A simple, slight but delightful slice of life à la Leigh, with some heart-stoppingly committed performances and genuinely moving moments. It won't set the world on fire, but will smoulder in your brain long after you've left the cinema.

Murphy consolidates his comeback with an engaging performance in an often thrilling thriller. Metro mixes high-quality stunts and slick dialogue with enough menace to keep the audience nibbling its cuticles until the closing credits. Welcome back, Edward.

Don't overlook this film. It doesn't have the must-see pull of a Mars Attacks! or a Fierce Creatures, but it's a fine, convincingly played drama, and a superlative adaptation of Mr Miller's play. (Married to Marilyn Monroe, he was. Makes you think...)

Philosophically complex, spiritual but anti-religious, harrowing yet hopeful.

While it paints a convincing vision of lives ruled and ruined by the bottle, none of this makes for compelling viewing. Certainly not an hour-and-a-half of it.

Within the first half-hour, all suspense has been punctured. Not only do you find out who the two men are, and why they and their jiggly testicles are galloping through New York, but you learn exactly who's chasing them and why. Worse still, like a flabby episode of Columbo, you get to know whodunnit right at the start of the film.

She's The One is carefully observed, well-made, enjoyable, thought-provoking and even funny. And: cracking crumpet, Gromit.

The Frighteners is not just Fox's most entertaining picture since Back To The Future, but one of the slickest comedy-horror movies you could hope to see.

Most alluring are the crumbling neon cityscapes, real world/cyberspace fusion and the musings on identity.

A stop-motion charmer.

As Scrooge, Michael Caine rises to the challenge and helps find the pathos beneath the puppetry.

A disco dancing Jamie Lee Curtis is long gone, and so is any sense of logic in this drivelsome fourth Prom, which takes itself far too seriously.

Drawing on their traditions of oral storytelling, it’s lushly photographed and costumed, plus dreamily confusing, yet it vividly brings a past to life.

The Double Life of Véronique makes the familiar seem extraordinary and memorably conjures up the sense of metaphysical forces guiding its characters’ everyday lives.

FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), brainiac cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and tackle-tucking serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) make for one of cinema’s great ménages à trois.

A 25th anniversary restoration of Giuseppe Tornatore’s ode to moving pictures and puppy love.

John McNaughton's movie manages to go beyond the disquieting, distressing or even disturbing. It's downright dismaying.

Conceived on an unprecedented scale in ambition and technique, Otomo’s rich visuals and awe-inspiring action depict a post-apocalyptic dystopia where the threat of feral biker gangs is dwarfed by the rise of an uncontrollable psychic.

Plays like an elegy for the demise of the cool, thick with the small-hours allure of addiction and infatuation but smart enough to see clearly.

Audran is luminous as the centre of a gentle, generous film about grace. Oh, and grub.

Will Richard E Grant ever get a better role than bitter thespian Withnail? Has anyone devised a more iconic comic notion than the Camberwell Carrot? Has any screenplay combined so many quotable lines with such tear-jerking pathos or blatant homophobia?

Directed by John McTiernan, it’s an ’80s classic full of still-thrilling action, quotable one-liners (“Get to the chopper!” “Stick around!”) and sly digs at Uncle Sam’s penchant for unwinnable jungle wars.

Fresh from portraying another counterculture icon in Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy, the 29-year-old Oldman could hardly have been better cast as the cocksure genius whose saucy farces turned the West End stage on its ear.

For all its Swedish trimmings, the long, syrup-slow takes are unmistakably Tarkovsky’s, and it’s these that provide this arthouse disaster movie with its mesmerising power.

A stylish black-and-white prison romp with a sense of humour as offbeat as its perfectly cast stars (John Lurie, Roberto Benigni and singer Tom Waits).

Isabella Rossellini’s singer Dorothy is a heart-rending open wound, Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth one of cinema’s great nutjobs, and Lynch’s control a thing of nightmarish beauty.

Nothing about the film works. And the festering boil on this arse-end of cinematic quality is the duck suit itself: it’s about as realistic as a builder’s quote, with less than a tenth of the aesthetic charm of the same builder’s bum cleavage.

With his native Prague standing in for Vienna, Forman's images of icy beauty counterpoint the soaring music and grandstanding performances. [2002 Director's Cut]