My Favorite Movies

The most beautiful, imaginative and ambitious fantasy film ever made. Everyone should see it. Originally commissioned to improve Anglo-American relations at the tail end of WWII!

More of a character study than a thriller, though it does have a lovely twist at the end. Easily the best thing Coppola ever made and undoubtedly Gene Hackman's finest hour. I annoy people by declaring this Harrison Ford's best movie!

It's a scandal that this isn't out on DVD in the UK. Bertolucci's masterpiece, beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro.

The most perfectly cast film ever! And, for once, an adaptation that actually improves on the (excellent) novel. "He has his father's eyes!" Polanski at his best.

Way more than your average horror film. So incredibly detailed that you notice something new every time you watch it, like how the colour red is used sparingly to create a subconscious impact.

If you're lucky enough to see this film at an impressionable age it will stay with you for the rest of your life. Robert Mitchum's greatest part; Charles Laughton's only film as director. There are moments in this movie that are pure magic, especially the children's escape down river in the boat.

Another masterpiece currently unavailable on DVD in the UK. A glacially cool study of a contract killer.

My favourite Robert Altman film, this enraged many a Raymond Chandler purist when it came out, but it's probably the most intelligent Chandler adaptation ever made. Besides reinvigorating a first-rate murder-mystery, by adopting a contemporary setting and audaciously altering several of the book's key plot developments, Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett create a perceptive commentary on moral bankruptcy in the 1970s. Whereas a 1940s or 1950s Terry Lennox would have been innocent of his wife's murder because, as Philip Marlowe's friend, he could be trusted implicitly, the 1970s Terry Lennox is not only capable of murder, but also has no scruples about directing a vicious, double-crossed hoodlum and a police investigation Marlowe's way.

The one anachronism here is Elliot Gould's Philip Marlowe, and not just because he drives a vintage car and wears a suit--albeit rumpled--at all times. Beneath the grubby facade of a chain-smoking, apathetic slob, he is every bit as morally centred as Chandler's creation: he doesn't work divorce cases, he cannot accept Lennox's/Augustine's dirty $5000 bill and, most tellingly, he's prepared to step outside the law to punish the man who escaped justice by betraying their friendship.

"The Long Goodbye" is a wonderfully playful film. There are jokey references to screen legends of the classic Hollywood era, and John Williams and Johnny Mercer's title song is reworked delightfully throughout, even appearing as supermarket Muzak and a doorbell chime. Elliott Gould makes the most of the best role of his career, Sterling Hayden is larger than life and Henry Gibson is very creepy as a 'drying-out' clinician, but film director Mark Rydell steals the acting honours as the gangster Marty Augustine. Simultaneously hilarious and unsettling, he's far more terrifying than, for example, Joe Pesci is in "GoodFellas" because he's controlled and calculating rather than just an apoplectic hothead. I cannot recommend this film strongly enough. Tell your friends it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's best movie; I do!

It may not have the best songs, it may not have any dancing but this is still the greatest musical film ever made.

Also known as Profondo Rosso, this is Dario Argento's best film, featuring Goblin's best soundtrack. Full of nasty, stylish set-pieces.

My first Satyajit Ray movie and still my favourite of the handful of his films I've seen. I'm going to struggle to write about this one, I can tell, because I don't think I can adequately explain why I find such an apparently simple movie so uniquely profound. In terms of plot, there's nothing to it; it's just about four well-to-do, westernised friends from Calcutta, who spend a few days in the country to help one of their number, a celebrated cricketer, get over being jilted by his girlfriend. Snotty and self-important to begin with, the men are improved over the course of the film, to greater and lesser degrees, by their surroundings and experiences.

The miraculous thing about Ray's direction is that, not only does he manage to turn the forest and countryside into an enchanted realm, where fundamental improvements of character seem entirely justified, even inevitable, he somehow manages to make the viewer feel changed for the better, too, by the experience of watching his film. It's one of those very rare movies that, for a short time at least, makes the real word feel like a more magical place after you've seen it. Sharmila Tagore is very memorable as the elegant, enigmatic and supremely intelligent object of one of the men's affection.

