This illustrious courtroom drama, adapted from an Agatha Christie play, is directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich is also excellent as the accused's wife.

As a drama, Checkpoint is somewhat lacking, but for anyone who appreciates magnificent cars plus various tweed-jacketed Rank contract players saying “Gosh!” it is compulsive viewing.

Few film directors can resist the urge to "open out" a story, to broaden the view and bring in as wide a variety of sets and locations as the narrative - and budget - will allow. The genius of Sidney Lumet's astonishingly powerful 12 Angry Men is that he does exactly the opposite: he takes an already small, claustrophobic space - a jury room - and makes it even more confined.

The idea is an old one - coincidence leading to unjust incrimination - but Hitchcock's docudrama approach here is starkly atypical. [04 Oct 2014, p.36]

Kirk Douglas gives us a manically impressive Vincent van Gogh in this biopic based on Irving Stone's novel, which was inspired by the painter's letters to his brother Theo. Director Vincente Minnelli brings his own palette to bear on van Gogh's artistic struggle and emotional isolation, yet the plot could do with more of a defined structure. [10 Dec 2016, p.32]

Though working on a thin budget from Allied Artists, director Don Siegel managed to create a compelling and violent tale of juvenile delinquency. [05 Jul 2014, p.32]

This extraterrestrial version of The Tempest was in another league. [15 Jul 2017, p.32]

Inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, this is a mournful masterpiece. Shimura's performance is central - he plods around like a gnarled tortoise, his weather-beaten head perpendicular to his body, his expression a downturned rictus of despair. [01 Mar 2014, p.36]

It’s the very open-endedness of the film’s subtext that gives it power. When a sleepy California town is overrun, first by the outbreak of a strange delusion that people have been replaced by doppelgangers, but then gradually by the doppelgangers themselves, the film is brilliantly placed, however unwittingly, to illustrate America’s political paranoia from both ends.

Kon Ichikawa's 1956 epic about Japan's surrender in World War II is a haunting elegy on the theme of defeat, an achievement fully meriting this high-definition transfer, and essential for war-film devotees. [28 Aug 2010, p.7]

Rather dated now of course but absorbing none the less. [01 Jan 2011, p.31]

To borrow the words of the award-winning man of the moment Jean DuJardin (star of The Artist): "It's a simple story – a love story. It's universal. And everyone loves a cute dog."

The plot, directed by Michael Curtiz, is thin but warm-hearted. [22 Dec 2014]

Vincente Minnelli's fantasy musical is completely barmy and not one of his best. The songs are a mixed bag, but it's fun all the same. [11 Sep 2010, p.30]

André De Toth's film noir benefits from lovely LA location work and a strong supporting cast, including a scenery-chewing cameo from Timothy Carey. [10 Dec 2011, p.38]

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

Few Westerns examine the depths of human feeling, but this film by George Stevens is one of them, and it has since become a cinematic landmark. [13 Feb 2020, p.29]

Magnificent melodrama. [11 Feb 2012, p.34]

Still the wittiest of all the MGM musicals of the 1940s and '50s.

Grand, propulsive.

This strange, neglected Technicolor fable, with photography that’s edibly lush even by Jack Cardiff’s standards, wasn’t made by Powell and Pressburger, but feels as if it might have been.

Charles Crichton's classic crime spoof remains one of Ealing Studios' most successful films. [25 May 2013, p.36]

Glorious.

A black comedy, really, based on Patricia Highsmith's source novel - remains a cracking piece of entertainment. It is shot with all his usual invention and style, and a couple of scenes rank among the director's most visually memorable.

Sunset Boulevard, one of the greatest movies about the movies, may be a fiction, but rarely is fiction shot through so glitteringly with real life.

James Stewart is superb as a stubborn frontiersman turned bounty hunter called Lin McAdam, who wins a one-in-a-thousand Winchester repeater rifle in a Dodge City marksmanship contest.

This uneven but fascinating thriller from Alfred Hitchcock is good - how could it be otherwise - but it is not the director's best. [07 Aug 2010, p.31]

Charming seasonal fare. [15 Dec 2012, p.36]

The on-screen chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was so powerful that they ended up making nine movies together, to huge public acclaim. But in no other film did that chemistry produce such delightfully explosive results as Adam's Rib.

It looks amazing, and the complex treatment of the issues marks it out from the shoot-'em-up standards of the time. [29 Jun 2013, p.32]

Despite its great cast, this is certainly not one of Hitchcock's triumphs. [28 Sep 2013, p.40]

Throughout the film the sense of Vienna as a frazzled echo of its glorious past is underpinned by Reed's greatest trouvaille – the discovery of Anton Karas's zither melodies, used as the only musical accompaniment. Half-jaunty, half-melancholic, they epitomise, like the film itself, a world gone sadly to seed.

Director Raoul Walsh does not stint on the melodrama or the almost casual violence, and Cagney duly exits in a blaze of tainted glory. [18 Jun 2013]

A modern-day pilgrimage and profound comment on Englishness. [03 Apr 2021, p.20]

Fans of the genre will enjoy the scene in which Robinson's moll sings Moanin' Low, about a woman trapped in a relationship with a cruel man. [06 Aug 2011, p.30]

This Prohibition-set noir, directed by Byron Haskin, stars Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott, ably supported by Kirk Douglas, in the first of seven films he made with Haskin. Rumrunners Douglas and Lancaster run a thriving racket until one night they approach a police roadblock while carrying a fresh supply of hooch. They double their luck by splitting it up and rip-roaring chase kicks off. [03 Jun 2020, p.31]

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as Powell and Pressburger's tale of repressed desire and simmering passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack Cardiff's cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film. [09 Mar 2020]

They don't come sourer or sexier than Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a pretty much perfect film noir. [26 Jul 2014, p.4]

Very dark and very British, with strong performances all round. [28 Aug 2010, p.30]

The inspirational, thoroughly festive ending is guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes.

