The film has lost some of its allure over the years, but it's still streets and streets ahead of the addled whimsy favoured by latter-day Hollywood.

If plot, script and supporters are below par, the score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields is peerless.

It has enormous charm in its folklorish fancies, and a performance of great gentleness and good humour from Ingram which is never tainted by the mawkish religiosity that creeps in towards the end. What is offensive is the way in which the depths of plangent suffering that inspired the spirituals are totally ignored.

Based loosely on a couple of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories, this thriller may not be one of Hitchcock's best English films, but it is full of startling set pieces and quirky characterisation.

Whale does superbly by this much-loved Kern-Hammerstein musical, abetted by modestly handsome sets and lustrous camerawork from John Mescall.

Marlene's best movie away from Sternberg, it's relaxed, funny and charming.

An exotic and gripping piece of Hollywood mythology, made with all the technical skill and gloss one associates with Irving Thalberg's MGM.

The third Astaire-Rogers movie (not counting Flying Down to Rio) and one of the best, with a superlative Irving Berlin score, and equally superlative Hermes Pan routines which spark a distinct sexual electricity between the pair.

Other English Hitchcocks may be more provocative, but few offer such a ripping good yarn.

An absurd script, without a hint of self-parody, and a nicely equipped set (moving walls, a razor-sharp pendulum that slowly lowers itself on to victims) make for entertaining if undemanding viewing.

Heavy-handed, humourless and patronising.

Whale's most perfectly realised movie, a delight from start to finish.

Vintage Hitchcock, with sheer wit and verve masking an implausible plot.

Fred'n'Ginge fans won't need a nudge, but the uninitiated should start with almost any of their other movies.

More character study than polemic, wonderfully warm and witty in its observation of two women (one black, one white) who not only crash the race barriers in their friendship but successfully go it alone in a man's world, Stahl's version of Fannie Hurst's novel makes fascinating comparison with Sirk's remake.

Having insured Fred's legs for the equivalent of £200,000, RKO producer Pandro S Berman launched the Astaire-Rogers musicals with this extensive revamp of Cole Porter's famous stage show.

What enchants, really, is the relationship between Nick and Nora as they live an eternal cocktail hour, bewailing hangovers that only another little drink will cure, in a marvellous blend of marital familiarity and constant courtship, pixillated fantasy and childlike wonder.

Every line of dialogue is calculated bliss, the chemistry between the leads is magnificent, and the backdrop of Depression-era America allows for a prescient and amusing subplot about how well-heeled urbanites are compelled to misbehave when they have no money in their designer pockets.

Fred and Ginger teamed for the first time as featured artists in the big production number, 'The Carioca': 'I'd like to try this thing just once' says Fred, launching the movies' greatest partnership. Otherwise notable mainly for the non-stop opticals which turn the film into a series of animated postcards.

The film was rushed out to capitalise on its predecessor, with none of the subtext, but the animation is up to scratch, the action and direction efficient, and there is a nice melancholy to Denham’s regret for his previous conduct, which aptly prolongs the mournfulness of the original’s ending.

Most of the blame must rest with McLeod, whose incredibly cackhanded direction piles on the whimsy by the bucket-load and can't come to grips with the absurdity at all.

Surely the definitive version of Louisa May Alcott's novel, sweet, funny, perfectly cast, and exquisitely evocative in its New England period reconstruction.

Genius just about covers it.

The real strengths of the movie are John P Fulton's remarkable special effects (Rains removing his bandages to reveal nothing, footsteps appearing as if by magic in the snow), lending much-needed conviction to the blatant fantasy; and the fact that we never see the scientist without his bandages until the very end of the film.

The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.

By far the best part of the film is its first hour, fast, furious and funny as Cagney sets out to convince his nervous backers that his idea for live prologues to accompany talkies can be made to work.

Allegedly based on the career of Clara Bow (who, like Lola, had a parasitic family and a duplicitous private secretary), Bombshell is a prime example of Jean Harlow at her comic best.

Nary a tear-jerking trick is missed (our family loses one son to the Titanic, the other to World War I), and the strangulation is compounded by the staginess since the film, at Coward's insistence, slavishly followed the Drury Lane production.

If this glorious pile of horror-fantasy hokum has lost none of its power to move, excite and sadden, it is in no small measure due to the remarkable technical achievements of Willis O'Brien's animation work, and the superbly matched score of Max Steiner.

Reviving the musical's fortunes in one fell swoop, Bacon and Busby Berkeley's backstage saga set the benchmark for the putting-on-a-show subgenre not by means of plot (a thin and hackneyed affair about a young understudy finding stardom when she covers for the temperamental diva) but through sassy songs and dialogue and dazzling mise-en-scène.

Lightly brushing at least three separate genres, this good-natured yarn (from a story by Edmund Goulding and Benjamin Glazer) eschews conflict at every turn.

The 'Nashville' of its day, Grand Hotel's reputation has outgrown its actual quality, and it is now interesting only as an example of the portmanteau style: an interwoven group of contrasting stories allowing a bunch of stars to do their most familiar turns.

The Brothers have never been so chaotic or so aggressively funny.

There are occasional flourishes that testify to the director's ingenuity and ability - Expressionist lighting, faces looming over spiral staircases, hats blown off in the wind - and Hitch throws in plenty of knockabout English humour, but the plotting is half-baked and the special effects are so crude that they make the back projection in Marnie look like the last word in verisimilitude.

Its seminal importance in the early gangster movie cycle outweighed only by its still exhilarating brilliance, this Howard Hughes production was the one unflawed classic the tycoon was involved with.