One of Eastwood's lesser known movies, and one of his very best. Like Play Misty for Me, also released in 1971, Don Siegel's The Beguiled cleverly subverts Clint's macho/heroic image and recasts him as a vulnerable but thoroughly deserving victim of scorned femininity. However, whereas in Misty he's just a womaniser who happens to tangle with a rather poisonous species of clinging vine, The Beguiled gives Eastwood perhaps the only genuinely villainous role of his entire career. (I'm not checking that up but I can't think of another).

He plays a wounded Union soldier in the Civil War, taken in and nursed back to health by the staff and pupils of an all-female, Louisiana boarding school. Expecting to be handed over to a Confederate patrol as soon as he is fit again, the soldier turns on the charm to buy himself enough time to escape, inadvertently stirring up a hotbed of jealousy as the women and girls compete for his affection, ending in tragedy. The female members of the cast are outstanding - none better than Pamelyn Ferdin, who plays the little girl who finds the soldier in the woods - and even Eastwood is stretched considerably further than usual. The Spanish Moss festooned Louisiana woodland does wonders for the haunting atmosphere of the movie.

A magnificent trio of short horror tales by Mario Bava. Curiously, although it has the highest production values, a strong literary source and a big star, the central Boris Karloff segment, "The Wurdulak", is my least favourite, though it's still excellent and is beautifully shot. "The Telephone" is a perfect little giallo, and the final part, "The Drop of Water", is a very creepy variation on Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart".

"Le Boucher" is more of a study in passive complicity or associative guilt than a murder-mystery, but it's still a difficult movie to write about without spoiling the plot for newcomers, so I'm going to sidestep the problem. It reminds me of a tragic variation on "La Belle et la Bête", in which Belle is too romantically jaded and too much the mistress of her own desires - i.e. she is not innocent enough - to save the helpless Beast from his uncontrollable lust for blood. In the most telling scene of all, schoolmistress Mademoiselle Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and her pupils visit some cave paintings by Cro-Magnon man. The teacher asks, "Do you know what desires are called when they rise above the savage state? Aspirations." The irony is that Belle condemns the Beast to his savage limbo by being completely unresponsive to his tender advances, his aspirations. While the film undoubtedly owes a debt to Hitchcock, Chabrol's beautifully observed provincial French setting completely surpasses the other's invariably artificial backdrops. Pierre Jansen's score is wonderfully creepy and Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne are magnificent. A quietly perfect little masterpiece. "Mademoiselle Hélène! Mademoiselle Hélène!"

The bit that always chills me is when Carrie gets home from the ball, goes upstairs for a bath and we glimpse her mother hiding behind the door. This movie nails the school bullying mindset better than any other I can think of, even though the 'kids' are too old for their parts.

Céline, a flamboyant magicienne, and Julie, a librarian with an interest in the occult, stumble into a perpetually recurring murder-mystery in an old house, starring two women, a man and a little girl. Taking it in turns to collect the pieces of the puzzle, which may or may not be a figment of their imaginations, the friends resolve to prevent the murder from taking place.

It is entirely appropriate that Juliet Berto's Céline is a magician, because the movie itself is an amazing conjuring trick; when it's over, you'll probably find yourself wondering how you've been kept spellbound for three hours by little more than Rivette's inventiveness and the infectious enthusiasm of Berto and Dominique Labourier's performances. The film works equally well as a playful experiment in cinematic form, a tribute to childlike imagination and a feminist buddy movie. The only thing at odds with the prevailing spirit of feminism, and perhaps the best evidence that the film was, after all, directed by a man, is a pointless bit of nudity, but I'm happy to write that off as dated Seventies permissiveness rather than titillation. In any case, who the hell am I to complain, right?! The greatest tribute I can pay this three-hour-plus film is to say that, when Céline and Juile's game finally comes full circle and begins again, I always want to carry on watching. Endlessly fascinating, truly magical and a lot of fun!

