It's as lucid and wryly witty a film as you could wish for, uncluttered by superfluous period detail. A beautiful use of simple techniques - black-and-white photography, Vivaldi music, even devices as outmoded as the iris - give it a very refreshing quality.

Marvellous, toughly eccentric thriller which confirmed that Siegel had more responses to '70s paranoia than a mere Magnum blast, and decisively removed Matthau from the wasteland of Neil Simon wit.

Aided enormously by George Diskant's high contrast camerawork and by Bernard Herrmann's stunning score, which emphasises the hunt motif in Ryan's quest, it's a film of frequent brilliance.

Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.

It's absolutely riveting.

What really lifts this into the stratosphere of heady entertainment is its dizzy wit and intelligence. The dialogue is deliriously deadpan, the story surreal but surprisingly convincing, and the wealth of references to movie and TV classics hilarious rather than mere smartass posing.

There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here, but it hardly matters, given the film's visual splendour and muscular poetry in its celebration of the spirit that vanished with the taming of the American wilderness.

A truly enigmatic thriller and a key film of the '70s, brilliantly scripted by Alan Sharp.

Cassavetes and the two leads keep maudlin sentimentality at bay until the very bitter end, when the film basically 'fesses up that movie-style happy endings are the stuff of pipe dreams. Terrific.

Tragically, desperately funny: this adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel is John Huston's best film for many years.

This return to traditional Disney territory is geared to captivate children while allowing them to maintain their street cred, largely by combining extravagant animated technique with ranging musical styles.

Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which (unlike Bigelow's rather static debut feature The Loveless) is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

An unashamed sense of its own fantasy is coupled with classically mounted slapstick; nostalgia mixes with cynicism in seductive proportions; and John Belushi's central performance as brain-damaged slob-cum-Thief of Baghdad is wonderful.

In a film in which everybody is acting - a point neatly stressed by the stylised staginess of Cukor's direction - the performances (not least from Wayne and Hagen) are matchless.

Glenn Savan's novel offered a stronger exploration of Reaganism and consumerism, but overall he's served well by this intelligent, involving adaptation. There's an unmistakable charge between the two leads, and an acute sense of their mutual confusion. Acting honours go to Sarandon, who brings off a complex depiction of vulgarity, defiance and vulnerability.

A small masterpiece that places the mood and general ethos of the '50s with absolute precision and total affection.

Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.

The film can hardly contain itself with its catalogue of memorable songs, battery of dance routines, and strong supporting cast.

It's a rich, ambitious film, repetitive and voyeuristic in its eroticism, but exhilarating in its blend of documentary and fictional recreation to depict the Soviet invasion.

The original (and best) version of the cockle-warming tale of a man who claims to be the real-life Santa Claus.

The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir, with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of the three beautiful leads.

Jackson's film is distinguished by the intensity of the girls' secretive relationship. If the busy camera movements used to convey the heady exhilaration of their early encounters are irritating, the sense of claustrophobic immersion in private mysteries is palpable. Acted with conviction, and directed and written with febrile vibrancy.

Corman at his intoxicating best, drawing a seductive mesh of sexual motifs from Poe's story through a fine Richard Matheson script.

The twin perspectives yield a film that is both impassioned and elegiac, dynamic in its sense of the social struggle and the moral options, and yet also achingly remote in its fragile beauty. The result is even more remarkable than it sounds.

What makes the film so powerful is both the sympathy it extends towards all the characters (including the seemingly callous parents) and the precise expressionism of Ray's direction. His use of light, space and motion is continually at the service of the characters' emotions, while the trio that Dean, Wood and Mineo form as a refuge from society is explicitly depicted as an 'alternative family'. Still the best of the youth movies.

To be able to give this kind of stuff new and sympathetic twists is a tribute to Hughes' skill with narrative, and to Ringwald's magnetism as a performer.

Appropriately operatic, Chen's visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. Intelligent, enthralling, rhapsodic.

Riveting, exhilarating stuff.