Director Bob Clark, fresh (if that's the word) from the juvenile high jinks of Porky's and Porky's II, oversees a rather more family-friendly outing with this charmingly nostalgic, Forties-set comedy in which nine-year-old Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) is very specific - in a believably nine-year-old way - about what he wants for Christmas. [01 Dec 2012, p.36]

The chase sequences with government agents are tame but the film builds to a tense (and witty) conclusion at the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in Colorado Springs.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

The acting, most of it by non-professionals, is at times a little shaky and the sound is patchy. But it's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money. [10 Aug 2007, p.29]

Attenborough's stately film is in every sense of the word an epic and Ben Kingsley is superb as Mahatma Ghandi, aging as he does 50 years during the three-hour film, and transforming from dapper young lawyer to loin-cloth wearing ascetic.

This film about the cult of celebrity in America strikes me as a uniquely intelligent ironic masterpiece – though, witty as it is, it isn’t a comedy, despite what the title and the casting of Jerry Lewis might lead you to expect.

If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen.

Chariots of Fire covers arduous ground — faith, conviction and history (both the making of it and the living up to it) — but it does so with the same courage and sincerity that drives the two young men at its heart.

The terrific close-up showing Harold's look of appalled realisation – and resignation – is unforgettable.

It’s an underrated classic.

Hurt is brilliant as Merrick, projecting in his anguished eyes and mournful body language a humanity past the makeup that embodies so convincingly the pain of Merrick, the original elephant man, whose rare disease was exploited by the people running a Victorian freak show.

Demonstrating that cheesy low-budget sci-fi can sometimes be more fun than the blockbuster variety is this spiffing deep-space pastiche of The Magnificent Seven, written by John Sayles and exec-produced by Roger Corman. [11 Nov 2012, p.47]

The really great thing about Airplane! is that the jokes undercut your expectations so deftly, right down to the sour air traffic controller called Stack. When it's suggested that he turns on the landing lights on the runway, he snaps back: "That's just what they're expecting us to do."

The film also has stunning car chases, choreographed like the dancing in a musical, as the Blues Brothers are pursued throughout Chicago, at one point even tearing through a shopping mall, in their 'Bluesmobile', a retired 1974 Mount Prospect, Illinois Dodge Monaco patrol car.

An impressive and unconventional thriller. [4 Sept 2010]

Werner Herzog's classic vampire movie Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.

It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.

For sheer theatricality, the very thing Weaver thought she was abandoning, Alien is difficult to beat.

A highly entertaining, though undemanding mixture, of sci-fi, romance and comedy, which could hardly have come off at all at any lower artistic level, nor without such a happy choice for the central part as Christopher Reeve.

Any movie that lasts three hours should have a damn good reason for lingering so long. At 182 minutes, Michael Cimino's Vietnam War epic is timed to perfection.

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.