It is much better and funnier than the "The Sting" precisely because it allows the two stars to play off each other.

Pakula's debut as a director, two years before making Klute, is one of those rare American films which manage to be gently observational without succumbing to the Europeanism of Mazursky or Cassavetes.

Logan's rotund version of Lerner and Loewe's musical Western may lack actors (Presnell excepted) who can actually sing, but that's compensated for by a solid plot involving a farcical discovery of gold, and the growth of a mining town (No Name City) that develops from amoral shantydom to respectability and a holocaust.

Too often dismissed as modish, it's in fact a mostly very funny, insightful, gently romantic account of well-meaning couples.

The quintessential British caper film of the 1960s, The Italian Job is a flashy, fast romp that chases a team of career criminals throughout one of the biggest international gold heists in history.

A fascinating though not wholly successful fusion of cinéma-vérité and political radicalism.

Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller.

In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah's darkly elegiac vision.

A nicely extravagant tale of horror.

It’s mostly Wayne all the way. He towers over everything in the film – actors, script [from Charles Portis’ novel], even the magnificent Colorado mountains. He rides tall in the saddle in this character role of ‘the fat old man.’

Treasure of the Sierra Madness.

A fringe Siegel Western (he spent two weeks finishing it off). The theme of a law and order marshal who has tamed a frontier town, only to become an embarrassment to the 'civilised' community, is sufficiently interesting for one to wonder what it would have been like if Siegel had done the whole thing.

A landmark American documentary, Salesman captures in vivid detail the bygone era of the door-to-door salesman.

One by one, all the Western clichés are turned upside down and reinvented, with William Bowers' fine script proliferating enough invention and wonderful gags to make one forgive the occasional sag.

From the moment the picture wobbles reluctantly on to the screen, this clearly demonstrates that the Baltimore boy was ahead of his time when it came to punk aesthetics and shock for shock's sake.

Herbie and his plucky stunt drivers steal the show in this agreeable family entertainment.

It may be devoid of significance of any sort, but it is nevertheless passably entertaining, and certainly better viewing than most MacLean adaptations

No masterpiece, but a generally underrated musical all the same.

A monumental hospital soap opera which looks exactly as though Kurosawa had taken a long look at Ben Casey and Dr Kildare, and decided that anything they could do he could do better.

Ken Adam's sets are inventive, but the special effects are shoddy, the songs instantly forgettable, and the leisurely length an exquisite torture.

Reed is craftsman enough to make an efficient family entertainment out of Lionel Bart's musical, but not artist enough to put back any of Dickens' teeth which Bart had so assiduously drawn.

There's such a wide disparity of graphic styles from sequence to sequence. Some of them, though, still look terrific.

Flemyng's direction is efficient if lacking in real flair, but Burnett Guffey's crisp camera-work, the taut plotting, and the generally high standard of the performances make for a pleasing, if undemanding modern noir thriller in the tradition of The Killing and The Asphalt Jungle.

The film that showed Meyer to have the most dynamic editing style in American cinema, and took him from nudie king to national monument via the most outrageous exploitation of bosom buddydom ever.

Curtis gives a careful performance, but can breathe little life into this expurgated cliché.

Terry Southern's dialogue occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude Renoir, look really splendid.

Certainly the best of the latter-day musicals in the tradition of Minnelli and MGM.

Mostly it remains enjoyable for its colour and visual flair. Danilo Donati's costumes are, as usual, breathtaking.

In the aggressive self-confidence, the use of rock music, and the perceptive observation, Scorsese reveals an anthropological feel for street life and the attitudes of male adolescence, particularly how introversion and weakness are reserved for moments with the opposite sex, kept carefully apart from the mainstream of life.

While in no way as powerful as Barbara Loden's Wanda, Newman's film none the less captures the quiet desperation of enforced life in sleepytown America.

More interesting as a way station in Eastwood's career than for anything intrinsic to its lawman/vigilante scenario, this was his first American Western after the spaghettis.

Sorely contrived.

Slick, silly romantic thriller, with Dunaway as an insurance investigator falling for McQueen, the property developer led to commit a bank robbery through boredom. Much obvious 'significance' (the pair playing chess; symbolic, see?), much glossy imagery (courtesy of Haskell Wexler) fashionably fragmented into interminable split-screen nonsense, and little of any real interest.

Much of the movie’s revolutionary impact should be credited to the city itself: The Dakota looms menacingly, every bit the Gothic pile as any Transylvanian vampire’s mansion.

Saks takes Neil Simon's play pretty much as it comes, but with Lemmon and Matthau to watch, and a generous quota of one-liners, who needs direction?

Quite a few very funny moments, but one doesn't laugh so much as admire the ingenuity.

