MINICRIX

XF-ZU

2010-04-19T14:57:00.009+02:00

X-FILES, THE (1998) How quickly The X-Files went from compulsory viewing to the mouldy old scrapheap of TV history! The movie version is like a parody of its former self, as scary as old slippers with Mulder and Scully uncovering - yes! - yet another global conspiracy, this time involving an alien virus that turns people's eyeballs black. The film begins with the droll subtitle, "North Texas 3500 BC" and takes in the usual quota of dark alleys and helicopter chases on its way to a showdown in Antarctica. David Duchovny is dishy as ever but Gillian Anderson, one of the most beautiful women on TV, looks surprisingly drab. Maybe the camera crew conspired against her.

X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE, THE (2008) Always a pleasure to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back in the saddle as everyone's favourite paranormal sleuths, but this second big screen spin-off, six years after the long-running TV series ended, is like a sub-par episode set in a British Columbia that appears to have given up any pretence of being somewhere south of the 49th parallel. Both Mulder and Scully have left the FBI, but team up again to work on a not-very-interesting case involving a missing agent, a paedophile priest (Billy Connolly) who keeps having visions, and Russian organ traffickers, all tenuously linked. Amanda Peet and rapper Xzibit play agents on the case. There's a lot of pointless running around in the snow, and only in the home stretch does the film come close to the weirdness of the series.

X-MEN (2000) It’s superheroes a-go-go as Marvel's mega-powered mutants slug it out among themselves over the fate of humanity. Patrick Stewart, as the wheelchair-bound telepath Professor Xavier, leads the good guys whose ranks include Hugh Jackman as hairy-faced, retractable-clawed Wolverine. Ian McKellen plays baddie-in-chief, metal-bending Magneto, while Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays blue-skinned Mystique, whose special talent is being naked. Bryan Singer directs with admirable sincerity, though the sheer number of supercharacters sometimes makes it feel more like an episode in a long-running supersoap opera than a blockbuster movie.

X-MEN 2 (2003) Like the first X-Men, this special effects adventure inspired by the Marvel comic strip features so many mutants it feels more like an episode in a long-running saga than a self-contained story. But it also improves on the original in almost every way, with a story about good mutants (led by Patrick Stewart as Xavier) teaming up with evil mutants (led by Ian Mackellan as Magneto) against Brian Cox's plan to make the world a mutant-free environment. Hugh Jackman as adamantium-clawed Wolverine and Famke Janssen as telepathic Jean Grey are joined by Alan Cumming as a blue teleporter with a tail, but it's Rebecca Romajin-Stamos as Mystique, whose special talent is being naked, who gets the film's best moments.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (2006) Fanboys hit the roof when they saw how the third film in the superhero series had messed with comic-book gospel by, say, killing off characters who hadn't died in the books. Everyone else will find it adequate, if not as inspired as its predecessors; like them, it suffers from a surfeit of superheroes jammed into too short a time. Kitty Pryde (Hard Candy's Ellen Page) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) join the overstuffed line-up, while Famke Janssen is back from the dead and running amok with enhanced Dark Phoenix capabilities. There's also something seriously skewed about a plot that requires the good guys to end up on the side of mutant repression, leaving the bad guys fighting for mutant rights. But it's best not to think too hard, and there's too much going on for it to be boring. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen lend their customary gravitas as the mutant leaders; the latter has a spectacular encounter with the Golden Gate Bridge.

xXx (2002) Vin Diesel seems to have been and gone already, doesn't he? Take a look at last year's Next Big Action Star in this big, noisy James Bond rip-off, in which he plays an extreme sports addict blackmailed by Samuel L Jackson and the US government into jetting over to eastern Europe and infiltrating an outfit called Anarchy 99, which mostly seems to hang out in rave parties. Italian starlet (and daughter of Dario) Asia Argento plays feisty female interest, and a silly but exciting finale launches Mr Diesel down the Danube in pursuit of a speeding biological probe.

XXX: THE NEXT LEVEL (2005) Before he was arrested for soliciting an undercover LA cop while wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, Lee Tamahori directed this bang-a-minute (that's explosions, not sex) action pic aimed at adolescent boys. Ice Cube, who can scowl all he wants but still seems too cuddly for an action hero, busts out of jail to help shouty Samuel Jackson save the free world amid so much animated mayhem that it looks a bit like an episode of Scooby-doo. Willem Dafoe plays the Secretary of Defense. Oooh, I wonder who the villain is.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2001) Terrific (and terrifically sexy) Mexican road movie directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, who also directed the third Harry Potter film. Two teenage buddies (Diego Luna and the unbelievably cute Gael Garcia Bernal) borrow a car and set off in search of a mythical beach called "Heaven's Mouth". They're joined by an older woman - the Spanish wife of a cousin - who has tragic personal reasons of her own for going in search of sea, sand and zipless sex. What makes the film more than just another coming-of-age romp is the omniscient narration which deftly sketches in class differences, political context and reminders of mortality.

YAKUZA, THE (1975) Heavyweights Paul Schrader and Robert Towne were responsible for the screenplay of this interesting east-meets-west thriller in which Robert Mitchum goes to Tokyo and teams up with Japanese superstar Ken Takakura to rescue an American shipping magnate's daughter from local gangsters. There's a lot of double-crossing interwoven with high-toned samurai philosophising, but it all boils down to Takakura's supercool swordplay, while Big Bob crashes through paper screens with a shotgun and finally gets to grips with the ancient Yakuza custom of chopping off one's own pinky finger.

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942, b/w) James Cagney is even scarier in musical comedy mode than he ever was as a gangster. According to Hollywood myth, he threw himself into the role of patriotic song and dance man George M Cohan, composer of "Over There", to counter accusations of leftiness (not that there's anything wrong with that), but the excessive flag-waving might also have had something to do with Pearl Harbor having been hit in mid-production. The vaudeville-trained Cagney pulls off some impressive stiff-legged hoofing, sings (as Cohan himself did) in a sort of sprechstimme patter, and won an Oscar. Compared to modern biopics there's a peculiar lack of conflict as he glides from triumph to triumph, though from a modern viewpoint it's almost refreshing to see a showbiz biopic without trauma, drugs or wife-beating.

YARDS, THE (2000) I found this rather underwhelming when I first saw it, but it's time to take a second look, mainly because a lot of French intellectuals have been beating me over the head with how nervously brilliant it is and I need to get my arguments straight so I can shout back at them. Mark Wahlberg, just out of jail, finds himself dragged off the straight and narrow by unstable chum Joaquim Phoenix and scary uncle James Caan, whose company has been using dodgy means to monopolise maintenance contracts in the subway yards of New York City. In fact, the story's all melodramatic twist and no psychological depth, but it's strong on mood (gloomy) and image (murky), and superbly bolstered by Howard Shore's classical romantic score.

YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, THE (1982) Peter Weir's sizzling romantic thriller set in Indonesia in 1965 during the last days of the Sukarno regime never quite pulls off its ambitious attempt to balance the political situation against more personal concerns, but it's still jolly exciting. The affair between chunky Aussie reporter Mel Gibson and lanky attache assistant Sigourney Weaver is such a scorcher you can almost feel the sexual heat coming off the screen, even if she is about a head taller than him. But even that pales next to Linda Hunt's amazing performance as a male Chinese-Australian photographer who's even shorter than Mel. No wonder they gave her an Oscar.

YEAR OF THE DOG (2007) The directing debut of quirky screenwriter Mike White (School of Rock, The Good Girl) is as off-kilter as you'd expect; it's a melancholy deadpan comedy that's more likely to make you cringe than chuckle, though there's no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments. Lugubrious Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon plays an unmarried fortysomething secretary who goes a little nuts after the untimely death of her beloved beagle. She embezzles money from her employers to donate to animal shelters, sabotages the fur coats of her ghastly sister-in-law (a frighteningly funny Laura Dern), and annoys her next-door neighbour (John C Reilly) by filling her home with barking dogs. The scenes of office life are almost surreal and the canines are cute, but it's often sad and not always comfortable viewing.

YES MEN, THE (2004) Anti-globalisation activists Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum pose as WTO representatives to take the mickey out of free trade policies at international conferences. In Finland, textile executives look bemused as Bichibaum peels off his suit to expose a gold jumpsuit with giant penis attachment, but appear to give serious consideration to his quasi-fascist statements about slavery (or an "involuntarily imported workforce," as he puts it), while a gathering of students in New York State is outraged when he proposes to solve Third World hunger with hamburgers made from recycled excrement. It's not so much a documentary as a filmed diary of some very funny performance art, but we could have done with more of these set-pieces and less of the boys sniggering as they cook up their Chris Morris-style pranks.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000) It's taken me a few years to come to this conclusion, but I really do think Mark Ruffalo is sex on a stick. It was Kenneth Lonergan's low-budget study of a (non-incestuous) sibling relationship that put him on the Hollywood map. He plays a feckless drifter who turns up on the doorstep of his sister, a churchgoing single mother played by the marvellous Laura Linney, just in time to see her plunging into an adulterous affair with her boss (Matthew Broderick, hilariously uptight). Don't let the sentimental-sounding title put you off; this is not a hug-a-minute sobfest but a portrait of real human beings muddling through amid credible bickering, baffled affection and a few laughs.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) Sean Connery's fifth outing as Bond was scripted by Roald Dahl, and features one of John Barry's best scores, with a great title-song sung by Nancy Sinatra. Donald Pleasence plays 007's arch-enemy Blofeld, who hi-jacks space capsules (I always felt sorry for the astronaut who's cut adrift in outer space) and oversees operations from his HQ in a Japanese volcano. Keep an eye on Blofeld's white cat, which makes it quite clear it would rather be anywhere else than in a supervillain's HQ with explosions going off.

YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER (1942, b/w) The second partnership of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth is a likeable piece of fluff in which Fred plays a Broadway hoofer who gets stranded in Buenos Aires and falls for Rita, daughter of a local hotel-owner. The score by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer features numbers such as "Dearly Beloved" and "I'm Old-Fashioned", though the studio drafted in Xavier Cugat and his Latin rhythms to add a token touch of authenticity.

YOU, ME AND DUPREE (2006) Owen Wilson, so laid back he's practically horizontal, plays a homeless slacker buddy who squats on the sofa of newly weds Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson. Hilarity ensues as he shows his bottom, makes the bathroom smelly and accidentally burns down the house, though of course he ends up saving their marriage by teaching Dillon how not to be workaholic. This is the kind of comedy in which guys are eternal adolescents who like hanging out in bars and watching sport, while girls are shrewish killjoys, though the central relationship (between Wilson and Dillon, natch, rather than man and wife) is thrown off-balance by an overstretched turn from Michael Douglas as Kate's dad.

YOU, THE LIVING (2007) The second feature from Swedish director Roy Andersson is filmed in the same deadpan tragicomic style as his first, Songs from the Second Floor, but feels more cohesive and builds up to a stunning apocalyptic final image. In a series of tenuously linked vignettes, a cross-section of characters go about their business in an unnamed city, complaining about their lives, recounting weird dreams, playing brass instruments during a thunderstorm or buying drinks in a bar where it always seems to be last orders. Filmed in washed-out pastels by a full-frontal camera that rarely moves, and with a psychotherapist remarking that all his patients are "egocentric, selfish and ungenerous," it's like Ingmar Bergman reimagined by Luis Buñuel, or maybe Monty Python, and stuffed with surreal and occasionally disturbing details.

YOU'LL NEVER GET RICH (1941, b/w) I should never have taken up tapdancing, because now all I do when I see a Fred Astaire film is stare at him and despair. Here he plays a Broadway choreographer who joins the army. Luckily the guardhouse provides its own blues band, leading to a couple of terrific solos when Fred ends up there. Rita Hayworth (23 years old and stunning) plays a chorus girl who becomes Fred's on/off love interest, and dances so beautifully in their duets you wish they could have made more than two movies together, while Robert Benchley plays the producer whose attempts to cheat on his wife set most of the absurd plot contrivances in motion.

YOUNG ADAM (2003) Ewan McGregor shovels coal on a barge, shows his willy and bonks everything in a skirt, particularly Tilda Swinton as his boss’s wife, in David Mackenzie’s adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s cult novel. It’s set in gloomy 1950s Scotland, where McGregor and his boss (Peter Mullan) fish a corpse out of the canal; as flashbacks reveal, our anti-hero is more closely connected to the dead girl than he’s letting on. Things perk up with a kinky custard scene and the arrival of Therese Bradley in a splendidly vulgar turn as Swinton’s slutty sister, but the predominant tone is moody, broody and understated. It’s also beautifully shot and acted, though you may find yourself thinking "But Molesworth, what is the point of it all?"

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974, b/w) "Please, I beg you! For safety's sake don't humiliate him!" Mel Brooks’ affectionate pastiche of the old Universal horror movies is one of the most consistently funny of his films. Gene Wilder is the mad doc trying to play down his ancestry, Peter Boyle the monster with the zip in his neck (Brooks couldn't use the original bolts because Universal had copyright) and Marty Feldman the hunchback whose bump keeps swapping sides. Too many comic highlights to list here, but look out for the little girl on the see-saw and Gene Hackman as the blind hermit. And there's something sublime and heartstring-tugging about the mad doc and his monster's show-stopping version of "Puttin’ on the Ritz", not least because Boyle (like Feldman and Madeline Kahn) is no longer with us.

YOUNG GUNS II: BLAZE OF GLORY (1990) Everyone sneered at this Brat Pack western because it featured the eminently sneerworthy trio of Emilio Estevez, Lou Diamond Phillips and Kiefer Sutherland prancing around in duster coats as Billy the Kid and pardners. But Kiefer has since gained Hard Man credibility, and there's no sneering at co-stars William Petersen (as Pat Garratt) and James Coburn (as John Chisum) in what turns out to be a fairly decent oater, directed by New Zealander Geoff Murphy with a keen eye for landscape and minimal MTV effects, though we do get Jon Bon Jovi over the closing credits. Noteworthy props include a tobacco-pouch made from buffalo scrotum.

YOUNG POISONER'S HANDBOOK, THE (1995) The best British real-life murder movies tend to be those that aim for black comedy rather than realism. This wicked little gem, directed by Benjamin Ross, was inspired by the case of Graham Young, the so-called "St Albans Poisoner" who in the 1960s systematically spiked sandwiches or cups of tea with antimony, served them to family and workmates and then jotted down the results of these "experiments" in his diaries. Hugh O'Conor plays him as a spooky little swot who runs rings around his credulous therapist (Anony Sher). The off-kilter production design makes Neasden look weirder than anything from Twin Peaks, though the sufferings of the poor victims are never forgotten. Brace yourself for scenes of vomiting.

YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES (1985) This ripping adventure used to be known as Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear - appropriate since it feels more like Indiana Jones than Conan Doyle. Barry Levinson directed, but it's more in the style of one of its producers, Steven Spielberg. A schoolboy Sherlock and bun-loving Watson look like ancestors of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley as they confront bald loonies whose drugged darts trigger violent attacks of special effects, though it's more fun spotting Holmes' incipient pipe and violin habits, the explanation for his later lack of interest in the opposite sex and a first encounter with Moriarty.

YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS (1998) Up until relatively recently, when he went off-piste with The Wicker Man remake, Neil LaBute wrote and directed films about modern relationships so vicious and nasty it was enough to put you off sex for life. This one's an ensemble piece about two couples and their chums, captured in claustrophobic close-up as they go about their business in bars, at the gym or in bedrooms. Jason Patric is a contender for meanest sonofabitch of all time as a gynaecologist who hates women. Ben Stiller and Nastassja Kinski are among the other characters who can't seem to open their mouths without saying something hurtful, with results that are both brutal and wince-makingly funny.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007) Francis Coppola's first film in a decade is a Franco-Italian-Romanian co-production adapted from a novella by Mircea Eliade. It's a mish-mash of Nazis, doppelgangers, lost love, reincarnation and Heroes-type superpowers, which unfortunately is not as much fun as it sounds, since it's also talky, plodding and undermined by a failure to settle down into any particular genre. Coppola probably identifies with the character played by Tim Roth, a 70-year-old linguistics professor struck by lightning in pre-war Bucharest. He finds himself miraculously rejuvenated and able to read books without opening them, though still frets he won't have time to complete his life's work. Alexandra Maria Lara (from Downfall) plays two women in his life, one of whom is found in a cave, singing, "Om, shanti".

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) Michelangelo Antonioni's second film in English failed to repeat the success of Blow-Up, and its laughable view of revolutionary politics would probably have sounded less silly in Italian, with subtitles. Daria Halprin is driving a Buick through the desert towards a meeting with her boss; Mark Frechette kills a cop (maybe) and buzzes her in a stolen plane. They make love in an extraordinary lunar-like landscape, where lots of other couples suddenly materialise and roll around in one big dusty orgy. There's nice billboard photography, and a creepy scene with some feral children, but what makes this obligatory viewing for any self-respecting cinephile is the ending, set to Pink Floyd, in which the trappings of materialism are blown to smithereens, repeatedly, from lots of different angles, and in slo-mo. It's the best movie explosion ever.

ZARDOZ (1974) Delightfully nutty sci-fi fable set in a post-apocalyptic world of 2293. The primitive Brutals live like dogs in the bleak Outlands and worship a huge flying stone head that dishes out life and death. Sean Connery wears a nappy and shows his chest hair as Zed, a super-virile Brutal who stows away in the head and is whisked into the luxuriant Vortex, where hippy-ish intellectuals called Eternals pass their time in cosmic philosophical debates. John Boorman's cult film is beautifully shot pre-New Age psychobabble featuring magic leaves, crystals and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The title, incidentally, is lifted from The WiZARD of OZ.

ZATOICHI (2003) Takeshi Kitano directs himself as Zatoichi, who in the 1960s and 1970s was the protagonist in a popular film series about a blind masseur who roams 19th century Japan, righting wrongs with his expert swordsmanship. Kitano’s remake is his most relaxed and exhilarating film in years, with our enigmatic hero confronted by multiple subplots involving rival gangs, a transvestite geisha and musical peasants en route to a glorious tap-dancing finale that has to be seen to be believed. The weak of stomach should be warned there’s an inordinate amount of computer-generated blood in the fight scenes, but fans of exotic action-comedy-drama are in for a treat.