Considering that just about everything Orson Welles directed after "Citizen Kane" was compromised by studio interference and/or budgetary constraints, it's remarkable that he made as many brilliant movies as he did. "Chimes at Midnight" is one of his very best. Magnificent yet flawed, so well does this film mirror both its creator and the character he plays in it, lovable rogue Sir John Falstaff, that its very flaws almost become virtues. Though it is directed, photographed and edited with extraordinary skill, "Chimes at Midnight" contains some of the worst dialogue synching I have ever come across. A restoration of the film has long been rumoured, but such is the quantity of slapdash dubbing, short of creating a brand new soundtrack, no amount of judicious tweaking is ever likely to completely reunite Shakespeare's words with the lips that are uttering them. In spite of this, in spite of the difficult language and the dizzying editing style, which exhilarated but ultimately exhausted me, "Chimes at Midnight" is a wonderful movie.

I don't know why I like this film so much; Ken Russell movies usually give me a headache so this, his most over-the-top feature, ought to send me running to the medicine cabinet before the credits are over! The relaxation of censorship laws at the end of the '60s/beginning of the '70s heralded a bunch of movies which pushed the boundaries of explicit content. To give three examples: "Straw Dogs", "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Devils", all made in Britain for Warner Bros. Interestingly, while those other two films have lost most of their shock-value over the years, "The Devils" - even though it was hacked to pieces by the British and American censors - has lost none of its power. This could be Oliver Reed's finest hour; everybody else in the movie is camp or hysterical (or both) and he glides through it with immense dignity as a priest wrongly tried for heresy.

Saw this when it came out in 1982. Wonderful film. I would give the original version 5 stars but Spielberg had to go and do a George Lucas and spoil it.

This is, without doubt, one of Brian De Palma's greatest achievements, an incredibly rich and playful movie which immeasurably rewards repeated viewings. Basically, you get out of it what you put in. If you've got your wits about you, an open mind and a keen pair of eyes, you're in for a treat. Beneath its ludicrous exterior there lurks as intelligent a film as you could wish to see, a film which, refreshingly, credits its audience with the ability to understand it without spoon-feeding. If you've been paying close enough attention, the controversial late twist triumphantly validates innumerable carefully laid glimpses of the truth; you ought to feel exhilarated rather than cheated, eager to hit the rewind button in search of further clues. In De Palma's enchanted world: fish-tanks mimic overflowing baths, advertising posters offer vital pointers, casually seen faces become woven into the story and time stands still. As a Parallel Universe thriller, it's smarter, wittier, more inventive and more skilfully told than "Run, Lola, Run" et al. Ironically, this masterpiece sank without a trace in the UK and is hard to locate on DVD.

Technicolor photography was hardly in its infancy at the time of "Gone with the Wind", but its deployment with tasteful restraint certainly was, so the fact that the film's palette is a little gaudy--occasionally tacky rather than classy--can be forgiven. Also in dubious taste is the sight of black slaves merrily trotting off to dig trenches for the army of their oppressors, but an indictment of slavery was furthest from the filmmakers' minds. To be ungenerous for a moment, "Gone with the Wind", the movie, was only made to cynically replicate the financial success of Margaret Mitchell's book, the most popular novel of its day. However, the fact that the book has all but faded into obscurity while the film remains as popular as ever is a testament to how great a movie it really is, and to the magic it contains independent of the source novel. Of course, Clark Gable is excellent as Rhett Butler, but he'd already been playing roguish charmers for several years by now and could have sleepwalked through the part; the greatness of "Gone with the Wind" is due almost exclusively to Vivien Leigh, without whom it would be nothing. Her Scarlett O'Hara is spoiled, coquettish, petulant, self-centred and manipulative, yet she's incredibly strong, independent and resourceful; wicked as she is, it's impossible not to like her.

A fantastic comedy/fantasy and the best vehicle Murray has had to date. The finest time-travel movie since "Back to the Future".

Quite simply: the greatest horror movie ever made! There's not an ounce of excess fat on this film. Of course, a lot of inferior rip-offs followed in its wake but you can't blame Carpenter for his imitators' lack of talent. I can watch this time and time again and the shocks still work.

