It's loud-mouthed, colourful fun. [18 Apr 2020, p.21]

It's the stuff modern romantic dramas have turned into cliche, but that here feel anthropological and fascinating. [21 May 2018]

William Devane's performance – as Major Charles Rane, a former POW who sees his family get killed by hoodlums – remains magnetic: stoic and unhinged.

Samuel Peckinpah drank four bottles of whisky a day while filming his only war movie, but clearly it did nothing to diminish the power of his last masterpiece, related from the viewpoint of a German platoon retreating from the Russian front in 1943. [05 Apr 2014, p.33]

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

Pumping Iron offers a revealing record of his [Schwarzenegger] earliest dalliances in the spotlight.

Brian De Palma's flamboyant directing might seem callous were it not balanced by Sissy Spacek's heart-rending performance as the mousy adolescent who wreaks telekinetic vengeance when she's humiliated by bitchy classmates. [10 Dec 2011, p.39]

Writer-director Alan Parker's utterly delightful, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the gangster genre.

The Shootist is a fitting memorial to a great star – and leaves his image indelibly fixed on our imagination.

Much scarier than fellow possessed child flick The Exorcist, which predated it by three years, The Omen contains some of the most memorable untimely deaths in cinema history.

Packed to the rafters with musical numbers, this cheerful documentary features moments from films such as Gone with the Wind, Meet Me in St Louis, and Singin' in the Rain - a fun watch, even though it was not as commercially successful as Part I. [01 Nov 2014, p.32]

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.

Thirty-nine years on, it’s as vivacious as ever.

The terror, panic and small town politics are all brilliantly done but this is also a film about bravery and friendship and the scenes in which the trio bond as they sit out at sea waiting to fight death itself are moving and witty.

One of the rawest, toughest, most emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever put on screen.

Polanski honed the screenplay, turning the picture into one of the towering achievements of 1970s cinema.

There are fine performances from Donald Pleasence and Delphine Seyrig, but the film fails to build real suspense. [26 May 2015, p.32]

Fifty-three years on it looks utterly magnificent, a glorious record of a group at the height of their powers that will delight every old rocker and should be required viewing for every aspiring young musician.

Finally, a scary fillum that you genuinely, genuinely should watch. It's part werewolf, part Agatha Christie, part blaxploitation. [31 Oct 2013]

In an age when films such as Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are revered for their trickery, The Sting remains the definitive con artist comedy: as irresistible and ingenious as the scheme that hooks in Doyle.

With a dearth of psychoanalysis, the jazzy pace barely lets up, but the result - essentially an Allen stand-up show that just happens to be set in the middle of a fascistic, architecturally stunning future society - is no less seminal for its slapstick ebullience: a lesson that the pursuits of making art and making a complete idiot out of yourself are not mutually exclusive.

A courageous and gritty police exposé. [11 Oct 2014, p.37]

A gothic horror story and revenge thriller, it’s one of the darkest Westerns going. As much a ghost story as anything else, it stars Eastwood as a gunslinging cowboy paid handsomely to protect an idyllic Californian mining town from bandits.

American Graffiti is more a collection of vignettes than a straight forward movie, and the quality of the different plots is a bit hit and miss. But American Graffiti's appeal has less to do with plot and more to do with seeing the USA of the early 1960s faithfully recreated in celluloid, and Lucas gets every detail right. From the diner waitresses on skates to the hokey-sounding slang to the sock hop line dances to the gorgeous soundtrack (which is a aural treasure trove of late 50s and early 60s pop), Lucas doesn't put a foot wrong.

As much a meditation on weariness and ageing as it is an unsentimental thriller, the film stands up today, particularly Mitchum's performance. [01 Aug 2020, p.20]

Jacques Tati's plot-free masterpiece is a long way from the crowd-pleasing comedy of Mr Hulot's Holiday, but patient viewers will be rewarded by a mesmerising symphony of sight gags and social observation. [24 Aug 2010, p.34]

The effective use of the split-screen creates a splintered sense of reality and piles on the tension. [04 Jul 2015, p.33]

It's bawdy, sexy, gory, schlocky, and rollicks along at a cracking pace. [28 Feb 2014]

This is one of very few westerns that casts African-Americans in the lead roles. [27 Jun 2015, p.32]

Ozu may have made subtler films, but the clarity of his social critique here is wrenching and unassailable.

Featuring a particularly strong central performance and great effects, the film has had an enormous influence on many subsequent sci-fi films.