ZERO EFFECT (1998) Quirky writing-directing debut feature from Jake Kasdan (son of Lawrence). The ever reliable Bill Pullman gives one of his most likeable performances as the addled genius Daryl Zero, a sort of slacker Sherlock Holmes who leads a Howard Hughes-type existence in an LA penthouse, solving most of his cases without budging from his desk and dealing with clients via Ben Stiller, his resentful front-man. Ryan O'Neal plays a stressed-out tycoon who's being blackmailed, and Kim Dickens is the femme fatale who steals our hero's heart, but the standard private eye plot takes second place to the character, who's so odd and endearing you find yourself wishing there were a sequel.

ZODIAC (2007) In terms of serial-killer movies, you could hardly get more of a contrast to the so-called "torture porn" subgenre than David Fincher's engrossing account of the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the 1970s, a decade recreated here impeccably and without cliché. There's a horrible murder and some grim moments, to remind us we're not watching The Sound of Music, but it's a long way from the Grand Guignol of Fincher's own Se7en, and mostly the film concentrates on the effect of the long-running, unresolved case on the lives of the investigators: Robert Downey Jr as a dandyish reporter, Jake Gyllenhaal as an earnest cartoonist who decipers the psycho's coded messages and Mark Ruffalo, somehow managing to transcend his tragic 1970s sideburns and barnet as the cop who was the inspiration for Dirty Harry. The film sticks with these guys long after other, more sensationalist movies would have given up and gone home.

ZOOLANDER (2001) One of those comedies that's passably amusing when seen in the cinema, but increasingly addictive when watched repeatedly in the privacy of one's own home. Ben Stiller co-wrote, directs and sucks in his cheeks as dimwitted male model Derek Zoolander, brainwashed (by poodle-eared Will Ferrell) into trying to assassinate the Malaysian prime-minister. Taking the mickey out of New York's fashion scene should be like shooting fish in a barrel, yet Stiller manages to miss most of his targets. He makes up for it, though, with his "walk off" against rival model Owen Wilson, the gas station scene, Ferrell's brainwashing video or the part where which Ben and Owen try to get files out of a computer. Worth a second look.

ZOOM (2006) Tim Allen plays a washed-up superhero called Zoom who's obliged to train a bunch of misfit kids with super powers so they can save the world. Courteney Cox plays a lady scientist who falls over a lot. This isn't anywhere as smart or funny as Sky High, and I guarantee you'll want to murder the six-year-old brat with superstrength long before the insultingly lame climax, but I laughed when Allen whipped up a smoothie with his super-fast vibrating finger. Critics were vitriolic, but it's for kids, for heaven's sake. Undemanding kids, at that.

ZULU (1964) Cy Endfield's epic recreation of the Siege of Rorke's Drift in 1879, when 139 mostly Welsh troops held off 4000 Zulu warriors, is still one of the most rousing battle movies ever filmed, and John Prebble's intelligent screenplay avoids most of the usual jingoistic pitfalls. Stanley Baker leads the British contingent, which includes Michael Caine in his first leading role, improbably cast as an upper-class lieutenant. My favourite bit is the thunderous sound of the approaching Zulu hordes – once heard, never forgotten.

WA-WR

2010-04-16T00:55:00.008+02:00

WAG THE DOG (1997) During a lull in production of the bloated sci-fi epic Sphere, Barry Levinson knocked out this super little satire (reportedly screened on Iraqi TV by order of Saddam Hussein), and it's a measure of the lack of trust we now have in governments that, even though it's not exactly subtle, hardly any of it seems far-fetched. The American president is accused of molesting an adolescent girl just before an election, so his aides (Robert de Niro and Anne Heche) draft in a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to cook up a phoney war against Albania to distract from the scandal. "News" footage is shot in a studio and digitally enhanced, Willie Nelson is drafted in to compose patriotic anthems and a bogus hero goes Missing in Action. Makes you wonder.

WAGES OF FEAR, THE (1953, b/w) If ever there were a challenger to Fritz Lang as the most downbeat director of all time, it would be Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose films are little masterpieces of misanthropy. Yves Montand plays one of a quartet of dislikeable European expats stranded in a Latin American village so sleazy and hellish that they leap at the chance of driving two nitroglycerine-laden trucks on a 300-mile trek over bumpy roads, resulting in one of the most nerve-racking white-knuckle rides of all time. Watch out for the cigarette-rolling scene - which is where my mum, bless her, decided to switch channels to see what was on the other side, thus depriving me of one of cinema's classic moments. Luckily, I've since caught up with the film in its entirety.

WAH-WAH (2006) Richard E Grant makes a quietly impressive writing-directing debut with this droll semi-autobiographical drama about growing up with an alcoholic dad (Gabriel Byrne, wonderful) who's Minister of Education in 1960s Swaziland. Emily Watson is delightful as the feisty American air-hostess who becomes young Ralph's stepmum after his real mother (Miranda Richardson) elopes with her lover. The likes of Celia Imrie and Julie Walters are on hand to flesh out the White Mischief-type caricatures of snobby, boozy, adulterous Brits being waited on by black servants or mounting an amateur production of Camelot for Princess Margaret, but there's a generosity of spirit towards everyone (except, notably, Richardson's character) that makes this slip down nicely, despite some awkward anachronistic dialogue and what appears to be a Swaziland screening of A Clockwork Orange several years prior to the film's 1971 premiere.

WAITRESS (2007) The death of Adrienne Shelly, whose kooky-looking face will be familiar to anyone who ever saw a Hal Hartley pic, inevitably overshadows this indie chickflick, her third movie as writer-director. Shelly also co-stars, but the central character is Jenna (Keri Russell); they're both waitresses at a hicksville diner somewhere in the South. Jenna's abusive husband (Jeremy Sisto) has got her pregnant, but her doctor (Nathan Fillion) is dishy and she finds solace in making pies with whimsical names such as "I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie". Shelly completed it just before her murder, though one likes to think that, given the opportunity, she would have tightened up the editing, since it's awfully flabby in the middle. At least the treacly blue collar wisdom is offset by a welcome dash of emotional realism.

WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) Three villains terrorising blind Audrey Hepburn add up to a classic thriller, albeit one that betrays its theatrical origins by rarely straying from the main set of the heroine's basement apartment, where she's unwittingly harbouring a doll stuffed with heroin. The 1998 Broadway revival of Frederick Knott's play was notable for the casting of Quentin Tarantino as the baddle-in-chief, but I'm told he couldn't hold a candle to Alan Arkin, chewing the scenery and intimidating his victim by wafting silk scarves across her face, though you do wonder why he bothers with his wacky disguises when she can't even see them. But never mind, because no-one can shriek, "Gasoline!" or trip over corpses quite as elegantly as our Audrey, the world's chic-est blind person.

WAKING LIFE (2001) Richard Linklater is one of those film-makers (Steven Soderbergh, who makes a "guest appearance" here, is another) who manages to alternate commercial pix, such as School of Rock, with more experimental stuff like this free-floating meditation on dreams, consciousness and the meaning of life. It was shot with real actors on digital film before being rotoscope-animated - a technique later used by the same director on his Philip K Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly. The effect's a bit like the constantly morphing doodlings of a myopic Rolf Harris suffering from the shakes and odd fits of surrealism as a young man drifts through a succession of dreams, meeting folk who rattle on endlessly about free will, existentialism and so forth. Terrific fun if you're stoned, I would imagine; everyone else will find the imagery thrilling, the speechifying indigestible.

WALK THE LINE (2005) Rare indeed is the showbiz biopic that isn't built from generic clichés such as The Rags-to-Riches Rise and The Struggle Against Personal Demons (generally some form of childhood tragedy, followed by drink and drugs), and James Mangold's Johnny Cash film never attempts to go against the grain. It is, however, exceptionally well-crafted, and features a brace of show-stopping performances from Joaquin Phoenix as the Man in Black and Oscar-winning Reese Witherspoon as the love of his life, the impossibly chirpy June Carter, making it as much romance as biopic. Both stars, amazingly, do their own singing, though I daresay Country is a lot easier to pull off than, say, Soul.

WALKABOUT (1970) It would be interesting to know how many men of my generation were reared on erotic fantasies of Jenny Agutter. Young Jenny, with her school prefect voice, is perfectly cast here as an ever-so-English teenager, stranded in the Australian outback with her little brother after their father commits suicide. David Gumpilil plays the adolescent Aborigine who interrupts his walkabout to look after them, only to be met with incomprehension when he embarks on a courtship ritual. Nicolas Roeg directs the clash between Nature and so-called Civilisation, and was also responsible for the dazzling desert camerawork with its creepy-crawlies and decomposing kangaroos.

WALKER, THE (2006) Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, may have fallen out of fashion lately, but he continues to write and direct intelligent films for grown-ups. This relatively low-budget affair (it takes place in Washington DC but was mostly shot on the Isle of Man) features a showstopping performance from Woody Harrelson as Carter Page III, a gay Southern gent who squires wealthy wives (Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin) whose powerful husbands are otherwise occupied. As in Schrader's American Gigolo, 28 years ago, a fetishistically detailed way of life (toupee! cufflinks!) is disrupted by murder. The story works better as character study than thriller, but what a character! Page is a witty, refreshingly principled amalgam of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, which makes him excellent company amid the moral decay of modern America.

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (2007) John C Reilly, solid-gold supporting actor, finally gets to play the lead in this smashing spoof, which riffs on clichés from every music biopic from Ray to Walk the Line, as well as brilliantly pastiching every musical style of the past 50 years, from blues to rap. There's the obligatory early trauma (a tragic accident with a machete), handicap (Dewey loses his sense of smell), and the usual wives, drugs and crass miscasting, of which Jack Black as Paul McCartney is the most out-to-lunch example. Director and co-writer Jake Kasdan avoids the anything-goes policy of Scary Movie-style spoofs to keep it savvy as well as silly, while the hand (metaphorical if not actual) of co-writer, producer and comedy guru Judd Apatow can be seen in some gratuitous (and very funny) male nudity.

WALKING TALL (2004) I was looking forward to some mindless bone-crunching vigilante violence, but this tale of an army vet who cleans up his hometown is disappointingly PG-rated. Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock comes home to find the sawmill replaced by a casino where the dice are loaded, crack-cocaine is on sale to minors and his girlfriend is working as a (PG-rated) stripper. The bad guys attack the Rock with automatic weapons; he responds by clobbering them with lengths of wood and small trees, while his girlfriend strips down to an orange bra for the final shoot-out.

WALL STREET (1987) All together now – "Lunch is for wimps!" Or how about, "Greed is good?" Or, "If you need a friend, get a dog." Strange to think this rather schematic "exposé" of 1980s insider trading, written and directed by Oliver Stone, once tapped into the zeitgeist. Did we really take Charlie Sheen seriously as an actor? But Michael Douglas' Oscar-winning performance as Gordon Gekko, the tycoon who leads young Sheen astray, is as juicy as ever. And – red braces and striped shirts aside - you can't help reflecting that, when it comes to financial malpractice in high places, nothing much has changed.

WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (2005) I was looking forward to slagging off Nick Park's latest claymation romp to show how daringly iconoclastic I was, but no dice - Wallace and Gromit are as charming as ever in this affectionate horror movie send-up. The cheese-loving inventor and his dog (not just a loyal hound but business partner, housewife, fixer) try to catch the mutated rabbit that's threatening to devour the village's annual crop of giant vegetables. The painstaking stop-motion, Peter Sallis' Yorkshire accent, vicars and village fêtes all hark back to Watch with Mother, though kiddy TV was never this stuffed with puns, double entendres ("Call me Totty" says Helena Bonham Carter's lady of the manor) and so many pop culture references you'd need several viewings to catch them all. We all need a little Gromit in our lives.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008) If anyone is still labouring under the misapprehension that cartoons are just for kids, Ari Folman's animated documentary ought to set them straight. This multinational production, with mostly Hebrew dialogue, examines the mindset of Israeli soldiers complicit in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Folman (or his animated avatar) has no recollection of the atrocity, so travels around, talking to middle-aged former soldiers like himself, whose accounts are clouded by suppressed memory, dreams and what a psychiatrist calls "Protective Dissociation". More than a traditional documentary could ever do, it captures something of the subjective, almost hallucinatory experience of fighting in a war, and at times the animation is startlingly beautiful. But the ending, where animation gives way to real news footage, is devastating.

WANDERERS, THE (1979) The teenage members of the Bronx street gang of the title aren’t as tough as they look. They’re still anxious about incurring parental disapproval, overawed by strong women and scared witless by a gang called The Ducky Boys. Philip Kaufman’s rambling but amusing coming-of-age pic boasts a fine ensemble cast (whatever happened to pint-sized dynamo Linda Manz?) and a superb soundtrack. But this is 1963, President Kennedy is about to visit Dallas, and, according to a Dylan lookalike glimpsed singing in a folk club, "The Times They Are a-Changin’".

WANTED (2008) Timur Bekmambetov, who scored a hit in his native Russia with Night Watch, applies his kinetic film-making approach to this preposterous geek's fantasy in which a mild-mannered office worker (James McAvoy showing hitherto unsuspected muscle) learns his recently deceased father was a super-assassin and that a mysterious organization called The Fraternity now expects him to step into the breach and kill targets specially selected by (I kid you not) woven textiles. Angelina Jolie's the foxy mentor who shows him how to make bullets go round corners, Morgan Freeman's the dapper chap in charge. If you can get past an attitude to collateral damage that is cavalier, to say the least (at one point an entire trainful of passengers is casually dropped off a bridge) there's plenty of whizz-bang comic-book action.

WAR (2007) With Jason Statham and Jet Li sharing top-billing, you'd be forgiven for expecting a prime slice of lunkhead action, but alas, Philip G. Atwell can't resist ruining the fight scenes with all the annoying directing tics he picked up while making rap videos, and the plot is that deadly combo of complicated and uninteresting. Jason's a vengeful FBI agent, Jet's an assassin who pits Chinese Triads and Japanese Yakuza against each other, Yojimbo-style, on the streets of San Francisco (played, not very convincingly, by the streets of Vancouver). There's an entertaining if preposterous plot twist in the final reel, but it's too little, too late.

WAR GAME, THE (1965, b/w) Peter Watkins' film about a thermonuclear strike on Kent was produced by the BBC, which famously refused to broadcast it, though it did receive a limited cinema release, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary even though it's fiction. It still packs a punch. Making a virtue of a limited budget and pioneering faux documentary techniques, Watkins presents a picture that was the opposite of his government's refusal to acknowledge the realities of nuclear war. Mass evacuation, a blast that can melt eyeballs 27 miles away, firestorms, execution of looters and painful death from radiation sickness are brought home with an immediacy that has never since been equalled.

WAR LORD, THE (1965) Interesting mediaeval epic starring Charlton Heston as a Norman knight called Chrysagon De Lacrue whose mission to defend a coastal village from Frisian invaders gets sidetracked when he falls in love with a peasant maiden called Bronwyn (Rosemary Forsyth). Although shot in and around Hollywood, it has a strong European flavour; intimate relations, feudal family ties and ye olde druidic religion take precedence over stonking great battle scenes, though the climax doesn't stint on catapults, battering rams and barbarians at the gate.

WAR OF THE ROSES, THE (1989) Danny De Vito's second film as director reunites him with Michal Douglas and Kathleen Turner, the two stars of Romancing the Stone, but far from being a sweetly romantic follow-up, this is one of the blackest comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, as well as one of the bleakest portraits of a marriage since the heyday of Ingmar Bergman. De Vito's lawyer acts as an ineffectual referee as we watch the couple's relationship degenerating from petty point-scoring via mutual antagonism to all-out self-destruction. He runs over her cat! She locks him in the sauna! He saws the heels off her shoes! She feeds him paté made from his dog!

WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005) With its scenes of destruction rained down on a panicking populace, Steven Spielberg's version of the HG Wells classic often feels more in tune with the zeitgeist than the more obviously politically engaged Munich. The director steers clear of the gung-ho jingoism of, say, Independence Day and, other than shifting the setting from Woking to New York, stays fairly close to his source material. Though many of us would happily feed Dakota Fanning to the Martians, dockyard worker Tom Cruise sets about getting her and his teenage son to Boston without any of them being vaporised. But although cast in the hero role, Cruise is as powerless as everyone else when the alien invaders wreak havoc. The mob scenes are even more terrifying than the tripods from outer space, and if the action flags when Cruise and co take refuge in a cellar with a survivalist (Tim Robbins) these scenes nevertheless raise some pertinent points about everyman's response to the threat of annihilation.

WARGAMES (1983) Young Matthew Broderick stars in this fitfully amusing teenage Fail Safe made back in the days when domestic computers were still a novelty. Broderick uses his to boost his high-school grades, impress his girlfriend and hack into video-game companies to grab sneak previews of their coming attractions, but little does he know that Global Thermonuclear War is not just another variation of Space Invaders, and his gleeful decision to nuke Las Vegas precipitates a fullscale countdown to Armageddon. Though, personally, I prefer Quake.

WARLOCK (1959) Despite the title, this near-classic western with interesting homoerotic undercurrents has nothing to do with witchcraft. The frontier town of Warlock is being terrorised by a gang of outlaws behaving like binge-drinking yobs with revolvers, so the locals hire dapper gunslinger Henry Fonda and his devoted sidekick (Anthony Quinn) to clean up. Meanwhile, bandit Richard Widmark gets fed up with his colleagues’ unsporting habit of shooting opponents in the back and switches sides, while things are further complicated with the arrival of Dorothy Malone as Quinn’s vengeful old flame. Watch out for DeForest Kelley, better known as Star Trek’s McCoy, as a smiling outlaw called Curly.