The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained.

It remains as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming.

A typically larky Disney film, heavily over-directed and under-written.

The Bricusse songs (including If I Could Talk to the Animals) have their charms, and the pre-CGI spectacle of some 1,500 live animals often works its magic on very young viewers, but you're mainly left with sympathy for Fleischer and his crew, since the whole thing was evidently a nightmare to shoot.

The film is regarded in some quarters as a marvellous piece of camp.

Good fun sometimes but a little too sketchy, with a plot that is almost as threadbare as the outfit worn by the voluptuous Raquel Welch in her cameo role as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

With all its faults, an engaging oddity.

Classic opening gunfight and first-rate performances from Garner, and from Robards as the tubercular, laconically resigned Doc Holliday. A determinedly old-style Western, made two years before Peckinpah shook things up with The Wild Bunch.

Great knockabout visual gags, mercifully little cutey-poo sentiment, and reasonable songs, including The Bare Necessities. The animation has only the bare necessities, too, and the storyline is weak, but it doesn't seem to matter much.

All in all, a superbly controlled exercise in the malevolent torments of despair.

At times, it feels a touch self-conscious – a box of directorial tricks employed to compensate for an occasional lack of real substance elsewhere.

With its weird landscape of dusty, derelict towns and verdant highways, stunningly shot by Burnett Guffey in muted tones of green and gold, it has the true quality of folk legend.

This is a brisk, well-oiled thriller with blistering performances and a crackling, memorable script.

Aldrich appears to be against everything: anti-military, anti-Establishment, anti-women, anti-religion, anti-culture, anti-life. Overriding such nihilism is the super-crudity of Aldrich's energy and his humour, sufficiently cynical to suggest that the whole thing is a game anyway, a spectacle that demands an audience.

A British Blackboard Jungle that bears no resemblance to school life as we know it.

It's a witty, exciting and deeply moving masterpiece.

The whole project, in fact, with its violence and love interest (Nicholson fighting for the leader's 'momma') is schizophrenic, cutting from psychedelia and group sex to private angst and night-time stompings. Rush said that he found the whole bike phenomenon 'distasteful', and it shows in the uneven treatment.

No masterpiece, but very engaging.

Sprightly dialogue, nice performances.

The cast - Douglas as a frantically visionary senator, Mitchum as the veteran trail scout, Widmark as the leader of the settlers - is fine, and William Clothier's location photography impressive. But the script meanders badly, even taking time off for a bit of teenage romance involving nymphet Sally Field in her film debut, while McLaglen's direction is simply lacklustre.

The abiding memories of Don't Look Back are lack of privacy, dull cliques, stumble-drunkenness, very insecure British artists (Price, Donovan), and Dylan's bored, amused sparring with anyone trying to point him in the direction of Damascus.

Not as stylish as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but a significant step forward from A Fistful of Dollars, with the usual terrific compositions, Morricone score, and taciturn performances, not to mention the ubiquitous flashback disease.

Arid, crowd-pleasing stuff, in which the soul-searchings take place very conveniently on annual holidays in France and in a variety of luxuriously furnished interiors.

Most of all, Chimes at Midnight is gorgeously, heartbreakingly sad, shot through with romantic surrender and the ache of loss.

Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one.

There's a simple story about lovers from different tribes, and Welch grunts beautifully clad only in a few bits of bunny fur, but the real stars are Ray Harryhausen's superbly animated dinosaurs.

Probably the best of the formula motor racing films, though that isn't saying much. Too long, and the bits in-between are the usual soapy off-track drama.

As often with Antonioni, a film riddled with moments of brilliance and scuppered by infuriating pretensions; full of longueurs, it works neither as a portrait of Swinging London, nor as a bona fide thriller.

An agonisingly respectable, sincere film of Robert Bolt's literate play, with Scofield as Sir Thomas More, endorsing the divine right of the Pope over and above his King.

Very much of its time (i.e influenced by Godard, Dick Lester and the whole dropout thing), it now looks archly dated rather than spontaneous. But Coppola's style had healthy roots in the screwball comedies of the '30s, and the glorious performances litter the film with moments to treasure.

Funny, visceral, bloody, no-nonsense entertainment with a touch of class.

If the subject matter is bleak and bitterly serious, the tone throughout is darkly comic, while the precise imagery effortlessly conveys the tension, the claustrophobia, and the madness of the situation.

Brooks could certainly write a line and direct action, but his taut and disillusioned yarn of American mercenaries intruding into the Mexican revolution to "rescue" Cardinale had only a couple of years in critical favour before it was comprehensively eclipsed by Peckinpah's ostensibly similar The Wild Bunch.

