A haunting, nightmarish vision.

This is a remarkable, piercing film, and central to an understanding of Ozu's work.

Tokyo Twilight' - [Ozu's] last black-and-white movie - takes him into unusually melodramatic territory, a dark disintegrating family saga that has broken marriages, unwanted pregnancy, gambling, prostitution, vice cops and so on. What's amazing, however, is that Ozu's narrative and visual ellipses keep sensationalism, hysteria and cliche at bay, so that it all rings true in ways undreamt of by most other directors. [10 May 2006, p.86]

This is a great movie, an austere masterpiece, with Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract killer who lives by a personal code of bushido.

A fairly obvious story, perhaps, but one that is helped enormously both by Ritchie's reluctance to move away from simulated realism into melodramatic plotting, and by his customary generosity, clear-eyed and unsentimental, towards his characters.

A series of variations on themes of excess, surplus and waste from the most fastidious of directors.

Superior formula stuff, injected with a rare degree of life by enthusiastic direction that occasionally tries for virtuosity and succeeds, and by a neat performance from Hershey that avoids the yawning traps in the script (built-in sex sequences, the she-loved-her-man theme in general).

Some moments of Gothic atmosphere though, don't quite dispel the feeling that much of the plot is devoted to developing situations where its leading ladies might be disrobed for the camera.

As so often with this director's work, the film is craftsmanlike rather than brilliant, but the performances, Robert Surtees' lush camerawork, and Mulligan's solid psychological insights make for thoughtful, sometimes even chilling, entertainment.

A flawed but immensely appealing film adapted in part from Vardis Fisher's Mountain Man, a superb historical novel which explores the myth and the reality of the tough trappers who roamed the unconquered West in the 1850s.

Allen's neurosis is not to everyone's taste, but this movie - based on his own stage play about a film critic with seduction problems who takes Bogart as a role model - shows him at his best, exploring the gap between movie escapism and reality.

It is pleasant enough, but somehow - despite excellent performances by Poitier (the intrepid wagonmaster) and Belafonte (a roguish preacher) - it never quite clicks.

Despite some ingenious effects, a generally trivial exercise that never matches the punch of the original.

Waters raids de Sade in pursuit of extremes, but the difference between him and Warhol (or that other arch-exponent of extreme disgust, Otto Muehl) is that Waters' grotesquerie is decidedly trivial.

Occasionally Hill comes up with some nice touches of the unexpected: a few moments of black humour, the suggestion of a deliberate pastiche here and there, but on the whole he's too resolutely fashionable a director to really get behind Vonnegut's idea of time-tripping. It ends up the wrong side of unadventurous.

Often topping lists of the best films of all time, and a great influence on many great directors of the last half century, not least for its purity of expression, this remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema’s masterpieces.

Filmed in the usual crisp AIP style, with dazzling sunlight and ominous shadows.

Full of stunning visuals, the ideas in the film more than compensate for the awkward scene-setting of the beginning.

Third of the Rosenberg/Newman collaborations, and a wry, leisurely relief after the heavyweight experiences of Cool Hand Luke and WUSA.

Redford and Segal are both good, parodying their normal images, as the thieves who steal the Sahara Stone from the Brooklyn Museum and spend the rest of the film chasing after it. Like Cops and Robbers it's a lightweight film, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Although the film is well performed and beautifully shot by Robert Surtees, its ideology is highly objectionable, celebrating as it does the turning of the boys into hardened killers.

Try to get Siegel’s masterful camera rise out of your head: gun-happy Harry looming over his jabbering perp, who screams like a stuck pig as the shot recedes high into a dense night fog. This is not a cop film. It’s a monster movie.

Taking elements of both the Western and the British horror film, Peckinpah's masterstroke was to shoot Straw Dogs absolutely straight, without the reassuring signposts of either type of film.

Meticulously schoolmarmish, John Hale's script lays out all the power plays behind Elizabeth Tudor's battle to keep Mary Stuart off her throne, but fails to provide much else.

The cast are decent, but not much more. Filmed in Panavision and angled at childre

An idiosyncratic romance, and a far lighter movie than is usual from Cassavetes. Detailing the problems that background and character bring to a relationship, he creates a captivatingly witty and sympathetic picture of a pair of misfits deciding to make a go of it together despite numerous incompatibilities and adversities.

Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.

A sexless, inhuman film, whose power derives from a ruthless subordination of its content to the demands of telling a good story. A glossy, action-packed ritual which is fun to watch but superficial to think about.