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal spar beautifully in Peter Bogdanovich's homage to screwball comedies of the Thirties. [11 Feb 2017, p.32]

Laid-back caper movie, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel and directed with the lightest of touches by the perennially underrated Peter Yates. There's lovely footage of early 1970s New York and Quincy Jones provides the ultra-cool soundtrack. [09 Jul 2011, p.30]

Mawkishness is kept at bay by the lightness of touch in Ashby's direction and Gordon and Cort's wonderful performances. Only the most miserable cynic could resist its unique charm and ultimate hopefulness.

What's clearer about Duel now is its rawness and bleakness as a picture of American life and troubled American little-man masculinity. [19 Mar 2005]

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars, but the work of Eileen Brennan and Timothy Bottoms is even more cherishable.

While the film has a deadly end, Lawman exchanges the typical good vs. evil narrative of Western films for one of moral ambiguity and humanity, and ultimately presents the question of whether murder can ever be justified.

The pitch to the studio was "Romeo and Juliet on junk": fair enough, but it crackles with life, and this is a tremendous rediscovery.

Beautifully done, I think, with a completely appropriate and consistent style.

Reflecting the mood of Nixon's America, the film plays on the anxieties of surveillance. [27 Oct 2012, p.36]

Effectively the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup with a Cuban spin. It looks cheap, which is funny in itself, and satire and spoofery are crammed in until it bulges at the seams.

There are no good guys in this quietly gripping adaptation of Ted Lewis's 1969 novel Jack's Return Home, but cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky brings out the stark beauty of the North-East while capturing their attempts to kill each other. [09 Mar 2020]

Vanishing Point is a fantastic chase film, which despite its heavy-handed symbolism, is an absolute must for any movie lover – whether you're a petrol head or not.

Portraying an instantly recognisable reality with a raw, utterly uncompromising intensity.

I admire its courage and the always welcome presence of Harry Andrews (as Earnshaw), Judy Cornwell (as Nellie), Pamela Browne, Rosalie Crutchley. But I can't forgive its dullness. I don't have to believe in Wuthering Heights, I simply ask to be transported by it. [13 Jun 1971, p.14]

Billy Wilder's endearing film, ostensibly a parody, is seen by many as an important influence on the BBC's Sherlock series. [02 Dec 2017, p.32]

It’s the women who steal the film, collectively recalling Grey Gardens (1975) in their distinctive, damaged mannerisms.

It holds up as terrifically fresh and constantly enjoyable, thanks to the collision of two social milieus that American cinema rarely puts side by side.

Time has been kind to Lindsay-Hogg’s film. I felt like I was viewing the period through a fresh perspective, perhaps simply because his editing style and choices (made contemporaneously, without benefit of hindsight or a deeply nostalgic agenda) felt quite radically different to Jackson’s. [2024 Restored Version]

Franklin J Schaffner's superb war epic charts US General George S Patton's role in the Second World War. [06 Jun 2015, p.32]

Hunt, who served as editor on the first three Connery films, gives Lazenby’s fist fights a whipcrack intensity and the ski-jumping, stock car-racing, bobsled-sliding finale is one of the series’ best.

It's hard to imagine now just how astonishing it was to interrupt the action with a sun-lit frolic on a new-fangled bicycle as the whimsical Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head burbles away in the background.

It's pretty standard fare, but it's always uplifting to watch Spitfires stick it to the Stukas. [25 May 2019, p.32]

As the Mini Coopers rock from side to side along a sewage tunnel, with £4 million in gold bullion in their boots and Quincy Jones's infectious score swinging away in the background, ask yourself this: is there a film - certainly a British film - that delivers a greater infusion of pure joy than The Italian Job?

John Wayne gives an imposing and vivid performance. [07 Nov 2014, p.37]

The film that made Steve McQueen a superstar and revolutionised the car chase with its 10-minute split-screen, edge-of-your-seat race up and down the hills of San Francisco. [12 Jan 2017]

What makes the film so charming is the comic interplay between Matthau and Lemmon.

Late in James Stewart's career he made this sturdy western, the beauty of which lies in its simplicity. [09 Jul 2016, p.32]

It takes about three minutes – roughly the length of time it takes Hoffman to get down the moving walkway to Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and from the airport to the suffocating atmosphere of his graduation party, where he gets gradually trapped into a relationship with one of his parents' friends – to realise that The Graduate is actually a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one.

Grand Prix is possibly the greatest motor racing film of all time.

