It’s a joyous film, full of love and warmth but unafraid to admit that with sticking out your neck comes struggle and sorrow. Truly lovely.

It’s a family adventure that’s the right sort of heartwarming, delivering real human emotion through the medium of a small bear.

It's dazzling and rambling, intimate and sprawling, and it's carried along by an infectious, off-the-cuff jazz score. As soon as it ends, you'll be dying to fly with it again.

Day Lewis' re-creation of writer/painter Christy Brown's condition is so precise, so detailed and so matter-of-fact that it transcends the carping about casting an actor without cerebral palsy. He couldn't have done it better.

From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic.

Most importantly, the film involves us: it draws us into the debate, makes us complicit, demands that we have an opinion, and then upends that same opinion a few minutes later. It's engaging and rousing.

Reiner captures just the right level of physical tension, but for the most part wisely emphasises the mental duels. Terrific.

Everything about this film makes you look with fresh eyes at the familiar.

The film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains.

This hilarious and touching romantic comedy recalls the integrated plotting and sophisticated dialogue of '30s Hollywood. Russell is excellent as overgrown kid Dean; Hawn gives her best performance to date as the hapless heiress turned gutsy wife and mother (the kids aren't just cutely naughty, they're truly obnoxious); and Marshall's faultless timing makes the most of Leslie Dixon's neatly contrived situations and snappy dialogue.

All the performances are impressive, but Gleeson and Voight are especially memorable, lending an almost tragic air of inexorability to Cahill and Kenny's cat-and-mouse games.

The word "personal" is bandied around a lot in film reviews, but it’s hard to think of a work that better fits the description than avant-garde icon Chantal Akerman’s intimate swansong No Home Movie.

The understated performances and reluctance to emphasise plot result in convincing characterisations, to such an extent that the often narcissistic Redford actually allows himself to come across as a dislikeably selfish, arrogant and icy man. And the location skiing sequences, revealing Ritchie's background and interest in documentary styles, are simply astounding, even for those with little interest in the sport.

Nicholson's second film as director, a wonderfully beguiling Western in which he plays a sad sack outlaw (ex-cook to Quantrill's Raiders) snatched from the gallows by Steenburgen's prim spinster (taking advantage of a special ordinance occasioned by man shortage after the Civil War), who weds him and puts him to work mining for gold. Tender, bawdy and funny in its shaggy dog ramifications.

Another episode in Allen's Jewish-neurotic romance with Diane Keaton, this time with Napoleon's invasion of Russia interfering. This allows a string of terrific visual gags using battles, Death the Grim Reaper, swords, grand opera, village idiots, snow, Napoleon and Olga Georges-Picot. As less than half-a-dozen lines are bum, Love and Death is an almost total treat.

The film has moments of humour, but they are integrated into a totally serious structure which isolates the family's countervailing tensions with a scalpel-like penetration. Only in a single character, the failed husband of one of the daughters, does the tone falter towards soap. Otherwise the approach is rock steady and, if the film's surface invites superficial comparisons with Bergman, its real roots lie in the very finest American art.

Gripping...A very convincing nightmare, and if Hackman gives too rounded a performance to approach the omniscient evil of Laughton's original, Patton assumes the mantle as Brice's henchman, while Costner confirms his arrival as a star. Clearly, they can remake 'em like that any more.

Class conflict and small town chauvinism are the subject of Yates' ingenious youth movie, a film which intrigues as much by its portait of working-class America bitterly opposed to the affluent society as by its large measure of lovingly-crafted fantasy.

What sets this apart from most modern horror movies, besides a sparing use of special effects, is Romero's careful development of a credible emotional context for the pyromaniac madness and razor-wielding terror. Romero's is a formidable talent which others can only hope to ape.

Concentrating on familiar rituals - the funeral, the hoe-down, the robbery (a stunning tour de force in slow motion) - Hill pays tribute to such directors as Ford, Hawks and Ray, emphasises the mythic aspects of the Western, and focuses on the subjects of kinship and the land (probably suggested by Scotsman Bill Bryden's screenplay). This last theme is emphasised by Hill's coup of casting real-life brothers as the members of the gang. A beautiful, laconic and unsentimental film.

What really transforms the piece from a rather talky demonstration that a man is innocent until proven guilty, is the consistently taut, sweltering atmosphere, created largely by Boris Kaufman's excellent camerawork. The result, however devoid of action, is a strangely realistic thriller.

The initial stages of this epic movie are somewhat stodgy, but once Attenborough achieves his momentum there's no holding him. The performances are excellent, the crowd scenes astonishing, and the climax truly nerve-wracking. An implacable work of authority and compassion, Cry Freedom is political cinema at its best.

Reiner's splendidly confident, witty teenage variation on It Happened One Night.

The Ben E King theme song and all the imagery of tousled adolescents preening themselves like miniature James Deans rekindle memories of old jeans commercials, but the film is so well-observed and so energetically acted by its young cast that mawkishness is kept at bay.

With Williams giving a virtuoso fast-mumbling performance as the hero, and gags ranging from expertly choreographed slapstick to subtle verbal infelicities (Popeye muttering about 'venerable disease'), it is far too sophisticated to function merely as kids' fodder. Often, watching the actors contorting themselves into non-human shapes, you wonder how on earth Altman did it; equally often, you feel you are watching a wacky masterpiece, the like of which you've never seen before.

Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed.

The spoof-policier series is about non-stop gags, pure and simple, and this third instalment, for all its lax plotting and ludicrous characterisation, remains infinitely more pleasurable than sticking you face in a fan. Indeed, the five minutes of the pre-credits sequence are quite possibly the funniest since the talkies came in. Thereafter, it's hit and miss, but the hits are so frequent and spot-on, you'd have to be dead (and buried) not to find the film painfully hilarious. Inspired, inspirational, gloriously inane.

Romantic humanism may not be fashionable in these cynical cinematic times, but few directors reveal the tragicomic lives of ordinary people with such sensitivity and humour.