WARLOCK (1989) Julian Sands flexed his evil muscle in this engaging supernatural romp scripted by David Twohy, who went on to write and direct the estimable Pitch Black. Julian plays a devil-worshipper pursued from 17th century Boston to 20th century Los Angeles by a witchfinder (pelt-wearing Richard E Grant, with Scottish accent) and has oodles of fun plucking the eyes from spiritualists' heads, whipping up flying potions from the boiled fat of unbaptised children and hexing Lori Singer so that - shock horror! - she ages 20 years in a single day. "Why didn't he just kill me? Nothing could be worse than this!"

WARLORDS, THE (2008) Hollywood's last big epic, 300, was more like a cartoon than a serious live action movie, so aficionados of historical spectaculars could do a lot worse than look east for their fix of big battle scenes. This magnificent 19th century Chinese war epic offers a well-judged balance of the personal and the political, and stars three of Asian cinema's best-known actors; Jet Li (whose delivery of his native Mandarin is in marked contrast to the woodenness of his English language excursions) plays a defeated general who falls in with some bandits led by Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro (both from House of Flying Daggers), but not before he has inadvertently fallen in love with Lau's wife. The three of them pull off an astonishing military triumph, but Li's ambitiousness increasingly alienates his companions, and tragedy looms. The story is based on the same historical events that also inspired Chang Cheh's 1973 kung-fu classic Blood Brothers.

WARRIOR KING (2005) Tony Jaa, Thailand's answer to Jackie Chan, travels to Sydney in search of the evil ladyboy and her henchmen who killed his father and kidnapped his elephants in this chop-socky yarn with at least three fight scenes (filmed without wirework or special effects) which make it worth tolerating the stupid plot and dialogue. One's a rumble with a whirling capoeira dancer, another's a bone-crunching demolition of about two zillion men in black, but the highlight is a four-minute Steadicam fighting ascent of a staircase in a vast brothel improbably topped by a restaurant serving endangered species to decadent Australians. If there's a message here, it's that you don't kidnap Tony Jaa's elephants if you know what's good for you.

WARRIOR, THE (2000) Asif Kapadia's debut feature, set in the unspecified past amid the plains and mountains of north-west India, is a historical epic that has more in common with samurai movies or spaghetti westerns than Bollywood. The title character is ordered by his lord to sack a village that has failed to pay tribute, but sees something that makes him throw away his sword and renounce violence, leading to a cycle of loss, revenge and redemption. Spare but spectacular landscapes, generic story elements and minimal dialogue combine in an elegant piece of myth-making.

WARRIORS, THE (1979) "The chicks are packed! The chicks are packed!" Walter Hill's grungy gang movie became notorious for allegedly inspiring real-life violence, but despite an ad campaign calculated to rattle the bourgeoisie ("These are the armies of the night!") it's more epic fantasy than gritty realism. Michael Beck (one of those "where is he now?" leading men) heads a bunch of New York street punks who are framed for the assassination of a gang leader at a big pow-wow in the Bronx and forced to make their way home to their Coney Island turf through enemy territory occupied by outlandishly-dressed rival gangs egged on by a silky-voiced radio announcer. Inspired by, of all things, Xenophon's Anabasis.

WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS (1999) French enfant terrible François Ozon adapted this four-hander from an unperformed play by the brilliant German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's set in an impeccably 1970s apartment – all orange sofas and shagpile – where the relationship between a middle-aged insurance salesman (a marvellously camp Bernard Giraudeau) and a pretty young boy he picked up has degenerated into petty power-playing. Eventually the men's respective girlfriends turn up, leading to everybody shaking his or her booty in a delightful samba number. Not for all tastes, but aficonados of Fassbinder's perverse sense of humour will be in seventh heaven.

WATERWORLD (1995) This watery sci-fi adventure is set in a future when the planet has been flooded by melting polar icecaps. Originally dismissed as a turkey, it's actually not a bad little B-movie. Problem is, the budget was $200 million. The preternaturally humourless Kevin Costner plays The Mariner, a samurai-like drifter with webbed feet who gets lumbered with a horrible child and a woman in a fish-skin Wonderbra. The perfunctory plot consists of everyone searching for a mythical place called Dryland while trying to avoid Dennis Hopper and his band of pirates, whose heavy nicotine habit has earned them the nickname The Smokers. Yes, but where do they find all those dry cigarettes?

WAY OF THE GUN, THE (2000) Any film-maker willing to place a pregnant woman in peril is dicing with bad taste. Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for his Usual Suspects screenplay, makes his directing debut with a self-consciously postmodern shoot-em-up that ends with a Caesarean section during a gun-battle in a Mexican whorehouse. Way to go, Christopher! Ryan Philippe and Benicio del Toro play a couple of sociopaths who kidnap a mother-to-be (Juliette Lewis) and hold her to ransom, only to find they're dealing with psychos even more ruthless than themselves. Luckily one of them is played by James Caan, who brings a welcome touch of class to the proceedings.

WAY OUT WEST (1937, b/w) This comic western is one of Laurel and Hardy's finest hours. Stan and Ollie trek out to the frontier town of Brushwood Gulch to hand over deeds to a goldmine to the orphan who's rightfully inherited them, only to fall victim to the wiles of a crooked bar owner played by James Finlayson, the duo's regular sparring partner. Among the highlights are Stan eating his hat and lighting his finger, an inspired soft-shoe shuffle and the duo's rendition of "Trail of the Lonesome Pine", which some 40 years later surprised everyone by becoming a UK Top 20 hit.

WAYNE’S WORLD (1991) Grown-up comedians Mike Myers and Dana Carvey put on ridiculous wigs to play Wayne and Garth, a couple of brain-dead teenagers who present a cable TV show from their Illinois basement. Viewers who fail to get the joke will be left scratching their heads at the starting-post, but anyone attuned to the comic bouillabaisse of pop culture references (Scooby-Doo!) coupled to a headbanging rock n roll soundtrack and a clutch of slangy catch-phrases will definitely want to catch the best movie since Citizen Kane - not!

WAZ (2007) Tom Shankland, who went on to direct the interesting horror movie The Children, made a striking low-budget feature debut with this dark (in both senses of the word) thriller set in New York but shot in the urban wastelands of Belfast. Stellan Skarsgård plays a hardboiled cop, Melissa George is his rookie partner, and they're on the trail of a serial killer who leaves horribly maimed corpses with 'W∆Z' carved into the flesh. There's some nasty torture-porny stuff near the end, but Clive Bradley's screenplay is as much concerned with knotty ethical considerations as gore. The sound quality's bad, but that might just be the version I caught, and you'd never guess there's only one genuine American (Selma Blair) in a cast which also includes hot up-and-comers like Tom Hardy (Bronson) and Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky).

WE ARE MARSHALL (2006) Most sports films are about winning; this real-life drama is more about cobbling together enough players to get on the pitch in the first place. In 1970, the small West Virginia town of Marshall loses its entire university football team in a plane crash. Some townsfolk, Ian McShane among them, prefer not be reminded of their bereavement; others hire an outsider (Matthew McConaughey, in quirky character as opposed to matinee idol mode) to coach the raggle-taggle bunch of replacements with masses of pep-talk and homespun wisdom. But hey, we're talking about American football, so once the plane has gone down it's hard to care.

WE DIVE AT DAWN (1943, b/w) Spiffing British submarine movie set during WW2, with Captain John Mills taking time off from playing the field and cultivating his designer stubble to lead the crew of the Sea Tiger on a mission to track the German battleship Brandenburg into the Baltic and sink it. Exceptionally well-drawn characters and a credibly scruffy evocation of everyday life in cramped conditions make this a refreshing alternative to the Hollywood-style submarine pic, but the film's not without tense action scenes and machines that go "ping".

WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) American auteur James Gray may be the darling of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, but his films still lack that je ne sais quoi. Fab title, and great cast, mood and soundtrack, but his would-be Greek tragedy plots and characters - especially the women - are severely undernourished. This is set in late 1980s Brooklyn, where coke-sniffing Joaquin Phoenix runs a nightclub with Russian Mafia links while his father (Robert Duvall) and brother (Mark Wahlberg) are among the cops preparing to clamp down on drug-dealing. Conflict of interest there, then. Events reconciling the brothers are all too predictable and rife with period anachronism, though throw up incidental thrills such as a gripping car chase through torrential rain, and smokin' hot Eva Mendes' va-va-voom red strapless frock.

WEATHER MAN, THE (2005) As if to atone for the relentless rumbustiousness of his Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Gore Verbinksi goes in the opposite direction here and directs a family drama that starts off glum and just gets glummer. Nicolas Cage, so low-key he's almost bearable, plays a Chicago weather-man whose public hates him so much it keeps pelting him with fast food in the street - resulting in much double-edged product placement for well-known burger chains. He's estranged from his wife, his daughter is fat, his son is borderline delinquent and his father (Michael Caine underplaying nicely) is dying. Cage's problem, it seems, is that he needs to move on, though, atypically for a mainstream release, this is never addressed directly. Not exactly fun, but rather refreshing in its refusal to round everything off with a Hollywood hug.

WEIGHT OF WATER, THE (2000) Kathryn Bigelow directed this flawed but compelling thriller which intercuts between two different timelines. The first concerns the axe-murder of two women in 1873 on an island off the coast of New England, with Sarah Polley superb as a Norwegian immigrant who fingers the culprit. The second, set in the present-day, stars Catherine McCormack as a photographer who charters a yacht to research the crime and becomes obsessed with it, while her husband (Sean Penn) is ogling her brother's girlfriend. And who can blame him when she's played by a frequently topless Liz Hurley? Both tales are absorbing enough; the problem is they never really connect with each other.

WEIRD SCIENCE (1985) Everyone rubbished John Hughes' wayward teen fantasy when it came out, but it seems to have to acquired a devoted following all the same, probably made up of people who were impressionable eight-year-olds when they first saw it. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith play a couple of nerds who use computers to create their ideal woman (Kelly LeBrock), with chaotic results. The best bits are the scenes involving a pre-Aliens Bill Paxton, altogether splendid as an obnoxious older brother called Chet, who leers and snarls things like, "How about a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?"

WELCOME HOME, ROSCOE JENKINS (2008) While Will Smith has gone from strength to strength since the Bad Boys movies, his erstwhile co-star Martin Lawrence has made less of a mark with a run of comedies that have failed dismally to engage either intellect or funny bone. This one, alas, is no exception, though I guess we should be thankful that it provides employment for fine Afro-American actors such as James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery. It's the latest variation on the Sweet Home Alabama formula, with the star playing a successful LA talk show host who reluctantly heads south for his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, gets taken down a peg or two, and learns the importance of family values. The usual yawn-making homilies are served up, while Lawrence's fiancée is sneered at for taking the sexual initiative and not wanting babies.

WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD (2002) George Clooney produced and steals the show in a smallish role as a wheelchair-bound safecracking expert covered in tattoos. For their debut feature, Anthony and Joe Russo chose to remake the classic Italian heist comedy, Big Deal on Madonna Street, with amiable if not particularly memorable results. An exceptionally strong cast (including Sam Rockwell, William H Macy and Patricia Clarkson) hams it up something rotten as a clutch of bungling crooks who plot to rob a pawnshop in the suburbs of Cleveland.

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (2003) As action stars go, The Rock (né Dwayne Johnson) is cooler and altogether more simpatico than Vin Diesel. "Have fun," says Arnold Schwarzenegger in a split-second cameo at the start of this Indiana Jones-style romp in which the former wrestling champ plays a "retrievals expert" dispatched to the Amazon jungle in search of his boss’s son - American Pie alumnus Seann William Scott providing dumb comic relief. The plot’s just an excuse for our hero to show off his WWE skills in a series of face-offs, but it’s done with good humour (he jots down recipes in between rumbles), spectacular if fanciful stunts (nary a scratch after tumbling down a mountain) and a heartwarming moral message as the mismatched buddies lead local rebels against ruthless American capitalist Christopher Walken.

WENT THE DAY WELL? (1942, b/w) Tarantino-esque violence is the last thing you'd expect from Ealing Studios, but just take a look at this nifty slice of wartime propaganda adapted from a story by Graham Greene. Bramley End may seem to be the sort of idyllic English village we've all seen in many a cheery comedy, but blow me if it isn't the target for an advance guard of German parachutists. Before you know it, one of them is bayonetting the postmistress, the Home Guard is being blasted off its bicycles and the local Squire turns out to be - horror of horrors - a sneaky German spy! So it's down to a shower of landgirls, poachers and evacuees to fight back against the dastardly Hun.

WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, THE (2000) If you're looking for the ultimate art film experience Béla Tarr's wilfully abstruse adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance may well be it. Murky black and white photography? Agonisingly long takes in which nothing happens? German actors dubbed into Hungarian so it looks as though the film is badly synched? Check, check, check. There's a powerful scene in which a mob smashes up a hospital, but it's a long time coming, as is the Biggest Whale in the World, a fairground attraction that's the talk of the town for most of the film. Lulled by the sound of townsfolk tramping endlessly along streets, I drifted into a light coma, but at least I can now brag about having sat through it, and it's reassuring to know there are film-makers out there still willing to test an audience's limits.

WE'RE NO ANGELS (1989) Not so much a remake as a reworking of the 1955 Humphrey Bogart comedy about escaped convicts with hearts of gold, directed by Neil Jordan from a well-crafted screenplay by David Mamet. Sean Penn steals the show as a dimwitted lag who takes his priestly disguise too seriously, just about making up for some shameless mugging from Robert De Niro as his co-escapee. Demi Moore plays an unmarried mum, and the fine supporting cast includes the irreplaceable Ray McAnally. Nothing to write home about, but there are worse ways of frittering away 106 minutes.

WEST BEIRUT (1998) Impressive little first feature from Ziad Doueiri, who worked as Quentin Tarantino's second unit cameraman before returning to his Lebanese roots to make this lively tragicomic rites-of-passage story set during the civil war that devastated his homeland from 1975 to the end of the 1980s. The film-maker's brother Rami plays Tarek, a Muslim teenager who, with his friend, is overjoyed when their school closes and treats the war-torn city as an adventure playground until he falls for a Christian girl and things start to get complicated.

WEST SIDE STORY (1961) There are moments when this energetic film version of the hit broadway musical, set amid the slum gangs of New York in the 1950s, makes Baz Luhrmann's more recent teen update of Romeo and Juliet look almost arthritic. Jerome Robbins completed several numbers before his perfectionism got him sacked, but his contributions - which include the show-stopping America - figure among the highlights. Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, both dubbed, are not the most convincing Maria and Tony, but George Chakiris is hot stuff as her brother Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, and Rita Moreno (also dubbed though not so as you’d complain) brings the house down with her "I wanna be in A-meh-ree-kah!" "I Feel Pretty" makes me break out in a rash, but I’ve always been more partial to "Gee, Officer Krupke."

WESTWORLD (1973) Many years before he reworked a similar idea into Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton wrote and directed this sci-fi cautionary tale set in a futuristic theme-park where holidaymakers can act out their heroic fantasies against realistic-looking androids. Of course, something goes horribly wrong and the robots start slaughtering their human opponents for real, leaving Richard Benjamin (an actor only slightly more animated than the robots surrounding him) running for his life from an unstoppable gunslinger played by a blank-faced Yul Brynner as the android-equivalent of Jurassic Park's velociraptors. Great fun, though I always fretted excessively about the plight of the poor technicians trapped in their control-room with a dwindling air supply.

WHALE RIDER (2003) Likeable if lightweight New Zealand movie about Pai, a 12-year-old Maori whose grumpy grandfather refuses to appoint her next-in-line for tribal chief because she's a girl, even though she's demonstrably better at stick-shaking, tiki-tiki chants and diving for whales' teeth than her chubby male counterparts. Keisha Castle-Hughes was Oscar-nominated for her sprightly performance, and there's plenty of whale action for those who like that sort of thing. I tasted whale sushi once when I was in Japan; it was delicious.

WHAT A GIRL WANTS (2003) What a perky New York teenager called Daphne wants is to fly to Blighty (to the obligatory soundtrack blast of "London Calling" by The Clash) and hook up with the dad she's never met. And what do you know? He's a fabulously wealthy peer living in a country mansion in the middle of London, and he's played by Colin Firth! This update of The Reluctant Debutante will make your jaw drop in disbelief at its preposterous portrait of England as a theme-park of snooty aristos and society balls. Will Daphne (played by the appealing Amanda Byne) show us stuffy Brits how to loosen up and shake our booty? Yes! She showed me, anyhow; I ended up enjoying every last stupid minute of it.

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME (1998) The visionary New Zealand director Vincent Ward came a cropper with this update of the Orpheus legend, a must-see for aficionados of monumental cinematic folly. Robin Williams is at his most ingratiating as a dead paediatrician who finds heaven resembles one of his wife's Alpine landscape paintings. When she commits suicide, he sets out to save her from an underworld packed with dead souls and rotting brickwork. The result is kitsch on an awe-inspiring scale - an imbroglio of fine art, religion, mythology and New Age whimsy, co-starring Cuba Gooding Jr as an angel. Enough said.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (1972) Wooden acting, Ennio Morricone music, gratuituous shower scenes, sicko sex killings and a plot with more twists than a pretzel? Yes, it's giallo time as Massimo Dallamano puts a peculiarly Italian spin on an Edgar Wallace yarn photographed, rather prettily, in and around London and the banks of the Thames. Bearded smoothie Fabio Testi plays the frankly rather unpleasant hero, a gym teacher at an all-girl's school who's not only cheating on his wife with one of his pupils, but who seems more interested in getting his rocks off than in the brutal murder taking place only a few feet away. "Would you know him if you saw him again?" someone asks a witness right in front of a roomful of suspects, to which she replies, "Maybe". Hey, guess what happens to her.

WHAT LIES BENEATH (2000) I don't know about you, but I'm quite happy watching Michelle Pfeiffer wandering around and looking nervous in colour-coordinated knitwear, which is just as well since Robert Zemeckis' upmarket chiller consists of little else. With big-name stars, chic design and slick camerawork - this is the exact opposite of The Blair Witch Project. Michelle plays a highly-strung Vermont housewife who suspects her neighbour might have murdered his wife. Her husband (Harrison Ford in a pumped-up supporting role) is sceptical, but Michelle's curiosity - and her odd habit of jumping fully-clothed into the pond at the bottom of her garden - prises the lid off a can of supernatural worms and a last half-hour of deftly-orchestrated woman-in-peril tension. It's a ghost story so glossy that even the ghost is played by a supermodel (Amber Valletta).

