This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

Adams is already a six-time Oscar nominee: it’s very possible that for this, she could finally nab one outright. From out of its sitcom-neat package, Nightbitch unleashes something primeval and wild – thought it might seem cuddly, hot spit flecks its jaws.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

It's as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s an underrated classic.

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

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]

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]

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

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

Fascinating.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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]

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

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]

Body Double isn’t trash, misogynistic or otherwise. It’s unrepentantly trashy – not the kind of film you watch while your parents or kids are in the house, or with your curtains open. But it’s also a complex, provocative suspense thriller that bears comparison with the three immaculate Hitchcock classics – Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window – it gleefully drags through the sludge.

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."