The finest mainstream Hollywood movie of the '90s. This exceeds even "The Godfather" for scope and depth, finding time to characterise in detail not only the criminals but also the cops, as well as examining the turbulent home relationships of both. As a summit meeting of two great acting talents it doesn't disappoint, but it's so much more besides; an epic "one last heist" tragedy, rich enough to repay repeated viewings.

This will always be remembered for the money it cost and the money it lost, killing United Artists in the process, but it's a beautiful, wonderful, epic movie; a fitting end to the last great decade of Hollywood film-making, the Seventies. I would rather wallow in this than sit through "The Deer Hunter" any day of the week. Whatever its faults, it's full of memorable moments, for example Christopher Walken's marvellously cinematic first appearance, which is worthy of Sergio Leone. As an intimate love triangle set against an epic background of immigration and unrest, it's a hell of a lot more successful than Scorsese's awful "Gangs of New York".

"Greetings" was good but the sequel "Hi, Mom!" is astonishing, easily the best of Brian De Palma's early comedies and still one of the greatest films he has made. It's overflowing with terrific ideas and is brilliantly shot and edited, retaining a vitality and an awesome power in spite of its often dated subject-matter. Robert De Niro reprises his role of Jon Rubin, a voyeuristic Vietnam vet who sets out to make a porno movie by surreptitiously filming the residents of a neighbouring apartment block, then joins an experimental theatre group and, finally, becomes an urban terrorist. The first part of the movie, with Allen Garfield reprising his role of a smut peddler from "Greetings", is hilarious, and one is completely unprepared for the shattering shift in tone which follows with the "Be Black, Baby" segment, in which a group of whites in blackface are terrorized by blacks in whiteface to help them understand the 'black experience' of living in America. This harrowing sequence alone would make "Hi, Mom!" a five-star film; everything else is just a bonus.

This isn't as deliriously paced or as quirky as other screwball comedies, but it's still completely delightful. Because it is immediately obvious that Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn will fall for one another eventually, the joy in watching "Holiday" comes from the circuitous route taken to get to the inevitable. Lew Ayres' character, Hepburn's younger brother, cuts through the frothy fun to add a genuine note of darkness and despair. The-ghost-of-Grant-yet-to-pass, Ayres' financial trader with an artistic soul, slipping into apathy and alcoholism because he's been trammelled by materialism, represents Grant's dreamer as compromised by his practical fiancée and prospective father-in-law. The whole cast is marvellous, but I especially like Henry Daniell and Binnie Barnes as Hepburn's catty cousins. Hepburn is at her loveliest here, less cynical than usual. "I've got all the faith in the world in Johnny...If he wants to dream for a while, he can dream for a while. And if he wants to come back and sell peanuts, oh, how I'll believe in those peanuts!"

Wilco are one of the greatest bands on Earth and this documentary film of the making of their masterpiece, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", is a fascinating glimpse at record company machination vs the creation of art.

An impeccable adaptation of Henry James' wonderful "The Turn of the Screw". For those who find the book a little verbose and difficult, this is the next best thing, a chilling ghost story with some pretty daring ambiguities. Deborah Kerr, like Jean Simmons, made her best films in Britain, before embarking on a Hollywood career, so it's fitting that she returned here to film this masterpiece. Jack Clayton's control of atmosphere is faultless, Freddie Francis' photography is stunning, and Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin are perfect as Miles and Flora. One of the greatest British horror movies ever made.

The greatest of all the '50s sci-fi B-movies, which is probably why Hollywood continues to remake it on a regular basis. This one will never be bettered.

Hmm, what do you say about a movie that everybody's seen? Not very much and something different, hopefully. To appreciate what it is that makes Jaws so great, one has only to imagine what the film would be like were Spielberg to remake it today, with a bottomless budget and Hollywood's A-list at his disposal. It's really an object lesson in making a virtue of necessity. Spielberg's use of suggestive horror to cover for his malfunctioning mechanical shark is so brilliant that, when we finally do get a good look at 'Bruce', he comes as something of an anti-climax. Of course, nowadays he'd just CGI the shark, and those early attacks, which are some of the most indelible moments in 70s cinema, would not be nearly as memorable. Similarly, look at the three male leads: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. It goes without saying that these performances could not be improved upon, but how much of their greatness can be attributed to a veteran supporting actor's hunger to make the most of an unusually good opportunity? All of this would have been lost back in 1975 if Spielberg had had the clout to cast star names in his picture.