WHAT WOMEN WANT (2000) If you've ever dreamed of seeing Mel Gibson prancing around in Wonderbra and pantyhose, this rather heavy-handed romantic comedy is for you. The onetime Mad Max plays a divorced Chicago ad executive who's passed over for promotion in favour of Helen Hunt but discovers, after an electric shock, that he can hear what women are thinking. (And what are they thinking? Not a lot, according to this screenplay.) Our man duly learns how to find Marisa Tomei's G-spot, bonds with his teenage daughter and tries to make life difficult for Hunt but - naturally - ends up falling in love with her.

WHATEVER (1999) The English title's snappier than the original French one: Extension du domaine de la lutte. Philippe Harel wrote, directed and took the central role in this adaptation of the drolly nihilistic novel by literary enfant terrible Michel Houllebecq. The main character's a computer progammer who goes through all the motions of life – cigarettes, supermarkets, porn movies, vomiting – while failing dismally to make any meaningful personal connections. A business trip lands him with a colleague (José Garcia, poignant and hilarious) even sadder than he is. A must-see movie for aficionados of deadpan humour, soulless provincial architecture, discos from hell and the Existential legacy of Albert Camus.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962, b/w) Robert Aldrich's classic slice of American Grotesque, starring two of cinema's greatest screen divas, started a trend for casting ageing actresses in campy Gothic horror movies. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis play reclusive sisters locked in an abusive relationship in their crumbling Hollywood mansion; Blanche (Crawford), an actress confined to a wheelchair following a car accident, is tormented by Davis as "Baby Jane Hudson", an increasingly unhinged former child star whose dreams of a comeback are encouraged by sleazy piano-player Victor Buono, scenting an opportunity for easy money. No-one can play the terrorised victim like our Joan, but it was Bette, who dresses up in ringlets and a little girl frock to sing, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy", who got the Oscar nomination.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1987) Let's hear it for the showbiz biopic, a genre that positively thrives on its clichés. They're all present and correct in the rags-to-riches rise of Tina Turner - marriage to abusive Ike (Laurence Fishburne, oozing wolfish charm), solo breakaway and triumphant comeback as a rocking middle-aged housewife with shagpile wig and extra-capacity lungs. Angela Bassett mimes "River Deep, Mountain High" and nails the songstress's mannerisms to perfection, though the actress has such well-developed biceps that you can't help wondering why, when her husband hits her, she doesn't just thump him right back.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… (1989) I've never seen the point of that orgasm scene in the deli. What is Meg Ryan trying to prove to Billy Crystal, exactly? That she can fake a climax in a public place? But what really gets me is that it's totally out of character, since up until this point there's been absolutely nothing to suggest that Sally might be capable of such a wild and crazy extrovert act. Otherwise this is a serviceable romantic comedy, even if it does star two of my least favourite actors in the universe.

WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY (1996) Personally, I prefer the French title – Chacun cherche son chat (and try repeating that several times at top speed) – but either way Cédric Klapisch's film is a charming slice of Parisian life not a million miles from Eric Rohmer territory. Chloë is a wan-looking make-up artist who returns home from holiday to find that her cat, Gris-Gris, has gone missing. During the subsequent search Chloë makes new friends and sees how her newly fashionable quartier – the Bastille part of the 11th arrondissement – is gradually losing its traditional character thanks to an influx of trendy types and hip new cafes squeezing out the real people. I lived in this part of Paris for four years, by the way; at the beginning it seemed a bit like Islington, but by the time I left it felt more like Leicester Square on a Saturday night.

WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) "Broadsword calling Danny Boy!" This WW2 action pic based on an Alistair MacLean book has been on telly so many times that you're probably au fait with every last gun battle, satisfyingly non-CGI explosion and anachronistic goof (that Nazi helicopter!). But it's a cracking yarn just the same. Major Smith and Lieutenant Shaffer (aka Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood) storm a Nazi-infested schloss in the Bavarian Alps to rescue the American general held prisoner there. The Germans fall like ninepins, there's a hair-raising tussle on top of a cable-car and everyone's a double agent - or pretends to be. It's the sort of straight-up Boy's Own yarn that, sadly, has since beensupplanted by the flashier Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies

WHERE THE MONEY IS (2000) Charming little heist movie that was unfairly overlooked when it came out, probably because one of its protagonists is unfashionably old. That may be so, but he's still Paul Newman, who is sexier at the age of 75 than most actors are in their prime. He plays a bank robber who gets himself transferred from jail into a nursing home by pretending to be senile. Hot tottie Linda Fiorentino plays the nurse who sees through the scam by giving him a lapdance and nags him into helping her beat her small-town blues by - yes! - robbing a bank.

WHERE THE RIVER BENDS (1952) James Stewart and the director Anthony Mann made some terrific westerns together and this is one of their best. Stewart is guiding a wagon-train of pioneers through Oregon while trying to hide his dodgy past as a Missouri border raider. Arthur Kennedy's another former outlaw whom Stewart saves from being hanged, and the two of them bond by fighting Native Americans together. But Kennedy has no truck with this redemption nonsense and tries to steal the settlers' provisions, forcing our hero to confront his own dark side in a life or death struggle.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950, b/w) Otto Preminger reunited the two stars of Laura for this urban thriller. There’s always something deliciously shifty about Dana Andrews, and he’s perfectly cast here as Mark Dixon, a short-tempered cop who inadvertently kills a murder suspect and then finds himself in a typically film noir fix when his subsequent cover-up implicates the innocent cab-driver whose daughter is the dead man’s widow. As if things weren’t complicated enough, Dixon falls for her, and since she’s played by gorgeous Gene Tierney (a little too posh for the role, but we’re not complaining) you can’t really blame him.

WHERE THE SPIES ARE (1966) David Niven stars in this underrated but effective British spy yarn as Dr Jason Love, an English country doctor who’ll do anything for a vintage car - including reverting to his old job as a secret agent and hotfooting it to Beirut to try and foil an assassination attempt. During a stop-off in Rome, he bumps into the delectable Françoise Dorléac as Vicki, who may or may not be a double agent, but is clearly half the age of her leading man.

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (2005) Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan makes films that are interesting but structurally flawed, and this showbiz mystery is no exception - it's all over the place, hopping between the 1950s and 1970s and switching narrators so often you're never sure where you are. Alison Lohman is badly miscast as a young journalist who gets involved with a couple of has-been comedians; they used to be a double-act but split up after a girl's corpse was found in their hotel suite. But Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are splendid as the funnymen (apparently inspired by Martin and Lewis, though this isn't strictly a film à clef) with Mob connections, drug habits and sleazy sexual proclivities. Plus, both actors show their bottoms.

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995) Contrived but charming romantic comedy that gave Sandra Bullock (fresh from Speed) her first solo leading role. She pitches it just right, a perfect mix of self-deprecating humour and quiet desperation as Lucy, a ticket collector on the Chicago Transit System who one day saves the life of a tall, dark stranger played by Peter Gallagher, an actor who can crack me up even when he's in a coma - which is where he spends most of this film. So lonely is her life that when his boisterous family assumes she's his fiancée, she plays along with the charade - until she finds herself falling for his brother (Bill Pullman). Nice performances and a welcome streak of melancholy (Lucy's final confession is a real tear-jerker) make this superior date movie fodder.

WHIRLPOOL (1949, b/w) Gene Tierney gets caught shoplifting in this barmy slice of dime-store Freud noirishly directed by Otto Preminger. She gets off the hook thanks to the machinations of silky mesmerist José Ferrer, who murmurs things like, "Your soul can undress in front of me" before hypnotising her into taking the rap for the murder of his mistress. Tierney's husband (Richard Conte) is a celebrated psychoanalyst who has failed to notice his wife's unhappiness; will he help her beat the rap, or stomp off in a jealous huff?

WHISKY (2004) If you have to see one Uruguayan film this year, you might as well make it this award-winning low budget gem about Jacobo, lugubrious sexaganarian owner of a small sock factory, and Marta, the loyal assistant who agrees to pretend to be his wife for a few days when his more successful brother comes visiting from Brazil. The mismatched threesome spends a weekend at a hotel by the seaside, which is where the film's title is explained - Uruguayans, apparently, say "whisky" instead of "cheese" when they pose for photos. Like Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, writer-directors Jean Pablo Rebella (who inexplicably killed himself in 2006, at the age of 32) and Pablo Stoll make capital out of lived-in faces, minimalist tableaux and deadpan verbal exchanges. It's hardly laugh-out-loud funny, but it is droll and touching.

WHISPER OF THE HEART (1995) Yoshifumi Kondo was being groomed as the successor to anime genius Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli when he suffered a fatal aneurysm at the age of 47. His one feature as director gives us an idea of what treasures his death has deprived us of; it's an enchanting tale of a 14-year-old schoolgirl whose encounter with a mysterious cat on the Tokyo metro leads to her discovery of true love and a talent for storytelling. Don't expect fireworks, but do expect a lovely, delicate teen romance, all blushing cheeks and blurted sentiment, as well as an adorable Japanese version of John Denver's "Country Roads" and the most beautiful evocation of everyday life in the suburbs of Tokyo that I've ever seen.

WHISPERS IN THE DARK (1992) Annabella Sciorra stars in this absurd thriller as a New York psychiatrist who gets turned on by a female patient relating her S&M experiences. When the patient ends up dead, Annabella starts suspecting every male she meets of being the murderer. Is it that bloke from Without a Trace? Or whatsisname from Law & Order? Happily, this tosh is up (or down) there with such meisterwerks as The Color of Night, Final Analysis and Basic Instinct 2 as a shrink-in-distress movie so stupid one can't help but warm to its absurd plot, deathless one-liners ("A bright psychopath can fool anybody") and a last reel revelation so preposterous it almost elevates the whole thing into essential viewing.

WHITE HEAT (1949, b/w) "Made it ma! Top of the world!" The last great Warner Brothers gangster film, directed by Raoul Walsh, builds up to one of the most deranged climaxes in film history. It also features my favourite James Cagney performance as Cody Jarrett, the gang-leader and textbook psycho who suffers from crippling headaches and a mother fixation. Yet Cagney, whether having his brow soothed in ma's lap, or wigging out in jail when he hears of her death, makes him more than just a caricature, and he's certainly more sympathetic than Edmond O'Brien as the undercover cop who wins Jarrett's trust before betraying him.

WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP (1992) Writer-director Ron Shelton is a wizard at comedy-dramas with sporty settings, so even people who loathe ballgames should enjoy this amiable buddy movie in which Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes play Venice Beach basketball hustlers. Rosie Perez, who looked all set to be the next big Latino thing until Jennifer Lopez came along, gets one of her best roles here as Harrelson's girlfriend, swotting up on trivia in the hope of landing a spot on a TV quiz show.

WHITE MISCHIEF (1987) Sex, death and toffs – James Fox’s book about a real-life case of murder among the champagne-swilling expats in Kenya’s Happy Valley during the Second World War has all the ingredients for a steamy Somerset Maugham-style melodrama. Greta Scacchi, at that point in her career when she seemed to be forever taking her clothes off, marries wealthy old codger Joss Ackland but can’t resist rogering Charles Dance on the side. Alas, it’s not as much fun as it should be, perhaps because there’s never any question as to who killed who or why, and the characters are so shallow it’s difficult to care. But the scenery’s pretty and so are the frocks, especially Greta’s shiny gold one.

WHITE NOISE 2: THE LIGHT (2007) Serenity's Nathan Fillion stars in a sequel that's both trashier and more fun than its predecessor. Fillion's wife and son are shot dead, and his failed attempt to join them in the hereafter leaves him with the ability to see auras around people fated to die soon. Should he try and save them, or would that simply result in an even bigger body count? Despite the spectral figures pointlessly leaping out at us every couple of minutes, this isn't very scary, but Flllion is a likeable protagonist and the inevitable quasi-religious subtext is so garbled it's not too off-putting.

WHITE OF THE EYE (1987) Donald Cammell killed himself in 1996 after his last movie (Wild Side) was recut against his wishes, but prior to that the co-director of the legendary Performance made a fleeting comeback with this disturbing little thriller set in a small copper-mining town in Arizona. A detective investigating a series of mutilated corpses homes in an eccentric hippy TV installer (David Keith) and his wife (Cathy Moriarty) whose lives are further complicated by multiple mystical flashbacks and the unexpected return of a pistol-packing ex. You'll never be able to look at plastic sheeting in the same way again.

WHITE OLEANDER (2003) Like Mermaids, this is one of those chick flicks about the trials of growing up with a wacky mother, only in this case mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is an artist in jail for the murder of her two-timing boyfriend while her daughter (Alison Lohman) is shuttled between foster parents (one tries to kill her, another commits suicide) and children’s homes. Pfeiffer looks unfeasibly glam but gives a chilling performance as the jailbird who calmly continues to mess with her daughter’s head by offering pragmatic but emotionally devastating advice. Inevitably there’s some "Everything’s always been about you, never about me" dialogue, but it’s not as slushy as you’d expect.

WHITE SANDS (1992) Sheriff Willem Dafoe's murder investigation gets waylaid by psychotic lesbians, double-dealing feds and Mickey Rourke with a wild and crazy hair-do. Not as much fun as it sounds.

WHITE SQUALL (1996) Before he bounced back with Gladiator, Ridley Scott was going through a fallow period when he directed this watery drama, based on the true story of a brigantine (called The Albatross, which is just asking for trouble) which in 1961 was hit by freak weather in the Gulf of Mexico and sank with the loss of six lives. Jeff Bridges is his usual sturdy self as the crusty skipper who schools privileged preppy kids in boatcraft, the seascapes are as handsome as you’d expect and the sinking of the ship is a heart-stopper, but the rites-of-passage scenario is a yawn, and the film ends with one of the ghastliest cases of Hollywood Hug ever committed to celluloid.

WHO DARES WINS (1982) Oh for the days when terrorist attacks could be foiled by abseiling blokes in black balaclavas. This gloriously politically incorrect recruiting poster for the SAS was inspired by the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and fingers a CND splinter-group called The People's Lobby as a front for international terrorism. Collins is assigned to infiltrate the evil pacifists and thwart their plans, which somewhat illogically involve launching a nuclear attack on Scotland. Like any movie terrorist cell worth its salt, this one includes a couple of glam chicks: Ingrid Pitt as an East German weapons specialist and Judy Davis, who accessorises her evening dress with an Uzi to crash an American Embassy dinner party. Truly awful... yet weirdly compelling, with 1980s-tastic theme music by Roy Budd.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988) If you can get past the punctuation-challenged title (see also What's Love Got to Do With It and Two Weeks Notice) Robert Zemeckis' groundbreaking blend of live action and animation is a pretty dark 1940s film noir disguised as a family blockbuster, with a Chinatown-type plot so clever it almost makes you forget the dazzling technical achievement. Bob Hoskins plays alcoholic gumshoe Eddie Valiant, whose client is framed for dropping a safe on the head of his wife's pat-a-cake partner, but sit back and enjoy the Who's Who of cartoon favourites such as Dumbo, Betty Boop and Daffy Duck, and newcomers such as curvaceous Jessica Rabbit, unforgettably voiced by Kathleen Turner (and sung by Amy Irving). "I'm not bad - I'm just drawn that way."

WHOLE TEN YARDS, THE (2004) You would think film-makers might have realised The Sopranos had made hitman comedies redundant, but no. Even by sequel standards, this follow-up to the one about the loveable contract-killer (Bruce Willis) and his dentist neighbour (Matthew Perry) is dismal. Perry's wife allows herself to be kidnapped by a Hungarian mobster so Bruce can collect a big pay-off; Perry, not privy to the set-up, runs around like a headless chicken, bumping into things. The lame climax features the sort of omigod-he's-dead-no-he's-not charade introduced by The Sting and since recycled by 30 years of con-man movies. There, I've spoilt it for you.

WHOLE WIDE WORLD, THE (1996, TVM) When Renée Zellweger won her Oscar, among the people she thanked was Vincent d'Onofrio, her co-star ten years earlier in this superior telefilm. Set in a small Texas town in the 1930s, it's the sad but true story based on the memoirs of Novalyne Price, a spunky schoolteacher, and her ill-fated romance with the very strange writer Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian. You'll probably need a hanky or two for the home stretch.

WHY DOES HERR R RUN AMOK? (1970) Now we've grown accustomed to Dogme 95, Mike Leigh and reality TV, Rainer Werner Fasbinder's subversive, quasi-verité, semi-improvisational film-making style seems less radical than it once did. Nothing much seems to happen in the life of Kurt Raab (the name of both the actor and the character he plays). But watch him closely as wife, in-laws and neighbours witter on endlessly, or as he fails miserably to bond with colleagues from the architectural office where he works – this man is even more of a loser than David Brent, and he's further burdened by ghastly late-1960s German fashions and furnishing. Little wonder he cracks (and viewers with ADD may well be so bored that they'll crack too). Oh yes, it's always the quiet ones.

WHY WE FIGHT (2005) Eugene Jarecki’s scrupulously-researched documentary takes as its point of departure Frank Capra’s anti-Nazi 1942 propaganda film of the same name, and examines the rise of what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" in the 50 years since then. Jarecki’s approach couldn’t be more different from that of Michael Moore, maintaining a heroically non-partisan stance with an assembly of historical footage and comments from politicians and ordinary people (such as a cop who lost his son in 9/11), and poses some pertinent questions about the real reasons behind the war in Iraq. Not a lot of laughs, then, but obligatory viewing for armchair pundits.

WICKER MAN, THE (1973) Anthony Shaffer penned the screenplay for this uniquely unsettling cult horror movie which begins in low-key fashion with Edward Woodward, as a prim Calvinist policeman called Sergeant Howie, arriving on Summerisle, a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, to investigate the disappearance of a local schoolgirl. Among the terrors he encounters there are Britt Ekland's body double dancing naked, Christopher Lee wearing women's clothing (and take it from me - it's the one of the creepiest drag acts in film history) and the dreaded Wicker Man of the title. Ooh, those nutty pagans. Never again will you be able to listen to "Summer is Icumen In" without shuddering. Not that you listen to it anyway, but you know what I mean.

