodramatic sub-Hardy novel of late Victorian Shropshire. [05 Aug 2001, p.9]

A long, marvellously vulgar tribute to the circus world, the penultimate movie by the septuagenarian veteran, that brought him a sentimental 'best picture' Oscar after 40 years in the business. [05 Feb 2006, p.2]

Long, well-mounted early Christian epic based on the novel by 1905 Nobel prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz about eager Christian martyrs and hungry lions in ancient Rome. [03 Aug 2014, p.45]

A noir classic by the distinguished team of producer John Houseman and director Nicholas Ray. [06 Jan 2013, p.43]

Engaging, occasionally downbeat monochrome biopic of pop-composer Gus Kahn (Danny Thomas) and his devoted wife (Doris Day) who stood beside him through his affairs, the Wall Street Crash and his subsequent breakdown. [15 Dec 2002, p.8]

The Gershwin songs are magnificent, and the climactic ballet a tour de force that won the great Hungarian-born cameraman John Alton an Oscar.

Inventive, economic, masterly.

This elegant, imperishable romantic comedy is lighter in tone than the play and has a haunting score by Oscar Strauss (no kin to the waltz family).

Wise achieved fame and riches with West Side Story and The Sound of Music, but he's most highly regarded for his splendid genre movies like this sci-fi classic, one of his numerous minor masterpieces.

Conventional, highly efficient patriotic war drama, made during the Korean War but set in the Pacific during the Second World War. John Wayne as a martinet US Marine Crops squadron leader is confronted by Robert Ryan as a compassionate second-in-command, and the flying sequences are as outstanding as one might expect from a movie produced by ace aviator Howard Hughes. [08 Dec 2002, p.8]

Delightful period musical set in a small town on the eve of America's entry into World War Two. [09 Apr 2006, p.14]

Still the best, most penetrating picture about Hollywood, its surface charm, its underlying cruelty, its lack of interest in its own history, its ruthless disregard for failure. The casting is perfect. [16 Mar 2003, p.7]

Attractively staged, it is one of numerous versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure and is most notable for an unforgettable, over-the-top performance by Robert Newton as an eye-rolling Long John Silver. [7 May 2006, p.2]

Dan Duryea (manic outlaw) and Shelley Winters (pioneer wife) are excellent, as is the photography by William Daniels. [22 Jul 2012, p.43]

A sweet-natured romantic movie. [15 Dec 2002, p.8]

Inspired by the story of Bonnie and Clyde, superbly performed by Granger, O'Donnell and (as the evil gang leader) Howard De Silva. The opening scene shot from a helicopter was revolutionary in its day. [01 Jun 2014]

This, you feel, is really a story with roots in the nation, not just a fiction snatched out of the busy air. [16 Apr 1950, p.6]

A critical and box-office disaster that the Master himself dismissed. It is in fact a fascinating film, and was revered in France by Truffaut and others as Les amants du capricorne. [02 Apr 2006, p.10]

This underrated picture opens with a superbly staged bank robbery, is strikingly shot in Death Valley, and is dedicated to the great Harry Carey, who starred in Ford's 1919 version of this story and died in 1947 after appearing in Red River. [22 Aug 2004, p.63]

Historically important Hollywood expose of the grim conditions in America's mental institutions and an influential plea for more sympathetic treatment of the mentally sick. Olivia de Havilland is harrowingly good as a deranged, incarcerated middle-class housewife; British actor Leo Genn is convincing if a trifle glib as a pipe-smoking shrink. [18 Jul 1999, p.10]

It's a landmark film that brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career.

Both a landmark and some sort of masterpiece.

Amusing first screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who went on to script On the Town and Singin' in the Rain). The evergreen numbers include 'The Best Things in Life Are Free' which, in a romantic, slightly camp sequence, is sung first by a very young Mel Torme, then (in French) by Peter Lawford. [09 Jan 2000, p.10]

In the fifth and funniest of the Road movies, Hope and Crosby play third-rate vaudevillians rescuing heiress Dorothy Lamour from her wicked aunt (the incomparable Gale Sondergaard) in Latin America. [09 Apr 2000, p.10]

Kathleen Byron is unforgettable as a sister who goes dangerously off the rails. A beautifully designed movie with Oscar-winning colour photography by Jack Cardiff. [27 Apr 2014, p.48]

The script is dense, subtly shaped, and bristles with stylised, often witty hard-boiled dialogue and voice-over narration, eg: 'I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoke.'

Tyrone Power is outstanding in the most demanding role of his career as a con man who emerges from the fairground world to exploit the credulous rich as a mind-reader and descends to depths he's never dreamed of as a pre-avian flu carnival 'geek', biting off the heads of live chickens in exchange for alcohol. [04 Dec 2005, p.14]

One of the best acted, most technically accomplished movies ever made in Britain with a great cast of British and Irish actors, though at times a trifle self-conscious in achieving its effects. [29 Aug 2010, p.50]

Director Cromwell lays on the expressionist style of tilted cameras, graphic shadows and sinister silhouettes with some relish. [31 Jul 2011, p.47]

An enduring minor masterpiece with an amazing climax featuring a boat caught in a treacherous whirlpool. [05 Feb 2012, p.45]

Bogart and Bacall's exchanges are wittily playful, and the only femme fatale is a minor though crucial figure who destroys that perennial noir fall-guy, Elisha Cook Jr. But it's unmissable, irresistible.

Overshadowed at the time and ever since by the similar but altogether bigger The Best Years of Our Lives (which the same studio, RKO, released a couple of months later), this is a very decent contribution to a cycle of movies about ex-servicemen adjusting to civilian life. [29 Aug 2004, p.71]

More film gris than film noir, it offers a biting moral conundrum at every turn. [17 Oct 2010, p.4]

Beautifully photographed in black and white by Commander Joseph August, this moving picture has images and sequences that show Ford at his poetic and humanistic best. [13 Aug 2006, p.20]

Trail-blazing tale of murder at an American mental hospital that helped make the sympathetic Freudian shrink a Hollywood standby. [24 Aug 2011, p.56]

A great actress at her sado-masochistic best in a noir melodrama worthy of her talents. [28 Mar 2001, p.9]

Arguably the finest British film made during the second world war.

Although this is a wartime flagwaver and Flynn pulls out a grenade pin with his teeth, it is still a thoughtful and gritty depiction of platoon life and jungle warfare that uses actual combat footage shot by the US army signal corps. [07 Jul 2013, p.43]

A children's classic and among the best family movies of all time. [19 Feb 2006, p.2]