Quite simply: the most terrifying film I've ever seen. If spooky children don't give you the willies this probably isn't for you, but it scared the crap out of me. A truly amazing exercise in sustained atmosphere. I would recommend watching it with the original Italian soundtrack, if possible, because it's more intense and the child's laughter is 100% creepier.

A marvellous film noir which transcends two of the general constraints of the genre by a) eschewing cityscapes for majestic rural locations, chiefly Maine and New Mexico, and b) being shot in glorious Technicolor. The plot is pretty twisted, there's a wonderfully melodramatic court scene climax, and the corny but romantic ending is the icing on the cake. One of the most stunningly photographed films ever made.

Without a doubt the best of the Python movies. Highly controversial upon release and heavily criticised by the Church for alleged blasphemy. If these people had actually bothered watching the movie they'd know that Brian spends most of it telling us he's "not the Messiah". What's blasphemous about that?

You can tell this film's a masterpiece because you can't buy it on DVD in the UK, like Melville's "Le Samourai", Bertolucci's "The Conformist", Altman's "Nashville" and countless others. At its core, "Lone Star" is a touching and tragic love story centred around an archaeological murder-mystery, but it's so much more besides. John Sayles lays bare the racial prejudices (white, black and Hispanic), the hypocrisies and the generation-gap squabbles of a Texas border-town community. He also makes us question whether the suspected violent deposition of a corrupt lawman by his deputy--marginally less corrupt but loved by those he protected and served, regardless of their race--might have been an end which justified its means. Beautifully acted all round, especially by Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Pena. Sayles could teach Tarantino a thing or two about how to cherry-pick a great soundtrack; this has one of the best I've heard. A marvellous movie.

This was the last, and arguably the best, of five marvellous westerns directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, remarkable for their psychological complexity and - with the possible exception of The Far Country, which is over-reliant on artificial backdrops - for their stunning use of landscape. Typically cast as either a bad man trying to escape his past or a good man sworn to a vengeance he's barely cut out for, Stewart was the perfect actor to bring out the emotional turmoil of Mann's flawed heroes. In The Man from Laramie he plays a mysterious stranger hunting those responsible for selling the Apache the repeating rifles used to ambush an army patrol. Donald Crisp, Arthur Kennedy and Aline MacMahon give excellent support, and the film is also memorable for some unusual salt lake scenery and a couple of bits of eye-popping sadism.

George Romero just about invented the thinking-person's horror movie. This is one of his best: one of the greatest and most offbeat vampire films ever made. Martin certainly drinks blood but is he really a vampire or just a very sick young man?

God, I love this film! I watched it last night for the first time in years. It's one that always gets an honourable mention in those lists of the great movies that nobody went to see on first release. Thirty-seven years on, it feels and is paced more like a small character piece than a thriller, but I imagine Warner Bros. had reasonably high commercial hopes for it when it was greenlit, just four years on from Gene Hackman's Oscar-snaffling turn in The French Connection, eight from director Arthur Penn's phenomenal - and phenomenally successful - Bonnie and Clyde.

Sometimes you see these neglected gems and it's completely baffling how they failed to find an audience at the time, but with Night Moves I can sort of understand how it slipped through the net. And it's not surprising that the film's critical stock began to rise with the advent of home video, when it became possible to re-examine atypically rich examples of cinema to ones heart's content. In my experience, if there's one thing an audience cannot stand it's a movie that makes them feel stupid, and, simply put - and I don't mean this as a criticism, as the effect is certainly intentional - Night Moves is probably the most forbiddingly opaque and ambiguous thriller of the 1970s.

Honestly, if you're one of those people who hates loose ends and likes a nice pat denouement, do yourself a favour and stay well clear of this because it will drive you up the wall! The first time you watch it, it's largely incoherent; the characters and their respective motivations emerge more clearly with each subsequent viewing, but there's still no getting away from the fact that no matter how many times you watch it, the movie remains a riddle without a solution, or rather a riddle with any number of different solutions.