There's gambling, shootouts, shady characters and a bombastic score - what more could you ask for? [02 Mar 2016]

It's directed by Michael Anderson (of The Dam Busters fame) with steely panache, and the clammy terror of the mission is well evoked. [11 Sep 2021, p.24]

Director John Frankenheimer pitches French resistance member Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) against German Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) in this Second World War art-theft adventure that knocks spots off of George Clooney's modern misfire The Monuments Men (2014). [31 Jan 2021, p.31]

As for Andrews, she is just a joy, conveying enough doubt beneath that brisk, clean exterior to stop her character becoming a prig; her comic timing and the way in which she convinces in her relationships with the children are so understated they can be underrated.

Seen through the eyes of the soldiers, it is a rare film that humanises the Japanese "enemy". [27 Aug 2016]

It holds the attention of the audience from brazen start to fantastic finish – well, not quite to the silly end, perhaps, but then we can’t have everything.

A peachy-perfect example of what a movie musical should be.

Van Dyke's energy is prodigious (especially when he leaps around with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops) and the songs are classics.

Elke Sommer is good as the devious maid Maria Gambrelli but it is Sellers who steals the show as the inept detective fumbling and bumbling his way around solving murder mysteries.

It may not be truthful – but, my God, the result is thrilling.

It lampoons a crazed warmongering machismo that never goes out of style.

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

It is rubbish, and whereas Taylor’s playing can sometimes redeem utter nonsense, it doesn’t quite manage it here.

This adaptation of Leonard Wibberley's novel, and sequel to The Mouse That Roared satirises the space war, Cold War and politics to varied effect. [07 Dec 2013, p.40]

John Ford's Second World War film is a morality play that is both sentimental and comical. [02 Nov 2013, p.40]

The true genius of the film, based on a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier, is the way Hitchcock makes the malevolent birds seem like manifestations of his characters' mental unease.

As Mulligan so deftly demonstrates, the story is in the characters, their failings and fragility, their heroism and nobility of spirit. It's in the depiction of heart-breaking cruelty and heart-warming humanity. It's in the innocence of a child's world overshadowed by the evil that adults do.

The ultimate camp-Gothic bitchfight. Vastly entertaining.

Agnes Varda's exquisite New Wave masterpiece, about an hour and a half in the life of a gorgeous, possibly dying chanteuse. [30 Apr 2010, p.31]

The action is underpinned by the men's nostalgic reminiscences and regretful ruminations. A masterclass in unobtrusive film-making. [17 Mar 2014, p.29]

The diversity of the human elements - the wonderful accumulation of interlinked characters and situations in Nakamura's family, daughters, ex-mistresses, business associates, sisters, brothers - builds impassively to a harrowing, unusually bleak climax in which death claims its due and the consolation offered is disturbingly minimal, tenderly as we feel for those bereaved. [20 Mar 2004]

Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography needs the biggest screen it can get; when the movie’s firing on all cylinders of music, lyrics and motion (twice: “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”) there’s little to touch it.

Watching this film as a child, the piercing image of Medina's wife Elizabeth's (Barbara Steele) wide eyes in the iron maiden stayed with me for years.

The construction has a mocking fatalism that might have felt oppressive, but Malle and his actors keep you constantly on the edge of your seat, wondering what curse will befall the desperate lovebirds next.

What a multiple swansong and beautiful accident The Misfits is.

It's hugely overblown, and tones down the novel's force, but is carried along by skilful direction from Otto Preminger and a magnificent score by Ernest Gold. [15 May 2010, p.31]

It's hard to conceive of a sword-and-sandals epic with greater sweep or grandeur than Spartacus...For majestic, mind-blowing sequences, you're spoilt for choice.

Hitchcock's mischievous genius for audience manipulation is everywhere: in the noirish angularity of the cinematography, in his use of Bernard Herrmann's stabbing string score, in the ornithological imagery that creates a bizarre sense of preying and being preyed upon.

Gory, hammy fun. [16 Oct 2010, p.30]

This Ireland-set fantasy adventure, starring Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro as a father and daughter vying with a local clan of leprechauns is benign and deeply genial stuff. [25 Mar 2020]

Wilder’s intoxicating script, co-written with IAL Diamond, flows like finest brandy, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine shine as two essentially good souls trapped in a tangle of office politics.

Although it is a spectacle film, the story of how a man takes on the tyranny of the Romans, with all sorts of horrible consequences to himself and his family, is powerful and gripping.

There’s a superabundance of sparkling, often marvellously terse one-liners (when asked what the “O” stands for, Thornhill’s resigned and emotionally relevant answer is, “Nothing”) – and, my, how wittily Grant delivers them.

Hepburn's sensitive and eloquent performance makes it one of her finest films. [03 Dec 2016]

It's a great idea, and the supporting cast (including Sid James) is terrific, especially during the sight gags. It's very funny indeed. [22 May 2010, p.31]