WICKER MAN, THE (2006) Stupid remake of the 1973 cult horror movie, relocated by writer-director Neil LaBute (specialist in dramatic misogyny) to a remote island matriarchy off the coast of Washington State. Nicolas Cage, at his absolute worst, plays a Californian cop summoned by an ex-girlfriend to search for her missing daughter; he runs around the island punching women and yelling at small girls while Angelo Badalamenti's music works overtime to pump up the non-existent tension. If you want to see the funniest bits, follow this link. Otherwise, stick to the original.

WICKER PARK (2004) American remake of the French romantic thriller L'appartement, though the edginess of the original has been flattened out into vanilla romance between cute but dim Josh Hartnett and Diane Kruger, who like Uma Thurman isn't terribly interesting outside the films of Quentin Tarantino. The film, transposed from Paris to wintry Chicago, juggles flashbacks and viewpoints in an attempt to add pep, but frankly we don't give a fig whether or not these dull specimens end up together. Much more intriguing are Matthew Lillard and Rose Byrne as the flawed but interesting also-rans who get trampled over in the leading couple's sprint towards their obligatory happy ending. Pity the film's not about them.

WILD AT HEART (1990) There's masses of sex and violence in David Lynch's Southern Gothic road movie, adapted from Barry Gifford's novel, but none of the dreamlike quality or mounting dread with which the film-maker invests his best work. Nicolas Cage, in snakeskin jacket, and Laura Dern are at their most mannered and annoying as the amorous young couple on the run from her witchy mother (Dern's real-life mom Diane Ladd) who sends a series of killers after them, including Willem Defoe as pimpy Bobby Peru and a blonde-wigged Isabella Rossellini as the mono-browed Perdita Durango. And enough already with the hokey southern accents! Lynch, trying too hard to be weird, piles on references to The Wizard of Oz, throws in a bunch of naked fat ladies or blows someone’s head off in a geyser of gore, and just ends up parodying himself. But it's a fabulous-looking farrago, and the director's ear is as sharp as ever; the soundtrack, which ranges from Richard Strauss to Chris Isaak, is first-rate. 

WEDDING CRASHERS (2005) Likeable but fatally lazy frat pack comedy starring laid-back Owen Wilson and motormouth Vince Vaughn as guys who gatecrash weddings so they can take advantage of the free food, booze and bridesmaids. I could happily have watched them freeloading for hours, but alas, the fun grinds to a halt when Wilson falls for a posh girl with an Ivy League boyfriend, while Vaughn finds himself pursued by – quelle horreur! - a predatory female. Things perk up when Will Farrell cameos as a former wedding crasher who has graduated to funerals, but in terms of my laughs-per-hour meter I'd rank it some way below Anchorman or Dodgeball.     

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008) Just-dumped workaholic Cameron Diaz and just-fired slacker Ashton Kutcher meet drunk in Las Vegas and get hitched; next morning, after agreeing to a divorce and before going their separate ways, he wins a $3million jackpot with her quarter. Back in New York, a judge forbids the wildly mismatched couple access to the disputed dosh unless they can stick together for six months. Naturally, each tries to sabotage the other's committment to the marriage, with predictable rom-com results accompanied by obligatory wisecracking best pals - Rob Corddry for him, Lake Bell for her. Whether or not you'll find it funny will depend on your opinion of the leading players, but I like Diaz's game-for-anything approach and there are worse ordeals than spending 99 minutes watching Kutchner being cute.

WILD, THE (2006) You may experience déjà-vu during this dismal Disney cartoon about a bunch of zoo animals crossing the ocean to rescue a lion-cub that's inadvertently been shipped to a volcanic island - it's virtually the same plot as that of the marginally superior Madagascar. Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Izzard and William Shatner provide voices for, respectively, papa lion, koala bear and evil wildebeest with ideas above his station. It's not fit to shine the boots of The Lion King, let alone classics like The Jungle Book. Three things I ask of American animators: 1) Quit using the voices of famous actors. 2) Enough with the talking animals already. 3) Watch some Hayao Miyazaki.

WILD BUNCH, THE (1969) Imagine the changes that would be required if Sam Peckinpah's classic western were to be remade today. Animal Rights activists would carp at the treatment of scorpions and horses, feminists would fret about the women being duplicitous bitches (major spoilers in this link) who have to gunned down and Hispanic groups would condemn the way the Mexicans all have rotten teeth and snarl, "Hey, greengo!" But there's no place for political correctness in this curiously moving tale of ageing gunslingers with manly names like "Pike" and "Deke", and William Holden saying, "Let's go" before he and his partners amble off on that last walk down the dusty road to slo-mo death.

WILD CHILD (2008) Like What a Girl Wants, this springs from that odd mini-genre catering to American girls' secret yearning for the stuffy traditions of ye olde Europe. Emma Roberts (Julia's niece) plays Poppy, a spoilt Malibu teen whose exasperated dad packs her off to English boarding school where the headmistress (Natasha Richardson in her last role) is strict but fair, and it's ho for lax, plaid skirts and shared dorms, but with a noticeable lack of classrooms or prep. To begin with, Poppy is horrid and tries to get expelled, but gradually, she makes chums and licks the lacrosse team into shape by teaching them a Maori wardance (though it's a mystery how she knew it in the first place). Like Poppy herself, the film starts off obnoxious, but gets more endearing as it goes on. It's not Malory Towers, but it'll do for now.

WILD HOGS (2007) Think City Slickers, with motorbikes. John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy confront their respective midlife crises by taking to the open road on their choppers in this lame comedy, which reckons there's nothing more hilarious than nudge-nudge references to Deliverance and our heroes being terrified by a friendly gay cop. By the time they prove their manliness by meeting Ray Liotta and his biker gang in a tediously protracted punch-up, you'll be screaming for a little squeal-piggy-squeal action.

WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957, b/w) Just after The Seventh Seal but before his most famously gloomy films, Ingmar Bergman directed this beautiful Swedish road movie about an ageing professor (played by veteran director Victor Sjöström) driving with his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) to Lund, where the university is to honour his life's work. On the way there, he confronts his mortality via dreams, flashbacks and a trio of jolly teenagers who come along for the ride, and realises he has been a cold-hearted bastard. Amazingly, this meditation on old age, loneliness and memory is more wistful than depressing, packs in a fair bit of gentle humour and ends, without an ounce of bogus sentimentality, on an uplifting note.

WILD THINGS (1998) Denise Richards (rich, pouty) and Neve Campbell (trailer-trash, slutty) play hot high-school chicks who accuse their school counsellor (Matt Dillon) of sexual assault, but detective Kevin Bacon smells a rat, and so do we. We're not just in Florida here, we're in preposterous thriller territory – a glossy, unreal place where the only law is that of the Barking Mad Plot Development. This film has more twists than a cocktail bar full of Martinis, steamy sex scenes and – hurrah! – Bill Murray in a neck brace as the only lawyer sleazy enough to take Dillon's case. Don't miss the closing credits, which fill in vital missing plot details.

WILD, WILD WEST (1999) Barry Sonnenfeld and his Men in Black star, Will Smith, came a cropper with this big screen version of a 1960s TV spoof western. Smith and Kevin Kline play secret agents in the employ of Ulysses S Grant, are pitted against legless (and implicitly sexless) Kenneth Branagh and his phallic substitute, a giant mechanical tarantula, while Salma Hayek shows her bottom quite prettily. But this is just about worth watching for the bizarre scene in which the heroes use a severed head as a slide projector, working from the theory that the last image the dead man saw will be imprinted on his eyes. Even turkeys can sometimes yield choice morsels of tasty meat.

WILLARD (2003) I'm not saying I want rats infesting my home or anything, but I do think they're cute, particularly the smart ones that do tricks. Crispin Glover, one of the nuttier actors of our time, is well cast as the reclusive mama's boy who trains an army of rodents to do his bidding in remake of the 1971 creature feature. The early stages, in which the critters engage in low-level vandalism such as shredding car tyres, are mildly diverting, but R Lee Ermey, as Willard's boss, is one-note nasty (guess what happens to him) and it all gets out of hand as CGI takes over.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO + JULIET (1996) Campy Australian director Baz Luhrmann updates Shakespeare for a new generation with a barrage of razzle-dazzle MTV visuals, spaghetti western showdowns and loud pop music. Original dialogue is preserved but the mise en scène is so vivid that even bard-phobic adolescents with ADD should be able to follow the action. While rival teenage gangs are busy turning "Verona Beach" into a war zone, Leonardo DiCaprio sets hearts aswoon as rebellious Romeo, Claire Danes is adorable as shy Juliet, Mercutio makes his entrance in silver afro wig and sequins and Father Laurence entrusts his vital letter to "Post Haste" messenger service. The poetry gets a little swamped, it's true, but it just goes to show; if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004) Phew. Not Jeffrey Archer's The Merchant of Venice, then. When I was at school we all found this play problematic, not because of Shylock's Jewishness, but because whoever read the role of Portia had to say the embarrassing word "bosom" several times. Despite a bit of a gay thing between her unsufferable suitor Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes) and his mate Antonio (Jeremy Irons) while many a prozzie bares her bosoms in the background, Michael Radford's film comes down squarely on the side of respectful with its painterly Venetian locations and Al Pacino demanding his pound of flesh in a solid star turn. In the end, though, it's all a little… dare one say it? Dull.

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971) After The Producers, Gene Wilder's finest hour was playing the sinister Willy Wonka, who escorts poor but honest Charlie Bucket, Charlie's grandpa and four other not-so-honest children around his choccy factory in this trippy, nightmarish Roald Dahl fantasy festooned with even trippier and more nightmarish musical numbers ("oompah loompah doopity do!"). Ghastly fates await the kiddies - one is turned into a giant blueberry, another falls into a chocolate river and gets wedged in a pipe. Truly the stuff of nightmares, so it's hardly surprising to learn that it's Marilyn Manson's favourite movie.

WIMBLEDON (2004) Romantic comedies aren't best known for their credibility, but this one's more fanciful than most since we're asked to believe that a 31-year-old British tennis-player ranked 119th in the world can sufficiently raise his game to be in with a shout at the title. If you can swallow that, you'll have no trouble swallowing his unlikely love match with the rising young American wondergirl. Richard Curtis had nothing to do with it, yet his shadow looms large over the shabby-chic milieu populated by loveable English eccentrics. Yes, it's Notting Hill with tennis balls! That this formulaic nonsense remains watchable is due to the amiable Paul Bettany, who saunters through the proceedings like the winner of the Hugh Grant Prize for Self-Deprecation, though his love interest is less happily incarnated by Kirsten Dunst, an actress who to me always looks vaguely constipated.

WINCHESTER '73 (1950, b/w) In the first of several magnificent westerns he made with the director Anthony Mann, James Stewart wins a rifle in a shooting contest and then spends the rest of the film tracking it down after it's stolen by his brother. The weapon is lost in a poker game, pounced on by Sioux chief Rock Hudson and generally passed from hand to hand on its way to a cathartic shoot-out on a boulder-strewn mountain top. Not only did Stewart show his darker side in these films, he must have been pretty tough offscreen as well; this was filmed around the time he became the first Hollywood star to negotiate a cut of a film's profits.

WIND CHILL (2007) Critics were predictably sniffy about this modest little chiller, but you can be sure they watched it at a convivial daytime screening, as opposed to individually at home in the wee small hours, where its creepy minimalism is more likely to generate goose pimples. Despite the B-movie set-up, it's the best showcase yet for the talented Emily Blunt, speaking with an American accent as a not-particularly-nice student who accepts the offer of a ride to Delaware for the Christmas holidays. But there's something a bit iffy about her driver (Ashton Holmes, Viggo's son from A History of Violence), and things go horribly wrong when they take a shortcut and their car ends up wedged in a snowdrift. And if that's not bad enough, they're not alone! Ghosts? Hallucinations? Either way, it's pretty spooky.

WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, THE (2006) Ken Loach's historical drama about the 1920s Irish rebellion against the British won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but it's the only film in which I got so bored that I actually started trying to read a magazine in the cinema. In the dark! That was when I wasn't getting the giggles at the crudely improvised dialogue as the thuggy Black and Tans roll up, swear like troopers (well that's what they are, I suppose), turn poor old Irish crones out of their cottages and beat peaceable Irish folk to death; the Brits are even more caricatured here than English villains in Hollywood movies like Braveheart or The Patriot. I have no problems with the message (Irish super, English horrid - well, we all knew that anyway), and Cillian Murphy is his usual mesmerising self as the chap who abandons a medical career to join the Republicans but ends up fighting his own brother (oh, the horrors of civil war) but this is all message, scant characterisation, and speechifying instead of proper dialogue. The scenery's quite nice, though.

WIND WILL CARRY US, THE (1999) I have yet to encounter an Iranian film I didn't fall asleep in. But I managed to stay awake just long enough during this one by Abbas Kiarostami to realise it's a modern classic. A film-maker posing as an engineer arrives at an isolated village in Kurdistan, where he hangs around waiting for an old lady to die. Each time his mobile phone rings he has to drive to a hilltop cemetery to get a proper signal. If you can take nearly two hours of slow pacing, repetitive action and endless shots of people driving around in cars, this is deadpan comedy of the highest order. Well, I found it funny.

WINDTALKERS (2002) Everyone's agreed that John Woo's Hollywood films aren't a patch to the delirious shoot-em-ups he made in Hong Kong, and this war isn’t like to change anyone's mind, since it wastes an intriguing historical fact – Navajo Indian language was used by Americans as an unbreakable radio code during WW2. Nicolas Cage plays a sergeant who's expected to kill his Navajo "windtalker" should it seem likely he may fall into Japanese hands. But forget that – the film-makers certainly do – sit back and and get a load of the big explosions, which are cool.

WINGED MIGRATION (2001) Twitchers, nature lovers and indeed anyone who likes gawping at big close-ups of birds flapping their wings should flock to this stunning French documentary. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll help yourself to more turkey.

WINGS OF THE DOVE (1997) After The Innocents, this Edwardian ménage-à-trois is my favourite Henry James adaptation, and a world away from the mummified heritage-fests of the Merchant-Ivory films. Helena Bonham-Carter is terrific as a liberated London gal whose scheme for her penniless lover (Linus Roache) to seduce a terminally ill heiress (Alison Elliott) goes horribly wrong, but not before we've been treated to a superabundance of Fortuny-type frocks, picturesque Venetian palazzi and a couple of sizzling sex scenes in which our Helena shows what she's made of. Hossein Amini's screenplay updates the action and cuts back on the excessive verbiage, leaving director Iain Softley to fill in the meaning via purely cinematic means. Which he does brilliantly.

WINTER KILLS (1979) Like The Manchurian Candidate, this weird and wonderful conspiracy movie was adapted from a novel by Richard Condon and features a starry cast in a plot that occasionally bears intriguing parallels to the assassination of JFK, and is best viewed as a cynical, slightly surreal black comedy rather than as a thriller. Jeff Bridges, as the son of a wealthy tycoon (John Huston in Noah Cross-meets-Joe Kennedy mode) sets out to find the truth about the death of his brother, a US president, and finds himself up to his eyeballs in wacky cameos from the likes of Elizabeth Taylor as a Hollywood madam and Eli Wallach as a gay hitman.

WITCHES OF EASTWICK, THE (1987) George Miller, of Mad Max fame, always seemed an odd choice to direct this overproduced film version of John Updike's novel, in which three bored and frustrated housewives inadvertently summon a ponytailed Lucifer-cum-Lothario to their small New England town. The tone wavers uncertainly between black farce and special effects comedy, complete with grotesque vomiting scenes. The biggest special effect of all, though, is Jack Nicholson as "just your average, horny little devil", soaring so far over the top it makes his performance from The Shining look like a masterclas in underplaying. Incredibly, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher just about manage to hold their own.

WITCHES, THE (1980) Let's face it: what children really want is scary horrible stuff, and they get it in spades in this adaptation of a typically wicked story by Roald Dahl . Angelica Huston seems nice enough as she prepares to chair a convention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children at an English seaside hotel not a million miles from Fawlty Towers. But nine-year-old Luke knows the truth – that she's really the Grand High Witch, and hatching a plot to turn children into mice.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) This grim revenge "western" set during the English Civil War is the third and best of the three films directed by British whizz-kid Michael Reeves before he died at the age of 24. Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins, a religious hypocrite who roams the land, torturing suspected witches for profit and pleasure. Legend has it that Price wasn't happy with Reeves' refusal to let him chew the scenery in his customary fashion and said, ''I've made 84 films. What have you done?" to which the young director replied, "I've made three good ones." His use of the English landscape is stunning, and it's also one of the best films ever made about the Civil War (admittedly not a lot of competition there) and the dehumanising effects of violence.

WITHNAIL & I (1986) Sometimes I suspect I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think Withnail and I is a work of staggering genius. I like the early scenes in the sordid Camden Town flat - it reminds me of my student days. The scrag end of the 1960s is nicely depicted, and Danny the dealer (Ralph Brown) is the sort of character you wish had his own film. But when Richard E Grant and Paul McGann arrive at the cottage in Cumbria, the comedy gets lazy and desperate; British cinephiles invariably sneer at Hollywood comedies featuring elements such as randy bulls and predatory gay uncles, but somehow these things are deemed acceptable here. Long before the film returns to Camden, I've lost patience. But hey, don't let me put you off. Most people think this is the Funniest Film Ever Made and even I have to admit there are some fabulous one-liners. "We want the finest wines available to humanity," for one.

WITHOUT A CLUE (1988) Michael Caine bumbles around in a deerstalker as a dimwitted actor hired by Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley) to pose as the doc’s fictional creation - Sherlock Holmes – in a bid to stop Moriarty from flooding the economy with forged fivers. It’s a one-joke movie in which even the one-joke isn’t that funny (and surely the main attraction in Sherlock Holmes stories has always been the character of Holmes himself), but the two leads are game, and it’s fun watching a smart actor like Caine posing as a stupid actor posing as a genius.