R.I.P. Bruce Surtees, director of photography, 1937-2012

A really great conspiracy thriller. Warren Beatty is an investigative journalist who thinks he's getting a scoop on a politcal asassination, unaware that he's being manipulated as the fall-guy.

After two decades' work as a dependable character actor, Harry Dean Stanton was finally given a richly deserved leading role in this, one of the most iconic films of the 1980s and one of the most beautiful films of any decade. He plays Travis, a damaged refugee from an exploded relationship who pieces back together his life and his dignity after four years in the wilderness, gradually gaining the trust of the son he left behind and setting out to reunite the boy with his mother. I can't understand how anyone can call this a boring movie; even ignoring the great acting, the stunning visuals and the spectral majesty of Ry Cooder's soundtrack, the mystery at the core of the plot - the cataclysmic event which blew these three people apart - is as compelling as that of any detective story. The dramatic centrepiece is a hypnotic and deeply moving monologue, by Stanton, as the estranged lovers finally 'meet' again across the two-way mirror of a peep-show. Though the ending is bittersweet, the message I've always taken from "Paris, Texas" is inspirational: "Don't give up on life, even if your dreams are unattainable."

One of Kurosawa's greatest films. A man and his wife have been waylaid and assaulted by a bandit in the forest; the wife may have been raped, the husband has certainly been killed, but by whose hand did he die? Each of the central characters gives their own, widely differing version of events--the dead man's testimony relayed through a medium--to which an independent witness adds a fourth and final reconstruction. Kurosawa's complex film is about the way we each distort and embellish the truth to serve our own purpose, not necessarily to save our skin but to preserve our dignity. Since two of the testimonies are, essentially, self-sacrificial confessions to murder, the maintenance of this honourable facade is portrayed as being a cause worth dying for. Kurosawa's final cynical coup is to show that even his 'independent' witness cannot be trusted. Though it does end on a note of optimism, such a scathing indictment of human nature ought to be heavy going, yet it's handled with a remarkably light touch and is immensely entertaining. It's also brilliantly acted and stunningly photographed.

I guess you either love or hate Woody Allen. I know so many people who would adore this film if I was only capable of making them watch it. It's their loss. The summit of Woody's "funny" peiod.

A hugely entertaining adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's witty play. I'm hoping that the remake isn't awful but I'm not really bothered as I'll always have this to return to.

I've been casting about for a Christmas movie with which to send my Flixster friends a seasonal message, and this one will do very nicely. One of my primary school teachers was obsessed with this film and used to screen it for us every year, without fail. Consequently, I cannot watch The Snowman without thinking of enormous wooden television sets on trolleys and top-loader VHS machines. I must have seen it twenty times and -- whether induced by childhood nostalgia or the quality of the film itself -- it still brings a tear to my eye.

Forget that "Episode IV - A New Hope" subtitle. Cobblers. This is the original and best. As far as I'm concerned it begins and ends here. The difference between this and the new movies is that you sense that the cast really believe in it; they're not just going through the motions and trying to imagine something nasty bearing down on them from a blue-screen.

Along with Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this is probably my favourite of the 50s Sci-Fi horror movies I've seen to date. Watching it again, what impresses me most is the sheer volume of dialogue crammed into these 90 minutes. Produced by Howard Hawks, with uncredited screenplay contributions from Ben Hecht, The Thing from Another World is like the His Girl Friday of the sci-fi era. Not only does the sophisticated, overlapping, bantering dialogue keep the movie fresh, it also ensures that there is insufficient time for us to snicker at the usual cod-scientific technobabble without being left behind. It is a measure of how well made the film is that it can dispense with the strongest idea in John W Campbell's original story, namely that The Thing is able to mimic other life forms, and still manage to be a masterpiece!

