Spellbound is also a tale of suspense, and Hitchcock embellishes it with characteristically brilliant twists, like the infinite variety of parallel lines which etch their way through Peck's mind.

There are points when the director allows his voice to ring a little loudly from behind the camera, but the richness and depth of both the photography and the characterisation manage to brush any signs of preachiness and sentimentality from view.

Grand scale or no, this feels like a blockbuster on autopilot more often than not, curiously detached and self-importantly somber even by the director's standards - and without the cerebral heft of his best work.

The grandeur of this movie is off the charts. For a certain kind of old-school film fan, someone who believes in shapely, classical proportions and an epic yarn told over time, it will be the revelation of the year.

A film about the unknowability of grief ends up feeling a little too unknowable itself.

Endgame often pays tribute to itself, which makes it as fascinating as it is self-serious. It taps into a live wire of doomy tragedy and phoenix-like rebirth that comics do so well.

Sweet and fiercely humane, Song’s layered family portrait is decidedly Buddhist: silent when it needs to be and steadfast about approaching inevitable tragedy with care and patience.

In narrative terms, it's mostly an excuse to work in a trio of crooks whose banter may be even better than that of our hero; Mark Strong's disgusted rant about paying off policemen and Liam Cunningham – led musings on Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" are enough to justify the entire movie on their own.

Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.

The result is a film that starts with a bang and ends with a shrug, but keeps us entertained throughout.

Robson tries vainly to give the movie the look of a thriller with lots of shadows and bleak lighting, but Yordan consistently returns it to the field of melodrama by setting his drama in the home - as Bogart and his wife Sterling agonise over his job of exposing the fixed fights - rather than in the boxing ring.

Updated from London 1890 to contemporary California, George Pal's version of the HG Wells novel still works pretty well, thanks to its attractive special effects.

A ravishingly shot slice of teen-ness that eschews narrative altogether in favor of a moody, watchful wistfulness, this mild-mannered debut plays something like "Bestiaire" for contemporary slacker youth.

Nobody made this heart-warming fluff better than MGM.

Because the movie’s on-the-fly style is as scruffy as its protagonists, it’s easy to underestimate the intelligence and artistry it takes to make something so silly.

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.

At times, there is something almost spoofy about this film’s relentless miserableness. Its 30-minute long hallucinatory dream sequence didn’t work for me – it might be that you need a degree in Russian history to make sense of its allegory on the nature of power.

The film must come with several warnings. It’s extremely disturbing at points (there’s a horrific backstreet abortion scene), and the silence itself—actually, the nonspeaking, atmospheric sound takes on a life of its own—is hard work, meaning that you have to let whole swathes of story wash over you. But those same obstacles also give this strange story a deeply original, hallucinatory power.

The Sisters Brothers may be a violent movie but it’s not an especially graphic one; the bad guys are coolly dispatched from a distance and with minimal Peckinpah-ish splatter. The one genuinely stomach-turning moment comes at the hands of a surgeon, not a gunman. Prepare yourself.

The director illuminates how the town's racial and economic dynamics have changed, while simultaneously reflecting on the ethics of nonfiction filmmaking. It's a powerful testament to how far we both have and haven't come.

Instead of showing how prejudice seeps into the private intimacies of daily life, the film turns its attention to the other characters, including Flipper's junkie brother Gator (Jackson), who fuels a subplot evoking the destructive effects of crack on black society. Sadly, this aspect, which allows Lee his most unsettling and impressive scene, seems loosely tacked on to the main thrust of the film.

You can expect Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman-like banter from Robert Kaplow’s finely-tuned screenplay, an expert evocation of the ‘40s.

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

Much like climbing a mountain, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime may occasionally feel arduous, but the emotional release is worth it once you reach the peak.

It has a certain compulsiveness, but as with Dead End (also based on a play by Sidney Kingsley), the main interest lies in the admirable set.

Made the year after 'Bicycle Thieves', this is a less coherent but more exuberant film, with De Sica injecting a stiff dose of fantasy into what could have been another plangent tale of gentleman tramps and shantytown life. [07 Sep 2005]

Marvellous performance from Stanwyck, all snap, crackle and pop as the brassy nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea.

An interesting if poorly constructed and self-contradicting drama, directed with something less than assurance, but given some appeal by the honesty of its performances.