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.