I may be wrong, but I always imagine "3 Women" turning off a portion of Altman aficionados, while at the same time enchanting some regular detractors of his work. A complete departure from his typical freewheeling, ensemble style of filmmaking, it has a haunting, dreamlike quality unlike anything else I've seen. It's a tough one to describe, but the titular women are: a socially invisible chatterbox (Shelley Duvall), her adoring, childlike protege (Sissy Spacek), and a near mute artist (Janice Rule), pregnant by Duvall and Spacek's lecherous, philandering landlord. Over the course of the film, a pair of cataclysmic events cause the women to twice exchange identities. Without giving too much away, the first such transfer is straightforward enough, prompted by temporary amnesia, but the second is more abstract and disturbing, motivated by guilt and loss. If all this sounds a little heavy-going, "3 Women" is often very funny, at the expense of Duvall's would-be domestic goddess and Spacek's wide-eyed innocent. Shelley Duvall is outstanding and Sissy Spacek is equally wonderful, but the film owes much of its haunting atmosphere to Janice Rule; the fact that she says very little is somehow more mysterious than if she were to say nothing at all.

An extraordinary drama about three people whose lives become inextricably linked by a single tragedy: a woman (Naomi Watts) whose children and husband are killed in hit-and-run accident, the born-again Christian ex-con (Benicio Del Toro) who mows them down, and a dying college professor (Sean Penn) whose life is saved by the transplanted heart of the unfortunate widow's donor husband. The initially confusing, fractured narrative juxtaposes scenes both pre- and post-tragedy to create a heartbreaking, emotionally-draining kaleidoscope of a movie, which ends with a beautifully uplifting glimmer of redemption. Don't be put off by the difficult texture; this is essential viewing, a wonderful film. Watts, Penn and Del Toro are magnificent; each flawed, each haunted, each with a spark of decency.

Pretentious? Er, yes. Is HAL is the only character with a personality? Yes, also. But this is the most cinematic of movies, a jaw-dropping experience which simply must be witnessed on the biggest screen available. It may well be boring at times, and I'd be lying if I said I understood what happens at the end; it's still a masterpiece.

This is an amazingly dark comedy for the time it was made. A famous conductor suspects his wife of having an affair and imagines three different ways to deal with the problem according to the mood of the music he is conducting: murder, russian roulette or the surrender of his wife to her 'suitor'. Rex Harrison is magnificent in this.

R.I.P Ingrid Pitt, 1937-2010. I know Ingrid doesn't have a lot of screen time in The Wicker Man, so this might seem an odd choice of place to leave a tribute, but I think this quote from Jake Wright, assistant director on the picture, illustrates how generous, unaffected and well-liked within the industry the lady was: 'The characters of the three leading actresses really came out when we were shooting the final scene on Burrow Head, all shot on the cliff tops in November, and it was bitterly cold. There comes one moment when we have to reload the camera or something - a pause for two or three minutes - so I told the wardrobe to take the coats out for the three leading actresses. And Britt Ekland just seized her coat, put it on; Diane Cilento said, "Thank you very much," and put her coat on; and Ingrid Pitt said, "If the extras haven't got time to put their coats on, I haven't got time [either]," which I thought defines the three artists quite clearly.'

I may be barking up the wrong tree completely here but, having just watched M again for the first time in ages, I was struck by how the film seems to prefigure the work of Jean-Pierre Melville in certain key respects. Firstly, as played by Otto Wernicke and Gustaf Gründgens respectively, Fritz Lang presents us with a police inspector and a gangster who are equally charismatic, thereby testing the audience's sympathy, a trick which Melville would make good use of, time and again, in his Nouvelle Vague noirs of the late Fifties and Sixties. But rather than being a straightforward personality contest between the good guys and the bad guys, Lang's far more disturbing moral dilemma invites us to choose between the criminal justice system and mob rule in the question of what should be done with Peter Lorre's pathetic child murderer, who is beyond the pale of the regular criminal fraternity. The director would, of course, return to the subject of mob justice for his first American movie, Fury, in 1936. Lang's fascination with meticulous police procedure in M is also very similar to Melville's in Le Samouraï, and I was yet again reminded of Melville in those scenes where the criminal mob uses the tools and techniques of its trades to close in on the cornered Lorre in a deserted office building, which is essentially a heist scenario with Lorre as the booty.