On the surface it's a complete delight, with Matthau's relentlessly funny lines taking most of the honours, but underneath lies a disenchantment as bleak as The Apartment: amoral, misogynist characters (in Lemmon's case, literally spineless) racing through ever more futile efforts to outmanoeuvre each other.

Saul Bass' unsettling title sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.

Imbued with a dry, ironic sense of humour, the film is perhaps the director's most perfectly realised, and certainly his most moving.

The film has its moments, but is rendered virtually unwatchable by Furie's mania for weirdly mannered camera angles (you spend half the time peering round, over or under obstacles behind which the action is strategically placed) and enormous, pointless close-ups.

Very nearly a corking sci-fi lark.

More surprisingly, the production work is by and large excellent. Nelson Riddle's musical cues are fun, and the design still looks sleek today - I'd choose Adam West's Batmobile over Michael Keaton's any day.

Hitchcock, seemingly too dour or too uninterested to turn in the title's promise of a Cold War ripping yarn, settles instead for a dissection of the limits of domestic trust.

An engaging, sharply scripted comedy (Elliott Baker, from his own novel), with Connery oddly but not inaptly cast as a poet driven berserk by the frustrations of wage-earning in New York.

Edward Albee's vitriolic stage portrayal of domestic blisslessness translated grainily and effectively to the screen. Taylor gives what is probably her finest performance as the blowsy harridan Martha.

With Brown's wry, sardonic narration and a twangy, guitar-driven instrumental soundtrack by The Sandals playing over the silent footage, Mike and Rob leave their California home to visit Hawaii, Australia, South Africa and other secluded surfing spots in a search for the surfer's holy grail that Brown dubs "The Perfect Wave."

Much flashier than Donen's earlier Charade (also scripted by Peter Stone, alias Pierre Marton) and very sub-Hitchcock.

William Goldman, in his first solo script credit, plays knowing games with the Chandlerish conventions, while director Smight pumps up the pace and tags along with the allusive casting of Bacall. Enjoyable performances throughout.

The Naked Prey inverts many of the conventions of Hollywood films about "the Dark Continent." The warriors are given more character depth than Wilde's protagonist, and the film seems seriously engaged in a debate over whether man is driven by Darwinian brutality or rises above it.

One of Godard's most open and enjoyable films.

Doctor Zhivago has the most irritating soundtrack in the history of cinema and yes, it’s old-fashioned and sappy. But it’s impossible not to swoon. This is a love story to sink your teeth into.

In hindsight, it all looks like a rather tentative Hollywood essay at the race angle, but the actors do mesh together convincingly despite the obvious narrative contrivances, and debut girl Hartman's persuasive account of the everyday travails of the sightless is engrossing without overdoing the self-pity.

This typical - not unentertaining - mid-'60s Disney live-actioner has Hayley's Siamese following a trail of juicy salmon and unwittingly uncovering a kidnap plot.

This recasting of The Servant as a war film, with Courtenay playing the working-class deserter whose helplessness traps the liberal middle-class officer (Bogarde) assigned to defend him at his court-martial, fails precisely because the sexual element in the relationship, so explicit in The Servant, is so repressed.

A vivid character study in the tradition of the not dissimilar The Hustler. Marvellous performances throughout ensure interest.

A brief appearance by The Zombies places the time of the season quite neatly, though London doesn't so much swing as creak eerily.

Sean Connery took a break from Bond to give a sterling performance in this awesomely intense drama set in a North African British army camp, where the favourite punishment for prisoners is to send them clambering up and down a man-made hill in the full heat of the day.

A cheap and efficient comic horror movie, it's funniest when its dialogue and characters' behaviour are at their most non sequitur.

Excruciatingly embarrassing at the time, it now looks grotesquely pretentious and pathetically out of touch with the realities of the life-styles that it purports to represent.

Director Sidney J Furie’s indulgence of the queer manners of an army-based British spy culture remains seductive, as does Caine’s rash character, a mild flirt who is proud of his cooking skills (a superior calls him ‘insubordinate… insolent… a trickster… perhaps with criminal properties…’). More quaint is the film’s dated science.

The performances are universally weak, and Losey's clearly ambivalent attitude towards the demands of the genre ensures that the film is never exciting. But as an ambitious oddity, it exerts not a little fascination.

Marvin is consistently brilliant, but the film is patchy.

An uneasy mixture of European art movie (the Resnais-like flashbacks that punctuate the narrative) and American ciné-vérité (it was shot on the streets of New York), The Pawnbroker never achieves the intensity its subject matter threatens.

Much ado about background authenticity is nullified by the cardboard characters, but the starry cast makes it all relatively painless.

In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which huge metallic pawns are manoeuvred, probing for some fatal weakness but seemingly engaged in some deadly primeval struggle.