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At the very least it’s a fascinating historical document.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]