Slick odd-couple blockbuster which sees secret service grandee Anthony Hopkins forced to team up with street-punk Chris Rock in Prague as a nuclear bomb in a suitcase goes up for sale. Jerry Bruckheimer ensures the noisy pace never lets up; an anarchic Rock plays it strictly for laughs and a horizontal Hopkins looks mighty bored. Great stuff, all the same.
Not as astute or ambitious a satire of "reality TV" as Series 7: The Contenders, but Marc Evans' house-of-horror, shot on webcam, hosts a rattling good scary yarn. If the kids stay in the creaky pad for six months they win a million, but as Davina day looms, things get gory. A superior, if pretentious, genre piece.
Audrey Tautou's wide-eyed, innocent expressions are subverted cleverly in this Gallic romance-mystery. Hints of Hitchcock, but a mention of Memento's inevitable, as we see the story first through her eyes, then through those of the object of her amour fou, Samuel Le Bihan. Doesn't soar, but studded with scenes both picturesque and psychologically taut.
Much-emulated screwball comedy, directed by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper as the disingenuous rustic type who inherits a $20 million fortune and a new life in New York. There he's pitted against a variety of shysters, cynics and dodgy lawyers who lend the film its edge as well as material for the underlying homily against urban sophistication. Jean Arthur adds charm as the hard-bitten tabloid hack who falls for Cooper.
TV mini series from 1988 directed by David (The Sweeney) Wickes and starring Michael Caine as the police inspector investigating 'orrible murders in Whitechapel, with Lewis Collins as his sidekick. Hack melodrama with red herrings galore, but still quite watchable.
If Easy Rider spelled the end of the hippie dream, then Chainsaw provided the full-blown nightmare. A camper van full of paisley-shirted, astrology-obsessed kids pulls up in rural Texas only to discover Leatherface and his family only too willing to show them some local hospitality. The opening half-hour still remains the most unnerving in horror history.
Described by its proto-feminist French director Virginie Despentes as an attempt "to seize woman's true sexuality back from the male gaze", Baise-Moi is therefore a visceral, explicit re-imagining of the road movie (Thelma And Louise with cum shots), buffered by chunks of jaded '70s film theory. Too inept to be engaging, too light to be controversial. A mess.
Intense Israeli thriller merging politics, religion and thwarted romance in which Rabbi Meltzer (Assi Dayan) encourages his soldier students to embrace martyrdom. A huge hit on home turf, it's fiery spirit ensures it translates.
Magisterial, tough-hearted 1967 western from writer/director Tom Gries. Charlton Heston is a revelation as the eponymous ageing cowhand, a lonesome, unemployed illiterate, bushwhacked by deranged preacher Donald Pleasence and his boys. While recovering, he encounters Joan Hackett, who, although travelling through the wilderness to join her husband, offers the chance of a life he's never known.
You could argue a case for Funny Face or Breakfast At Tiffany's, but this William Wyler rom-com—now 50 years young—is perhaps Audrey Hepburn's shining moment. An incognito princess who leaps into love with journalist Gregory Peck (well, we can all dream), you'd have to be brutish not to catch its spark. And Rome's not bad-looking either.