Tod Browning's heartbreaking, empathetic story of circus life is one of the most striking, unforgettable movies ever made.

Von Sternberg, who was forever looking for new kinds of stylisation, said that he intended everything in Shanghai Express to have the rhythm of a train. He clearly meant it: the bizarre stop-go cadences of the dialogue delivery are the most blatantly non-naturalistic element, but the overall design and dramatic pacing are equally extraordinary.

A subversive and psychologically rigorous take on RL Stevenson’s tale of severed souls, ‘Dr Jekyll’ combines gothic horror, aristocratic romance and madcap Freudian psychodrama into a dizzying, exhilirating brew.

Set in WWI France, the film is Garbo's even before she appears on screen to dazzle her willing audience; once there, it becomes impossible to dissociate the legend of the star from the myth of Mata Hari.

It’s pleasantly perverse, but somehow never quite gels. Still, it’s a fascinating keyhole into a central Hitchcockian idea, the notion that the weirdest behavior comes not from criminals, but our friends and neighbors.

A stark, solid, impressively stylish film.

With Monkey Business, their first screen original, the team cast caution to the winds, helped by a perky script and some lunatic sight gags.

Cagney's energy and Wellman's gutsy direction carry the day, counteracting the moralistic sentimentality of the script and indelibly etching the star on the memory as a definitive gangster hero.

Milestone's direction, veering between stagey two-shots and extravagant but purposeless camera movements, doesn't help either.

The movie exemplifies everything that was great and grating about the filmmaker’s artistry: his impeccable physical slapstick (see the boxing match) and his overreliance on embarrassing sentimentality; his intuitive understanding of the medium and frequent displays of the mammoth martyr complex that informed the comedian’s every move.

Not by any means the masterpiece of fond memory or reputation, although the first twenty minutes are astonishingly fluid and brilliantly shot by Karl Freund, despite the intrusive painted backdrops.

Is this not the most Hitchcockian title of all time? Even the exclamation point adds a certain parlor-game fustiness. It’s a pity that the movie’s only so-so.

Saddled with an atrocious boy's own paper plot about a good brother and a bad brother, both in the Flying Corps and clashing over a girl, the end result is barely adequate. But it does feature a spectacularly elaborate World War I dogfight, and an equally fine Zeppelin sequence.

The Marx Brothers' second film and one of their best, satirising the rich at play as they infiltrate a society party and beome involved with a stolen painting.

The film's strength now derives less from its admittedly powerful but highly simplistic utterances about war as waste, than from a generally excellent set of performances (Ayres especially) and an almost total reluctance to follow normal plot structure.

Hitchcock matches the play's compassion for women suffering in the face of feckless men, especially in the film's powerful final shots. [07 Oct 2010]

Its story is accordingly old-hat...but Hitch makes the most of his locations (although the film is set on the Isle of Man, it was shot in Cornwall), while the frequent use of shots taken through windows anticipates the interest in voyeurism in his later work.

It shows its age, what with indistinct sound, fluffed lines, quaint choreography, quainter songs, a stilted supporting cast and positively arthritic direction. But the Brothers' energy and madness is never in question: when the laughs come, they come loud and long.

Vertov’s experimental essay proclaims its ‘complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’ in the opening titles. What follows is cinema in its purest form: movement, sensation, action and visual trickery.

The entire film is less moulded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving.

A spectacular tribute to the American flyers of World War I, born of Wellman's and John Monk Saunders' own experiences with the Lafayette Flying Corps, it's distinguished by matchless aerial photography, logistically-detailed battle scenes and dogfights, a unique blend of 'European' directorial touches with Hollywood pace, and solid performances holding the straightforward love/duty/camaraderie plotline together.

There’s an edge to The Circus that suggests a man gazing deep into the void, laughing at the darkness and urging us to do the same.

Look into Ivor Novello’s haunted, kohl-rimmed eyes in Hitch’s most overtly Hitchcockian silent film – his first of many ‘wrong man’ mysteries – and you can see generations of matinee idols coming full circle.

Though occasional acerbic touches remain, the sections that are drawn directly from the original remain hampered by the loss of Coward's dialogue. But the first half of the film, an addition detailing events only described in the play, is pure Hitchcock, its combination of conciseness and idiosyncrasy demonstrating his mastery of silent narration.

Its dreamlike realism is also to be enjoyed: when lovers appear to walk across a crowded city street, into (superimposed) fields, and back to kiss in a traffic jam, you have an example of True Love styled to cinema perfection. Simple, and intense images of unequalled beauty.

Arguably the finest of Hitchcock's silent films, this tale of a fairground boxer (Brisson) whose wife takes a shine to the far more socially sophisticated new champion (Hunter), sees the young director completely confident in his control of the medium.

Few films rival its ability to capture the danger, drama, uncertainty and energy of civil war or to respond so vitally to the urgent artistic challenges of their times.

Despite its wealth of detail and sharp observations about morality, the film remains curiously insubstantial with its refined dabbling in the elements of satire, sentiment and melodrama exploited with such panache in Chaplin's starring comedies.

The thematic approach no longer works (if it ever did); the title cards are stiffly Victorian and sometimes laughably pedantic; but the visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes.

Making use of locals instead of professional actors lends authenticity to this impressive look at a group of otherwise innocuous teenage lads in a boring northern French town (Bailleul in Flanders), driven to violence by a mixture of boredom, jealousy, macho pride and ingrained racism.

Beautifully shot and acted, it's probably Ray's masterpiece.