WITNESS (1985) Harrison Ford plays a big city cop who takes refuge from corrupt colleagues in Pennsylvania's Amish farming community, but what starts out as a violent thriller takes an unexpected turn into erotic territory, even though Ford and the lovely young Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) do little more than gaze yearningly at each other. Peter Weir directs it with such loving attention to the improbably idyllic Amish lifestyle - bonnets, communal barn-raising and so on - that it almost makes you want to swap your laptop for a herd of dairy cows.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957, b/w) When people talk about Agatha Christie movies they generally forget about one of the most illustrious examples of the subgenre - this courtroom drama's adapted from one of her plays and directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich plays the accused's wife. Though the narrative reversals are unlikely to startle today's twist-savvy audiences, there's always pleasure to be had in watching the well-oiled tumblers falling into place.

WITTGENSTEIN (1993) "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," and all that. Derek Jarman, with customary stylish visuals on a chewing-gum budget, strings a series of disconnected tableaux into a sort of Bluffer's Guide to the philosopher's life and Tractatus, complete with one-armed pianist brother (for whom Ravel composed his Concerto for the Left Hand), years at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, and imagined conversations with a Martian. Karl Johnson plays the endearingly batty thinker, whose intellect was so tortured he regarded his military stint in WW1 as light relief. It's surprisingly watchable, though Ludwig's own taste in film was anything featuring Carmen Miranda or Betty Hutton, so he would probably have loathed this one.

WIZ, THE (1978) One of Sidney Lumet's more aypical directing gigs, this overblown film version of the all-black Broadway reworking of The Wizard of Oz is pretty much a catastrophe, but nowadays packs a certain curiosity value for its cast and as a showcase for hard-working Afro-American thesps such as Ted Ross and Nipsey Russell. Diana Ross is a couple of decades too old to play Dorothy, a shy Harlem schoolteacher transported by a tornado into a magically transformed Manhattan, where the cowardly lion is found lurking outside New York Public Library, and the original story's poppy-field has been turned into an alley full of drug addicts. Michael Jackson pulls off some nifty dance moves as the Scarecrow, Richard Pryor plays the Wizard and Lena Horne is Glinda the Good. Maybe it's time for a gritty rap remake, directed by Spike Lee.

WIZARD OF OZ, THE (1939) Did you know that if you watch this while listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, there’s an eerie synchronicity between music and image? Bells start going off when the witch rides into frame on her bicycle, the black and white portion of the movie is the same length as Side One of the album, and so on. Internauts have been theorising about this for years, so I put it to the test, and what do you know – it’s uncanny! The downside is that you have to listen to Dark Side of the Moon three times on the trot, and I daresay you’d encounter similar "uncanny" coincidences if you were to watch Jaws while listening to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

WOLF CREEK (2005) If you just can't get enough of the grim new wave of "Torture Porn", here's another film in which young travellers (two British, one Australian) meet gruesome fates, though this one's "based on actual events" - at least two well-publicised cases in which backpackers were murdered in the Australian outback. Unlike the makers of Hostel, first-time writer-director Greg McLean lavishes time and care on his characters, which makes it even more unpleasant when their car breaks down and they fall into the hands of a Crocodile Dundee from Hell. (He even quotes Paul Hogan's "That's not a knife" gag.) It's elegantly filmed with hand-held camera, and the mounting sense of dread is expertly handled, but unless nihilism is a novelty for you, you're unlikely to find it much fun.

WOMEN, THE (1939) Gossipy Rosalind Russell can't wait to tell saintly Norma Shearer that her husband is sleeping with perfume salesgirl Joan Crawford in this classic George Cukor bitch-fest adapted by Anita Loos from Clare Boothe Luce's play. The men are kept offscreen, but the world still revolves around them while their wives do the round of health spas, fashion shows and beauty salons, their idle existences propped up by a full complement of dogsbodies beavering away in the background. Shearer does a cartwheel, Russell and Paulette Goddard have a catfight and it's bags more fun than the recent Meg Ryan remake, but these ladies' moneyed lives do seem awfully arid and airless. The narrative dice may be stacked against brazen hussy Crawford, but you can't help wishing her luck as she tries to claw her way up the social ladder.

WOMEN IN LOVE (1969) DH Lawrence seems to have slipped out of fashion, but his free-spirited sexual politics were all the rage back in the 1960s, when Ken Russell directed this po-faced slice of Eng Lit about two sisters (Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden) testing the limits of love in their stormy relationships. Highlights include the future honourable member for Hampstead & Highgate frolicking with cows in a field and, of course, the infamous nude wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, which will probably now seem rather poignant now that both actors have passed away.

WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988) Pedro Almodòvar's breakthrough movie was this kitsch screwball comedy which elevated the Spanish director from minor cult to international art-house flavour of the month. Carmen Maura plays Pepa, who wakes up in the Madrid penthouse she shares with her lover and finds an answer machine message telling her to pack her bags. She flips out. A never-ending stream of callers, a vengeful ex-wife, Antonio Banderas at his cutest, gazpacho spiked with tranquilisers and (the sort of thing that wouldn't seem remotely amusing nowadays) a terrorist threat to blow up an airplane jostle for position on the frenzied farce-o-meter. And the interior décor! Was there ever a director with such an expert eye for cushions?

WONDER BOYS (2000) Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to the glorious LA Confidential was this not-so-glorious but still likeable character-driven titbit, an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s campus story about an increasingly farcical winter weekend in the life of Grady Tripp, a fiftysomething university professor who, seven years after his acclaimed debut novel, is suffering from writer’s block. Michael Douglas has a ball shambling around in a grotty purple dressing-gown, stoned and unshaven, as his life goes into freefall, watched by Robert Downey Jr as his manic agent, Frances McDormand as his pregnant mistress and Tobey Maguire as a troubled rich kid.

WONDERLAND (2003) This effective if not terribly likeable exercise in Hollywood Sleaze is like a film noir version of Boogie Nights. Val Kilmer plays legendary porn star John Holmes, referred to here as "The King" but better known in my house as "Tripod" thanks to the gargantuan size of his member (not seen, alas). By 1981, Holmes was a washed up cokehead enbroiled in the brutal bludgeoning to death of four people; James Cox's film dances around the investigation without drawing any conclusions in particular. Lisa Kudrow and Kate Bosworth play the long-suffering women in Holmes' life; lots of hyperactive actors pretend to snort truckfuls of drugs and act debauched; Eric Bogosian fills the obligatory role of the Kingpin in the Dressing-Gown, while 1970s music and hip camera trickery fail to paper over the depressing void at the centre of this kind of existence.

WOODSMAN, THE (2004) Never one to turn his back on a controversial role, Kevin Bacon outdoes himself in this low-key drama about an ex-con, released after serving a 12-year sentence for child molesting, who gets a job in a lumber yard, a flat overlooking (uh-oh) a school playground and a girlfriend in the shape of the actor's real-life wife Kyra Sedgwick. But that doesn't stop him befriending a young girl he spots on the bus, leading to much tension of the will he-won't he variety. Nicole Kassell's writing-directing debut encourages audiences to try and see that protagonist as a messed-up human being, rather than as the evil bogeyman of tabloid lore, but it still doesn't make comfortable viewing.

WORKING GIRL (1988) "I have a head for business and a bod for sin," announces Melanie Griffith in this very 1980s corporate fairytale about a secretary who gets her own back on the female boss who stole her ideas by posing as an executive in her absence. Sigourney Weaver is huge fun as the evil bitch boss-lady, Harrison Ford plays love interest and Joan Cusack steals scenes in a supporting role. Griffith's subsequent career has been so disastrous that it's easy to forget how appealing she used to be with her not so dumb blonde attitude and disarming streak of Monroe-like vulnerability, though Carly Simon's Oscar-winning theme tune makes me want to throw up.

WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, THE (1999) I feel sorry for Pierce Brosnan - as much as one can feel sorry for any millionaire film star. He's actor enough to have pulled off the rough, tough Bond reboot that Daniel Craig got to play in Casino Royale, but instead he was saddled with having to channel Roger Moore's jokey 007. Brosnan does show signs of trying to add a bit of depth to the role, though the franchise is looking a little drab here as he jet-sets between Azerbaijan and the Millennium Dome, goes mano a mano against small-but-perfectly-formed Robert Carlyle and canoodles with Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards, who plays a pouty nuclear physicist called Dr Christmas Jones, just so that the screenwriters can bung in a gag about Christmas coming more than once a year.

WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006) I suppose it was asking too much of Hollywood film-makers to cut through the mawkishness surrounding 9/11, though it's disappointing to see the normally provocative Oliver Stone toeing the party-line with this ingratiating ode to New York heroism, capped by a dishonest attempt to link the atrocity directly to Iraq. The ubiquitous Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena play Port Authority cops trapped beneath rubble. Meanwhile, on the outside, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal wring their hands as the wives waiting for news as searchers comb Ground Zero for survivors. The film evokes the claustrophobia of being buried beneath tons of debris for 14 hours effectively enough, though for obvious reasons it's not a barrel of laughs. New Yorkers deserve better than this.

WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN, THE (2006) Anthony Hopkins seems to have been cruising in campy villain mode of late, so it's a pleasure to watch him turning on that old pre-Hannibal magic in this corny but likeable biopic, a labour of love for Australian writer-director Roger Donaldson, who already made a documentary on the same subject. Hopkins plays Burt Monro, an eccentric old codger who spends his days tinkering with his 1920 Indian Scout motorbike in the yard of his New Zealand shack. Until, one day, he cobbles together the funds to set off for the salt flats of Bonneville, Utah, where he plans to show the world what he and his bike can do. On the way there, he disarms everybody - including us, the viewers - with his down-to-earth Kiwi charm.

WRESTLER, THE (2008) "I'm an old, broken-down piece of meat." It was a travesty that the 2009 Academy Award for Best Actor went to Sean Penn for Milk instead of Mickey Rourke, who put his body, heart and soul into the story of a washed-up professional wrestler who ignores his doctor's advice and tries to make a comeback. Marisa Tomei gives a fearless performance as the pragmatic stripper with whom he forms an emotional bond; the normally unbearable Evan Rachel Wood is fine as his estranged daughter. Darren Aronofsky picked himself up after the flop of The Fountain to direct a gripping, moving portrait of a has-been, sometimes agonising to watch, but with lovely scenes of behind-the-scenes cameraderie between rival wrestlers. Rourke's face might be ruined, but he's lost none of the charisma he had as a young actor; he is quite simply magnificent.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956) Douglas Sirk, master of melodrama, directed this gloriously over-heated family saga. Lauren Bacall plays nice girl Lucy, who fancies down-to-earth Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) but rashly allows herself to get swept off her feet by Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), the fabulously wealthy scion of a Texan oil dynasty who turns out to be an infertile alcoholic playboy who sleeps with a pistol under his pillow. Dorothy Malone won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Marylee, his trashy nympho sister who rumbas around in red chiffon as their father expires of a heart attack. Pylon symbolism run riot; Dallas eat your heart out.

WRONG MAN, THE (1956, b/w) Alfred Hitchcock revisits one of his favourite themes – the innocent man falsely accused – but this times cuts out all the jokes in this dark-hued, Kafka-esque nightmare based on a true story. Henry Fonda plays Manny Balestrero, a New York bass player whose ordered existence is plunged into chaos after he's wrongly identified and arrested for an armed robbery he didn't commit. Despite his lawyer's belief in his innocence, Manny's alibi falls apart, he goes to trial, and his wife (Vera Miles) suffers a nervous breakdown. Extremely sobering.

WRONG TURN (2003) There's nothing original about this latterday blend of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, but it's competently directed by Rob Schmidt and an encouraging sign that slasher movies are being taken seriously again after post-modern pastiches such as Scream. Desmond Harrington and Eliza Dushku head the gaggle of nubile urban cannon fodder who make the mistake of venturing into the wild woods of West Virginia ("Let me remind you of a little movie called Deliverance") where they find a house full of human body parts. Cue for mutant hillbillies, severed heads and a chase through the treetops, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon this is not.

WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END (2007) If slasher movies are to be believed, rural parts of the United States are positively heaving with inbred cannibal hillbillies. Here we have another bunch of superfical young people unwittingly putting themselves on the menu of a family of lumpy-faced speech-impaired psychos by taking part in a Survival-type reality TV show. They're supposed to live off nuts and berries in the forest, but instead find themselves facing the business end of axes, arrows, flying razor-wire and the sort of chompy, crushy machines last seen in Galaxy Quest. Par for the slasher movie course, in other words, perked up by a couple of narrative surprises (the survivors aren't necessarily the ones you'd predict) and Henry Rollins, who injects a note of Rambo-esque fun as a military veteran who fights back.

UG-VO

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U-571 (2000) Hollywood rewrites history (yet again) by crediting an American submarine crew with the seizure of the all-important "Enigma" coding device during the Second World War. If that doesn't put you off, this is an exciting if not very nautically accurate action yarn in which Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey and their crew find themselves stranded in mid-Atlantic aboard the eponymous U-boat and having to master the unfamiliar controls in record time. Full speed ahead for all the usual submarine clichés: creaks, leaks, depth charges and no shortage of machines going "ping".

UGETSU MONOGATARI (1953, b/w) If you see one film by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, make it this haunting fable combining elements from a 17th century ghost story and the tales of Guy de Maupassant, and also known by the lyrical if not particularly informative title, Tales of the Silvery Moon After the Rain. Two villagers, a farmer and a potter, abandon their families in a vain quest for fame and fortune during the civil wars of 16th century Japan, only to find that riches and glory are – you guessed it – an illusion. One man poses as a samurai, the other is seduced by a mysterious lady with smudgy aristocratic eyebrows; both realise the error of their ways just in time for one of cinema's great tear-jerking endings.

UGLY TRUTH, THE (2009) Katherine Heigl plays an uptight TV producer; Gerard Butler is the macho man hired by her station to boost ratings with his boorish banter and crass stunts such as cavorting with bikini-clad babes in paddling pools full of Jello. Naturally, in best rom-com fashion, they're destined to fall for each other even though neither is very appealing. Hard to believe someone who looks like Heigl can't get a boyfriend, even if she is a whiney control freak, and even harder to believe she would ever ask a lunkhead like Butler for tips on how to seduce the eligible doctor she fancies. The film hits rock bottom with a particularly contrived and unpleasant gag about vibrating knickers. I can put up with sexual stereotypes being reinforced if the results are funny, but this is about as amusing as root canal work.

ULTRAVIOLET (2005) Kurt Wimmer wrote and directed the unintentionally hilarious Equilibrium, so I had high-hopes for his follow-up. Alas, this warmed-over rehash of comic-book clichés devolves into endless scenes of Milla Jovovich exposing her midriff in low-slung trousers as her opponents obligingly line up in rows or stand around in circles, waiting to be shot or kicked. She's a resistance fighter for an underclass infected with a vampire-like virus in an airbrushed future world that bears no relation to life as we know it - or even to vampire films as we know them. Actually, the computerised colours are pretty and so is Milla, so I could probably have gone on watching her lame gun-fu for hours, but then we get lumbered with some tedious guff about her bonding with a small boy whose blood contains... I can hear you yawning already.

ULYSSES' GAZE (1995) The films of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos are pretty long and slow-moving, but full of haunting images and richly rewarding if you can stay awake. This one stars a slightly miscast Harvey Keitel as "A", the film-maker's alter-ego (we should probably be thankful he didn't opt for Brad Pitt), who's an exiled director returning to Greece for the first time in 35 years to track down some missing reels of film. His odyssey takes him through most of the Balkans, slipping back and forth through the mists of time as he dodges snipers and firing squads. Eleni Karaindrou's music is lovely.

ULZANA’S RAID (1972) Ulzana's an Apache chief who escapes from the reservation and, with a handful of warriors, goes on a rampage of rape, murder and looting. Burt Lancaster plays the grizzled scout whose cynical words of wisdom shock the idealistic young cavalry officer (Bruce Davison) dispatched to deal with the situation. Dances With Wolves this is not (thank goodness) but although Robert Aldrich's grim but excellent western never downplays the savagery on both sides, it does treat Native Americans (mostly played by Hispanic actors) and whites as complex characters rather than as stereotypes, with Jorge Luke memorably super-cool as Lancaster's taciturn Injun sidekick.

UNBREAKABLE (2000) M Night Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense by directing Bruce Willis in another tale of the uncanny, again hinging on a last-minute twist that forces viewers to reassess everything they've seen. Bruce plays an unhappily married security guard who miraculously emerges unscathed from a train wreck and finds himself being stalked by Samuel L Jackson, sporting one of the more wayward hair-dos of our time, as a loony comic collector with brittle bone disease. Jackson reveals that our hero is, in fact... But that would be telling! It doesn't quite come off, but Willis' first scene on the train is a mini-masterpiece of gathering unease, and how refreshing to see such a radically different approach to the superhero genre, one that opts for po-faced Ingmar Bergman-style psychological drama over machine-gun editing and masses of special effects.

UNDER SIEGE (1992) Steven Seagal must be one of the least appealing action stars ever, but this is one of his better outings thanks to some top-notch villainy from Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey, both so obviously barking mad that you wonder how anyone let them within a million miles of a battleship stocked with nuclear arms. Only Big Steve, as an ex-Navy SEAL now demoted to ship's cook, and a calendar girl who jumps out of a birthday cake (Erika Eleniak, formerly of Baywatch) stand between these two ranting maniacs and the destruction of civilisation as we know it.

UNDER THE SAND (2000) Charlotte Rampling gets the best role of her career as Marie Drillon, an apparently happily married Eng Lit professor whose husband (Bruno Cremer, who plays Inspecteur Maigret on French TV) vanishes during a stay in their holiday home by the sea. Has he drowned or just gone AWOL? Marie goes into serious denial and imagines he's still sharing her day-to-day life in their Paris flat. French enfant terrible François Ozon directs this slow but moving study of aching loss that also touches on the everyday routines of a long-term relationship. Ozon adores women, and it shows - rarely has a fiftysomething actress been filmed so lovingly. Hypnotic and sublime.