In typical noir fashion, the story is related in flashback and there's a femme fatale, played by husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, to lure our hero even further into the danger zone. [30 Jul 2011, p.30]

Among Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's formidable oeuvre, this early romcom stands out for charm and quirkiness. [20 Aug 2020, p.20]

The Big Sleep is the best scripted, best directed, best acted, and least comprehensible film noir ever made. [27 Aug 2004]

A romance that stays memorable precisely because it couldn't go anywhere. Celia Johnson plays the married woman who meets Trevor Howard in a train station and falls in love; David Lean directs with forceful restraint. [24 Jun 2013]

There's not much in the way of plot, but it's a fun musical, blending live action and animation to great effect, as Jerry from Tom and Jerry joins Kelly for a dance sequence. [01 Feb 2014, p.36]

Moving but funny, serious but light of touch, it's a classic. [18 May 2024, p.22]

It has got to be in a list of her best: the sheer freshness of her screen presence as young Velvet Brown who prepares a wild but talented horse for the Grand National turns Clarence Brown’s sentimental adaption of Enid Bagnold’s children’s classic into the one film that everyone who has ever heard of Elizabeth Taylor has probably seen.

Film noir is the most intoxicating of Hollywood cocktails, and none is more potent than Double Indemnity...It breaks the rules of filmmaking with breathtaking confidence and is all the more satisfying for

There's an Oscar-winning performance from Ingrid Bergman, who is driven slowly mad by her husband (Charles Boyer at his smoothest), who's after her dead aunt's jewels. Joseph Cotten plays the urbane detective who smells a rat; Angela Lansbury is excellent as an insolent maid. [06 Jun 2020, p.20]

There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again.

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is one of our greatest war films.

Mark Sandrich's musical, written and scored by Irving Berlin, is a stone-cold festive classic. [07 Dec 2018, p.35]

This psychological thriller is far from Alfred Hitchcock's finest, but it is held together by strong leads. [13 Jun 2015, p.36]

The Maltese Falcon might not have been the first film noir, or even the most stylish, but all the genre elements are smartly in place here: the dark streets, the treacherous female, the monogrammed office door, the breathless smart talk. Bogart saying "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it" should feel like a cliché, but the freshness remains, the thrilling sense that nobody had ever talked like this in a movie before.

Stanwyck, in her absolute prime, is hard to touch - even Katharine Hepburn, or Claudette Colbert, who was originally supposed to play Jean, might have struggled to make her quite such sly and mesmerising company. Sturges feeds her subtle innuendos by the cartload. [19 Mar 2013]

With something to say about the suffocating social mores of the time, it is one of the better-surviving chic-flicks of the Forties. [05 Jan 2013, p.32]

Mercifully, The Philadelphia Story then transmogrifies into one of the smartest, sassiest - and sexiest - movies ever.

This is a bold work that seeks to educate its young audience about classical music. But it is also playful and delightfully imaginative.

It's too cruel to be all that much fun, and lacks the antagonistic zip of the earlier Dunne/Grant divorce romp The Awful Truth. [08 Nov 2003]

John Carradine's mercurial whiskey preacher and Jane Darwell's salt-of-the-earth farmer are sharply etched, and Fonda's quietly authoritative performance has stood the test of time.

Hawks was determined to capture the buzz of a newsroom with overlapping dialogue and rat-a-tat gags; it works marvellously. [30 Oct 2021, p.24]

Overblown and melodramatic, it somehow achieves more than the schmaltz of its parts, thanks to a spirited modern heroine, the spoilt Scarlett O'Hara, and its refusal to give us the neat conclusions you'd expect from a 19th-century saga of "cottonfields and cavaliers."

Daphne du Maurier's rum tale of romance, ripping bodices and roguery was rewritten for this so-so Alfred Hitchcock screen version to accommodate the demands of its star and co-producer Charles Laughton, who felt himself deserving of a grander role than any du Maurier had deigned to write. [30 Mar 2019, p.33]

Few films are more fun to watch than The Wizard of Oz, and few have such a charming message either. [28 Aug 2020]

There have been countless adaptations of Emily Brontë's classic 19th-century romance but none of them captures the spirit of her novel quite like William Wyler's production. [10 Aug 2013, p.32]

Although overshadowed by his later classics Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller is still a masterclass in suspenseful cinema. [14 Sep 2022, p.29]

Alfred Hitchcock is at the height of his skin-prickling powers in this brisk spy story, seasoned with oodles of humour and a dash of kink. [14 Jun 2013]

It Happened One Night is pure delight.

Perhaps the best (and certainly the most realistic and violent) of the great 1930s gangster films, with Paul Muni as an Al Capone surrogate. Directed by Howard Hawks at a flat-out pace, with thrilling shoot-outs and intriguing if depraved characters. [18 Jun 2013]

Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. [14 Jul 2012]

All Quiet on the Western Front remains an essential piece of social history and a heart-wrenching film.

In the hands of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer it becomes a potent saga of battered faith, vicious bullying and personal torment.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]

It is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images really stick.