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN (2003) No cliché is left unturned in this unabashed chick-flick adapted from one of those I-squished-my-own-olives-in-rural-Europe memoirs. Diane Lane plays a writer, fleeing a nasty divorce in San Francisco, who buys a mansion in a Tuscan village where, conveniently, all the locals speak broken English. Wacky Polish builders help turn her tumbledown hovel into a chic environment worthy of Interiors, and she has a fling with an Italian charmer who says, "You have beautiful eyes, Francesca; I wish I could swim in them." That this tosh remains watchable is entirely due to Lane, who is utterly wonderful.

UNDERNEATH, THE (1995) This reworking of the classic film noir Criss Cross is reportedly Steven Soderbergh's least favourite of all the films he's directed, but I've always had a soft spot for it, even if the thrills don't really kick in until the final reel. It also gives a plum role to the always interesting Peter Gallagher, who gets to exercise his slightly sleazy charm as a feckless ex-gambler who comes crawling home to Austin, Texas and makes the mistake of trying to hook up with his ex-wife (Alison Elliott), even though she's now involved with the local Mr Big (William Fichtner in scary Christopher Walken mode). Soderbergh brilliantly weaves together three separate time-frames as these losers start plotting a robbery that you just know is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

UNDERWORLD (2003) Vampires and werewolves are ancient enemies in this jumped-up action movie posing as a horror pic. Think Romeo and Juliet without the poetry but with added fangs as vamp Kate Beckinsale, looking fetching in skin-tight PVC, falls for a bloke whose multiple-monster ancestry is more interesting than his wan personality. The Matrix-inspired fight scenes already look dated, there are inordinate amounts of running around in tunnels and some intriguing ideas, such as ultra-violet bullets, that are never fully exploited. Back at base, the vampires lounge around looking like New Romantic rejects, and it's up to stalwarts such as Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen, as elder statesmen of their respective clans, to inject some blood into the otherwise anaemic proceedings.

UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION (2005) Not a lot of evolution on show here, I'm afraid. Kate Beckinsale wears tight black PVC and bounces all over the walls in action-packed, CGI-heavy, slightly tiresome vampires-versus-werewolves sequel.

UNDISPUTED (2002) Walter Hill's punchiest film in years went straight to DVD in the UK, but anyone with a weakness for the cinema of unreconstructed machismo will appreciate one of the best boxing movies since Raging Bull. Wesley Snipes plays a former heavyweight contender convicted of murder and now serving time at Sweetwater penitentiary in the Mojave Desert. Ving Rhames plays "The Iceman", the reigning heavyweight champ who (like Mike Tyson) has been convicted of rape, though he maintains he's innocent. The film is basically these two hardmen winding each other up in a countdown to the big face-off (both actors do their own punching in the ring), with rough contributions from Wes Studi, as Rhames' cellmate, and Peter Falk, in what could be his last great supporting turn, as a mobster banged up for tax evasion.

UNFAITHFUL (2002) Claude Chabrol's La femme infidèle gets the Hollywood remake treatment from Adran Lyne, the director who brought you Fatal Attraction, with results that are better than you'd expect, though the second half of the film, in which murder serves as a useful alternative to marriage counselling, doesn't work as well as in the original. What makes it worth seeing is the intriguing portrait of a marriage and good performances from Richard Gere, in low-key mode as the cuckolded husband, and Diane Lane, utterly compelling as the suburban housewife who embarks on an affair with a sexy French book dealer.

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948, b/w) The great Preston Sturges wrote and directed this ingeniously structured black comedy about a crazy-jealous symphony conductor (Rex Harrison naughtily parodying Sir Thomas Beecham) who suspects his wife (lovely Linda Darnell) of having an affair. In fantasy sequences inspired variously by the Wagner, Rossini and Tchaikovsky he's conducting, he fantasises about killing her, only for everything to degenerate into slapstick when he actually tries to put his plans into practice. Sturges purists tend to be a little sniffy about this film, but it cracks me up every time.

UNFORGIVEN (1992) Clint Eastwood produced, directed and stars in this Oscar-winning Western as William Munny, a widowed pig-farmer who thinks his gunslinging days are over ("I ain't like that any more") until he hears about a $1000 reward on the heads of some men who slashed a prostitute's face. Times are hard, so he and his old buddy (Morgan Freeman) dust off their guns to make one last killing. But first they have to get past Gene Hackman as a sheriff who'll go to any lengths to uphold the law. The result, predictably, is a bloodbath, but tragic rather than cathartic because these are real people instead of one-dimensional heroes and villains.

UNINVITED, THE (2009) Not, alas, the splendid 1944 ghost story of the same name, but a Hollywood remake of the Korean chiller A Tale of Two Sisters. Emily Browning (like Brenda from Beverly Hills 90210, but even more gormless) gets out of hospital where she's been treated since a suicide attempt, and rejoins her sister and father (David Strathairn) in their clifftop home, only to find dad planning to marry his late wife's nurse (Elizabeth Banks in wicked stepmother mode). Naturally, mum's ghost pops up to tell Emily her death was no accident. Tom and Charles Guard, making their directing debut, seem to have learned about horror movies solely from watching other bland remakes of superior Asian originals; red herrings and heavily telegraphed "shocks" abound. But look on the bright side - it's unlikely to give you nightmares.

UNITED 93 (2006) The horrific images from 9/11 have been screened so many times they've been reduced to a visual cliché. So the biggest achievement of Paul Greengrass' exemplary docu-drama style reconstruction of what happened to the plane that didn't find its target is how it succeeds in plunging us back into the shock and confusion of that morning - even though you know the outcome, you can't help hoping it's going to turn out all right after all. Watching this, it's hard to give credence to the conspiracy theory that the fourth plane crashed not because a heroic band of passengers fought back, but because it was shot out of the sky by the US air force. I'm not denying the US air force would be capable of such an act - I just don't think they understood what was going on any more than the rest of us.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992) Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in a single movie! Be still my heart. The big-biceped ones play American soldiers who are killed in Vietnam but resurrected back in the USA as elite super-fighting cyborgs. Lundgren, already a psycho before his demise, mainlines muscle-enhancing drugs and goes kill-crazy. Jean-Claude, who makes friends with a feisty female reporter, just wants peace and love, man. It's a tussle of the muscles, with explosions in all the right places.

UNLAWFUL ENTRY (1992) A friend once told me he thought this was the smuttiest film title ever and that he couldn't hear it without sniggering. I'm still not sure what he meant, but this is an effective if formulaic thriller starring Ray Liotta as a helpful cop who gets chummy with a well-heeled married couple (Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe) after a break-in at their lovely Los Angeles home. But hey, this is Ray Liotta, not best known for playing Mother Theresa, so it's not entirely surprising when he turns out to have a hidden agenda. Director Jonathan Kaplan works in some piquant illustrations of the chasm between moneyed society and life as a blue-collar working stiff, but at heart it's still just a Friday-night-after-the-pub psycho movie.

UNLEASHED (2005) Jet Li plays a Chinese orphan brought up as an attack dog by debt-collector Bob Hoskins in this Anglo-French-American martial arts variation on Oliver Twist written and co-produced by Luc Besson and known in France as Danny the Dog. One day our hero escapes and finds true happiness with a blind piano-tuner (Morgan Freeman) and his musically gifted daughter, but Hoskins wants to put him back to work, battering opponents to death in a fight club. It's a wacky blend of chop-socky brutishness and sentimental slop, set in a Glasgow curiously devoid of Scottish accents, but the fight scenes (choreographed by the ubiquitous Yuen Woo-Ping) are sensational.

UNSTRUNG HEROES (1995) Diane Keaton's debut feature as director is a tragicomic rites-of-passage story set in the early 1960s, and a lot more amusing than it might sound on paper. John Turturro plays an eccentric inventor whose wife (Andie McDowell) is dying of cancer, so their 12-year-old son runs away to stay with his uncles, who have taken the family eccentricity a few steps further down the road towards clinical insanity. One of these nutcases is played by Maury Chaykin, the other by Michael Richards in what virtually amounts to a reprise of his wacky Kramer character from Seinfeld. Which is OK by me.

UNTOLD SCANDAL (2003) We've already had Cruel Intentions, a teen update of Les liaisons dangereuses; now here's an 18th century Korean version of Choderlos de Laclos' classic epistolary novel. Progress is slow and stately, but the sumptuousness of the period robes makes it all the more exciting when the layers are peeled back; the calligraphy scene is especially saucy. Lady Cho, the Mertueil character, sports a matronly hair-do like a harvest festival offering of plaited loaves, while her unwitting rival, chaste Lady Sook, wears hers secured by a small hockey stick. In fact, everyone seems to be called Cho or Sook, but you're unlikely to get lost if you're at all familiar with the story. Bae Yong-Jun, who plays the Valmont character, is a charmer; this is the first time I've found myself rooting for him instead of Mertueil.

UNTOUCHABLES, THE (1987) Girls! Next time someone breaks your heart, remember - films can ease the pain. For example, there's a useful quote in Brian De Palma's operatically OTT gangster flick when Al Capone shouts, "I want him DEAD. I want his family DEAD. I want his house BURNT TO THE GROUND. I wanna go there in the middle of the night and PISS ON HIS ASHES." He's talking about Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) but try yelling that the way Robert De Niro yells it and you'll feel better. I promise.

UNTRACEABLE (2008) The always excellent Diane Lane stars in this clever but cruel psychothriller as an FBI agent specialising in cyber-crime who stumbles across a website showing a kitten being tortured to death (relax - Hollywood is happy to show people being horribly tortured, but never cute fluffy animals) and fears the perp will graduate to people. Sure enough, assorted unfortunates are duly dispatched in gruesome ways, the speed of their demise regulated according to the number of viewers logging on to watch, while Diane and her colleagues race to track the killer down. It's the sort of film that pretends to be dealing with the moral implications of screen violence, but is really just serving up more of the same, all filmed in that grainy, greeny way that makes everything look grim.

USUAL SUSPECTS, THE (1994) If Reservoir Dogs inspired a new wave of hip-talking heist movies, it was Bryan Singer's shaggy-dog yarn that led to the current trend for twist endings (He was dead all along! They were the same person all along! They were subjects in an alien experiment all along!), to the extent that nowadays, the audience is so primed for a plot reversal that the most shocking twist is when there isn't one. Except that Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay really is a model of its kind with its pretzel plotting, colourful hoodlums and overriding central mystery - who is the criminal mastermind Keyser Soze? Chazz Palminteri is the customs cop determined to solve the puzzle, and he gets solid support from Kevin Spacey, Kevin Pollak, Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin and Benicio de Toro (with hilariously incomprehensible accent) as the crooks who bite off more than they can chew. The great test of a twist movie is whether it stands up to a second viewing, and this one does, more or less.

U-TURN (1997) Had it had been directed by anyone else (John Dahl, say) this might have been a nifty little noir thriller about a beleaguered gambler (Sean Penn) stranded by car trouble in the boondocks of Arizona, where he finds himself caught in the crossfire between Jennifer Lopez and Nick Nolte as a couple of murderous spouses. Unfortunately, it's directed by Oliver Stone, who keeps inserting shots of scorpions and rattlesnakes to remind us of man's bestial nature, the disinheritance of the Native American and so on. But there's compensation aplenty in mad cameos from Jon Voight as a blind Indian and Billy Bob Thornton as the garage mechanic from hell. And J-Lo is, let's face it, an eyeful in her red frock.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005) Alan Moore was reportedly far from happy with this film version of his graphic novel, though it works better than the adaptations of From Hell or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The setting's updated from the Thatcherite regime of the 1980s source material to a near-future totalitarian Britain, in which the threat of terrorism is used as a pretext to curtail human rights. Natalie Portman, wielding wobbly Brit accent, plays a media babe whose head is shaved by secret police, but seems strangely peripheral to the mildly subversive story about a freedom fighter in a Guy Fawkes mask (fearlessly faceless Hugo Weaving) plotting to blow up Parliament. Stephen Rea is at his hangdoggiest as the police inspector on his trail, and John Hurt, who played Winston Smith in the 1984 film of 1984, has been upgraded here to the Big Brother figure, though the production misses a trick by making him a ranting bigot instead of a smooth-talking smiley Tony Blair figure. Maybe they should have cast Michael Sheen.

VACANCY (2007) There's nothing like being trapped in a life-threatening situation to fix your faltering marriage, as Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale find when they check into the wrong motel and stumble across a stash of snuff videos. Nimród Antal's classy directing doesn't make up for a plot so twist-free it's almost insulting, and the seedy motel bathroom is scarier than the bad guys, who are so stupid they're still trading in videos a decade after everyone else has switched to DVDs. Great typographic credits, though.

VALKYRIE (2008) Star performances can make or break a movie, and the casting of Tom Cruise as one-eyed Colonel von Stauffenberg, a ringleader in the 1944 plot against Hitler, throws Bryan Singer's American-German co-production off-kilter. Cruise can be a mesmerising, even troubling presence, but his style doesn't meld well with a cracking supporting cast of mostly British character actors (Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp et al), most of whose roles are more interestingly ambiguous or ambivalent than that of the heroic von Stauffenberg. Foreknowledge of the outcome of a historical thriller doesn't have to deprive it of tension - look at Day of the Jackal - and there are some intriguing "what ifs" here, but considering what's at stake, the end result is surprisingly bland and uninvolving. Inglourious Basterds this is not.

VALMONT (1989) Milos Forman's film of Les liaisons dangereuses was overshadowed by the overhyped Stephen Frears version, but this is less portentous, better cast and more fun all round. A pre-Beatty Annette Bening is deliciously duplicitous as Merteuil (and about a thousand times sexier than Glenn Close), a pre-Darcy Colin Firth is a seductive Valmont without any of John Malkovich's leering, and Meg Tilly is far more credible as the virtuous Madame de Tourvel than was Michelle Pfeiffer. Plus there's the added attraction of Jeffrey Jones in a wig. It may look like a light-hearted costume romp, but don't be fooled – the story's dark streaks are all present and correct. La Marquise de Merteuil, c'est moi!

VALSEUSES, LES (1974) French director Bertrand Blier's first big hit was this freewheeling road movie about two bad boys (Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, who killed himself in 1982) whose hobbies include stealing handbags and cars and having lots and lots of sex. In 1970s France, of course, these guys were hailed as anti-bourgeois rebels, though from a contemporary point of view their treatment of the various women they encounter is frankly rather disturbing and misogynous. Nevertheless, it's a key film in French cinema. Stéphane Grappelli's score adds a touch of class, and there are memorable contributions from Miou-Miou as their main squeeze, Jeanne Moreau as a woman just out of jail and young Isabelle Huppert, who gets deflowered. The title, by the way, is French slang for "testicles". Which just about sums it up.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1971) Latterday Hammer in persuasively dreamlike mode, with the mysterious Circus of Nights descending on a plague-ridden mittel-European village and wowing the locals with its mirror maze and displays of shape-shifting. You or I would smell a rat as soon as we saw trapeze artists turning into bats in mid-air, but not these morons. In fact, the circus folk are all related to a vampire the villagers staked 15 years earlier. You'd think they'd remember this not entirely quotidian occurrence and maybe make a connection when blood-drained corpses start turning up all over the place, but no. That's mittel-European villagers for you.

VAN HELSING (2004) Stephen Sommers does for Dracula, werewolves and Frankenstein's Monster what he previously did for the Mummy, namely pump them full of non-stop action, noise and CGI effects. Hugh Jackman plays the eponymous hero, appointed by the Vatican to rid 19th century Europe of evil creatures. For reasons that now escape me, he hooks up with Kate Beckinsale, as Transylvanian booty with a distracting dominatrix-meets-milkmaid bodice, before they set about thwarting Drac's plan to flood the world with ickle-bitty vampires. The first half hour is actually rather exhilarating, then nervous exhaustion sets in as you realise you're in for another 100 minutes of exactly the same, with no let up.

VAN WILDER: PARTY LIASION (2002) This American campus comedy wrings most of its laughs from the usual gross-out humour - laxatives, penis enlargers, chocolate eclairs spiked with ooh no, it's just too yucky to spell out. Van Wilder's an eternal student (seven years and counting, but his rich daddy is about to cut the funding) who's won affection and respect, basically, by throwing parties. But he has a good heart, and he's kind to nerds, plus he's played by the amazingly charming Ryan Reynolds who gets his kit off as often as possible, which is no bad thing. Dim-looking Tara Reid plays the prissy student journalist who sets out to write an exposé but ends up disarmed, as will you be if you're feeling sufficiently immature.

VANILLA SKY (2001) If you haven’t seen the superior Spanish film on which this was based (Alejandro Amenèabar's Abre los ojos aka Open Your Eyes) you might enjoy watching Tom Cruise as David Aames, a high-flying New Yorker whose charmed existence starts to fragment after a spurned gal pal (Cameron Diaz) drives their car off a bridge. Aames is horribly disfigured (or is he?), which forces him to wear a mask and scuppers his budding romance with Penélope Cruz (or does it?). Yes, it’s one of those films in which Reality Is Not What It Seems. Cameron Crowe directs in super-slick style, and though not a patch on the original it still pulls off a few nifty tricks, such as an eerie Times Square with no-one in it.

VANISHING POINT (1971) The first great road movie of the 1970s has a screenplay by Cuban novelist G Cabrera Infante and was a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Barry Newman plays Kowlaski, an alienated everyman (and Vietnam veteran) who accepts a bet that he can drive a supercharged white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours. A feat impossible without both kinds of speed, so he swallows a fistful of bennies and applies pedal to the metal for a non-stop car chase punctuated by the odd flashback or encounter with pistol-packing gay hitchhikers or nude biker chicks. This being America post-Easy Rider, the police are Blue Meanies and Kowalski is declared "The Last Beautiful Free Soul on the Planet" which makes it as dated as loon pants, but there's no arguing with the superb stunt driving and spectacular landscapes.

VANISHING, THE (1988) Wanna see something really scary? George Sluizer’s Franco-Dutch psychothriller begins with the disappearance of a young Dutchwoman at a service station in the south of France and ends with one of the most nightmarish denouements in film history. In the interim, we become almost as obsessed as the missing woman’s boyfriend with finding out what happened to her, though unlike him we’re privy to the kidnapper’s identity – he’s an ordinary-seeming family man played with chillng affability (and slightly dodgy beard) by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu. But the game here is not whodunnit, but how and why, with missing pieces falling into place to show us how the madman ticks. All he needs now is an audience to appreciate his cleverness.

VANISHING, THE (1993) No, not the devastatingly bleak Franco-Dutch psychothriller, but the Hollywood bowdlerization from the same director, George Sluizer. Predictably, critics dumped on it, but I like to look on it as the wishful thinking version, the one that doesn't give you horrible nightmares. Sandra Bullock plays the girlfriend who goes missing at a motorway service station, Keifer Sutherland is the boyfriend obsessed with finding out what happened to her and Jeff Bridges is a memorably creepy villain.

VANITY FAIR (2004) Zounds, what have they done to Becky Sharp? Reese Witherspoon, whose Tracy Flick in Election was one of the more memorable female monsters of our time, might have seemed an inspired choice to play the anti-heroine Thackeray's novel, but she just comes across as blandly sympathetic, a prototype feminist thinly disguised as a chirpy little tease so she can get ahead in class-ridden society. This is Thackeray with all his teeth extracted, an endless parade of bonnets and stately mansions, with director Mira Nair's sporadic injections of Bollywood colour seeming forced. It's not a dead loss: Eileen Atkins is magnificent as Matilda Crawley, James Purefoy is one hundred per cent hunk as Rawdon, and Rhys Ifans is such a manly, dependable Dobbin it makes Amelia (Romola Garai) seem like a myopic twit for not flinging herself into his arms from the get-go.

VAULT OF HORROR, THE (1973) The Amicus portmanteau movies of the 1960s and 1970s were considered horror films in their day, though nowadays they seem more like the kind of creepily comic yarns spun by The League of Gentlemen. Daniel Massey finds himself in a very unusual restaurant, Terry-Thomas drives Glynis Johns insane, Michael Craig gets himself buried alive, Curd Jürgens steals an Indian rope trick and – in my favourite segment – Tom Baker plays an artist who learns voodoo and gets his own back on his enemies by disfiguring their portraits. Alas, the silly man has also painted a self-portrait…

VANTAGE POINT (2008) This starts off with a bang, with an assassination attempt on the American President (William Hurt) who's attending an international summit in Spain. Then the film rewinds, and we see the same events again from other angles, including those of Lost's Matthew Fox, as a secret service agent, and Forest Whitaker, as an American tourist. Sigourney Weaver plays a news editor, and there's a sprinkling of European actors (Saïd Taghmaoui, Edward Noriega) who are mostly required to look shifty. Rashomon-style multiple viewpoints and all-star casting make this slick, gimmicky thriller appear more interesting than it actually is, with the screenplay rigorously backing away from anything that might be construed as pertinent or contentious, and a truly ludicrous ending. But it's entertaining while it lasts.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) American indie director Todd Haynes' attempts to join up the dots between Oscar Wilde and David Bowie don't really come off, and the writer-director loses the plot amid a lot of pop video posturing, but his reimagining of the 1970s glam rock scene via a Citizen Kane-style flashback structure is a swishy fever dream of bisexuality and sparkly eye-shadow, and obligatory viewing for anyone who ever twisted an ankle in a platform boot. Christian Bale plays a 1980s reporter trying to find out what happened to his former idol, a Bowie clone played by gorgeous, pouting Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. Ewan McGregor goes full-frontal as an Iggy Pop-type rocker. Bowie refused to grant song rights, which is fine by me since it leaves all the more room for Roxy Music, Brian Eno and Marc Bolan. Those were the days. Or maybe not.

VENDREDI SOIR (2001) A young woman (Valérie Lemercier), on her way to move in with her fiancé, finds herself trapped in gridlock, picks up a stranger (Vincent Lindon) and they end up having sex. Don't go expecting Hollywood-type plotting from a Claire Denis film. Those with short attention spans will find it akin to getting stuck in a traffic jam in real time, but patient Denis fans will be rewarded with a lyrical study of Paris by night, the magic of ordinary details and meaningful moments between people who don't know each other.

VENOM (2005) Pretty, obnoxious teens are chased through Louisiana swamps by ugly, undead tow-truck driver in unoriginal but not unlively voodoo slasher movie with masses of splatter.

VENUS BEAUTY INSTITUTE (1999) Toni Marshall's gently satirical portrait of French womanhood in all its permutations could almost be a Who's Who's of French acting talent for the benefit of British audiences who sense there's life beyond Depardieu and Deneuve. Nathalie Baye, as a commitment-shy beautician, heads a top-notch cast that also includes Audrey Tautou shining, pre-Amelie, as an ingenue who embarks on an affair with an older man, Mathilde Seigner (Harry, He's Here to Help), Bulle Ogier as the pretentious owner of the pink parlour where they work, Samuel LeBihan (Brotherhood of the Wolf) and a full complement of cameos from golden greats such as Micheline Presle, Edith Scob and Emmanuelle Riva.

VERA CRUZ (1954) Gary Cooper (upright, reliable) and Burt Lancaster (perpetually flashing his teeth and about as trustworthy as a snake) play American mercenaries trying to make a fast buck during the Mexican War of Independence in Robert Aldrich's colourful, cynical western. Add a dupicitous French countess, a coachful of gold and corrupt Europeans versus patriotic rebels (plus small roles for Bronson and Borgnine) and you've got a rip-roaring forerunner of spaghetti westerns and The Wild Bunch.

VERA DRAKE (2004) The three laws of Mike Leigh films are: 1) the middle classes must be caricatured, 2) life is depressing and 3) wallpaper, lots of it. Vera Drake is like a theme-park detailing the drab nightmare of Britain in 1950, an era before we discovered things like courgettes, Ikea and legal abortion. Imelda Staunton is simply amazing as Vera, a cheery bustling soul who's always ready with a cuppa, and always keen to help out young girls in trouble. Unfortunately, she also lacks the medical know-how to prevent things from going horribly wrong, which is when the law comes a-calling. Whatever your views on abortion (and I'm so irredeemably pro-choice that scolding me would be a tragic waste of your time and effort) you'd have to be pretty sick to want a return to the bad old days depicted here.

VERDICT, THE (1982) A predictable courtroom drama about a washed-up lawyer going for one last shot at redemption gets classy directing from Sidney Lumet and a marvellous lead performance from Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, an alcoholic ambulance-chaser who finds himself stirred by the plight of the comatose defendant in a malpractice suit against a Boston hospital. David Mamet's screenplay travels in a straight line (setbacks, speeches, surprise witness), and James Mason provides excellent support as the ultra-smooth defending counsel - "The Prince of Fucking Darkness", as someone calls him.

VERONICA GUERIN (2003) The real-life story of the Irish journalist assassinated by drug dealers in 1996 is so compelling that it has been filmed twice. Here it’s Cate Blanchett’s turn to flex her perfect Irish accent as the happily married crusader who doorsteps lowlifes, gets shot in the leg and, in the film’s most shocking scene, punched in the face by a Dublin drug baron, yet still refuses police protection since she believes it will hamper her ability to do her job. Joel Schumacher directs in atypically low-key style, though can’t resist inserting a touch of Hollywood gangster-movie hyperbole now and then, but it’s nice to hear Ciarán Hinds, as a moustachioed brother-keeper, using his own accent for once.

VERSUS (2000) It's gangsters versus zombies in this barking mad cult movie directed by Ryuhei Kitamura - zombies with guns, no less. There's a shred of a plot about heroes and villains caught in a time-trap that forces everyone to repeat their life-or-death struggle every 100 years or so, but basically it's an excuse for two hours of ninja-style action, silly show-off camerawork, rank overacting and lashings of dismemberment and coughing up blood on a shoestring budget. And the moral is - never bury the corpses of your victims in the Forest of Resurrection. Duh.

VERTICAL LIMIT (2000) Preposterously gripping tosh in which Chris O'Donnell leads a team of climbers (most of whom might as well have had the words "cannon fodder" tattooed on their foreheads) up K2 to rescue his sister (Robin Tunney) who has fallen down a crevasse with an evil millionaire (Bill Paxton) and is now slowly dying from lack of dialogue. Since climbing K2 obviously isn't dangerous enough for her rescuers, they carry backpacks of nitroglycerine as well. Scott Glenn plays a wild man of the mountains whose toes have been eaten away by frostbite, and Izabella Scorupco plays a French-Canadian climber whose finger gets bent back at an angle of 90 degrees. Ouch.

VERTIGO (1958) James Stewart plays an acrophobic private detective hired to keep on eye on Kim Novak as she wanders around San Francisco, apparently possessed by the spirit of a suicidal ancestor. The first time you see it, Alfred Hitchcock's mesmerising, elegant, melancholy masterpiece can be a little disappointing, because as a thriller, it's full of holes. (This could well be the stupidest murder plot ever devised.) But as a study of romantic obsession it’s a world beater, up there with Proust. Here are two of the most spine-tingling kisses of all time, as well as some of the most heart-rending dialogue – "If I let you change me, will you love me?" My own slightly controversial theory is that, far from being misogynous, as some critics have claimed, this is an intensely feminist film; it might be Stewart doing the legwork, but it's the women (Novak and down-to-earth bra designer Barbara Bel Geddes) who see things all too clearly as he spurns their real affection in favour of chasing after a glamorous phantom. But serves them right for falling in love with such a loser in the first place. Story of my life. Meanwhile, composer Bernard Herrmann and title sequence designer Saul Bass are at the top of their game.

VERY BAD THINGS (1988) Actor Peter Berg, who played the sap in The Last Seduction, makes his writing-directing debut with this dubious black comedy in which a Las Vegas stag party goes horribly wrong. A stripper-cum-hooker ends up dead, and the five despicable party animals (including Christian Slater and Jon Favreau) decide to bury her in the desert rather than come clean. Big mistake. The film starts off at such a hysterical pitch of Grand Guignol that there's nowhere left for it to go, but Cameron Diaz is good value in the later stages as the monomaniac bride-to-be who refuses to let a little thing like murder spoil her big day.

VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT, A (2004) Jean-Pierre Jeunet's follow-up to Amelie is a big-scale adaptation of Sébastien Japrisot's novel set just after the Great War. Audrey Tautou is convinced that reports of her Josh Hartnett-lookalike fiancé's death on the Front were greatly exaggerated, and scours France in a search for the truth. Although sepia-tinted and sprinkled with whimsical humour, this portrait of war's effect on a cross-section of French society is anything but cosy nostalgia, and you'll need to stay alert if you want to keep tabs on the sprawling plot teeming with moustachioed actors (plus Jodie Foster speaking impeccable French) and Marion Cotillard, pre-La vie en rose, in a scene-stealing turn as a vengeful prostitute. It's worth the effort, and a pleasure to see digitally rendered views of Les Halles and the Musée d'Orsay as they used to be.

VIAGGIO IN ITALIA (1954) See Voyage in Italy.

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA (2008) Woody Allen's most enjoyable recent film (and let's face it, he's turned out some turkeys of late) stars Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as two young Americans on the loose in Barcelona. One's engaged to be married, the other's on the lookout for adventure, but they both get involved with Javier Bardem, exhibiting outrageous animal magnetism as a local painter; Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for her performance as the ultra-sexy ex who, literally, comes gunning for him. It's very much a tourist's-eye view of the city - all Gaudí and guitar, paella and rioja - populated by stereotypically hotblooded Spaniards, with an excessive amount of male voice-over narration explaining what should have been evident in the visuals, but Bardem and Cruz are clearly having a ball, and Hall is wonderful.

VICTIM (1961, b/w) Dirk Bogarde risked his matinee idol reputation in this dated but ground-breaking British thriller. He plays Melville Farr, a married lawyer who finds himself blackmailed by someone who knows he's a closet homosexual (the word "gay" was unheard of in this context back then). Though the pleas for tolerance now seem stilted, you have to bear in mind that sodomy was still illegal in 1961, and though the depiction of London's homosexual community is a little noir around the edges, the film does make a game effort to subvert limp-wristed pansy stereotypes.

VIDEODROME (1982) "The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena." James Woods plays a sleazy cable TV programmer who stumbles across a kinky sex channel and reckons it's what the world has been waiting for. Unfortunately, it also causes disorientating hallucinations in which rival factions "progamme" him by inserting videos into a pulsating VCR slot which materialises in his stomach. David Cronenberg's visionary splatter movie about the perils of too much television was years ahead of its time and still packs a visceral punch, though of course nowadays Woods would have to be programmed with DVDs instead of videos (and soon he'll have to be downloaded from the internet, or hitched up to live streaming). A masterpiece of Body Horror, and, like most of this director's work, not for the squeamish.

VIE EN ROSE, LA (2007) Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for her portayal of Edith Piaf, and you can see why - it's a stunning performance that transcends mere impersonation, makes you forget you're watching an actress (who in real life looks nothing like the singer herself) and ranks up there with the best of De Niro and Streep. There was criticism of the way director and co-writer Olivier Dahan omits World War Two and shuffles the chronology of Piaf's life, jitterbugging back and forth from the height of her fame, to childhood, to tragic romance with boxer Marcel Cerdan, trip to America, early discovery and so on. But the usual biopic method of plodding in strictly linear fashion from birth to trauma to triumph bores me silly, so this impressionistic approach suits me just fine.

VIEW FROM THE TOP (2003) Normally, when heroines are faced with a choice between career and love, I’d urge career every time. I’ll make an exception here, though, since Gwyneth Paltrow’s dream is to be an air hostess (not my idea of fun), and her love interest is yummy Mark Ruffalo. This frothy chick-flick sank without trace at the box-office (it was originally slated for a 2001 release, then postponed and recut in the wake of 9/11) but it’s painless primary-coloured escapism, with our Gwynnie letting her hair down as the trailer-trash sweetie aiming to swap a dead-end life in dullsville for transatlantic travel and Chanel lipsticks. Candice Bergen and Mike Myers egg her on, and catfight completists will want to see Paltrow’s hair-tugging, leg-kicking squeal-a-thon in the aisle against rival flight attendant Christina Applegate.

VIKINGS, THE (1958) "If he wasn’t fathered by a black ram in the full of the moon, my name is not Ragnar!" bellows Ernest Borgnine in this rollicking saga set against a backdrop of Norwegian fjords, handsomely photographed by Jack Cardiff. After a Bayeux Tapestry-inspired prologue worthy of Monty Python, the lusty Odin-worshippers get down to some serious ale-quaffing, axe-throwing and wench-ravishing – sometimes all at once. Kirk Douglas, whose eye is pecked out by a hawk, vies with his half-brother Tony Curtis, whose hand is lopped off by an English sword, for the throne of Northumbria and affections of Janet Leigh’s hot Welsh totty.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960, b/w) As a sci-fi hungry adolescent I lapped up the novels of John Wyndham, but his work seems to gone out of fashion. This eerie adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos is set in an English village where the inhabitants wake up after a mysterious 24-hour trance to find all the women pregnant. When the children are born, they all have the same platinum-blond hair, glowing eyes and IQs of two zillion, making their parents suspect that something's afoot. Could the horrible little tykes be - gulp - alien invaders from another planet? If so, perhaps George Sanders can stop them.

VILLAGE, THE (2004) M Night Shyamalan's tale of a small 19th century village menaced by creatures from the forest is like The Crucible without the jokes. Intermittently nice spooky build-up, but the Big Narrative Twist is really, really stupid.

VIPS, THE (1963) When you or I get stuck in an airport lounge, it’s hell, but when an all-star cast gets fogbound at "London Airport" it’s glossy trash of the first order. Liz Taylor plans to run out on millionaire husband Richard Burton because he gives her diamond bracelets instead of love. The swine. Margaret Rutherford, bless her, won an Oscar for her dotty turn as "The Duchess of Brighton". Orson Welles strolls through with a preposterous accent. Richard Wattis and an alarmingly fresh-faced Maggie Smith are among the toadies, and Terence Rattigan was responsible for the snobby script.

VIRTUOSITY (1995) Denzel Washington plays a leather-clad cop in this dippy slice of sci-fi that even by sci-fi standards isn't awfully credible. But let's be honest here – I'm recommending it chiefly because it features Russell Crowe with no clothes on. Big Russ, pre-Gladiator, gives it everything he's got as SID 6.7, a computer-generated criminal combining aspects of all the worst psychopaths in history, from Hitler to Manson to the killer who murdered Washington's family and left our hero to take the rap. SID's supposed to be a training device for future cops, but of course things go horribly wrong and he starts running amok.

VIRUS (1998) Cheerfully tacky sci-fi romp in which Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis and the rest of the crew of a beleaguered salvage tug take refuge from a South Sea hurricane on board an abandoned Russian science vessel. Little do they know an alien lifeforce has been piped down from the Mir space station, and is now busy in the bowels of the ship, cobbling together DIY host bodies out of electrical equipment, human parts and bits of old Meccano. It's all good unclean fun with no morally redeeming features, and Mad Cap'n Sutherland speaks with an Irish accent so insane it ought to be locked up.

VISITEURS, LES (1993) This popular comedy is brimful of unfunny shrieking and grotesque overacting but you must study it closely if you want to live in France, where it's regarded as a classic and regularly quoted in casual conversation. Jean Reno (magisterial) and Christian Clavier (irritating) play a mediaeval squire and servant who are transported by a bungling wizard into the 20th century, where they wreak slapstick havoc. Most of the humour hovers around the level of Clavier attacking a postal van with a log (which only makes you pine for John Cleese doing something similar in Fawlty Towers) but what makes the film worth watching is Valérie Lemercier, who nails the accent and mannerisms of the French provincial upper-classes to consistently droll effect.

VITAL (2004) Tadanobu Asano, sometimes referred to as "Japan's Johnny Depp", plays an amnesiac medical student who finds himself carving up the corpse of his dead girlfriend in dissection class. Since this is directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, best known for the extreme-cyberpunk classic Tetsuo, you'd be forgiven for expecting lots of headbanging nastiness, but instead it turns out to be a slow, strange but rather beautiful meditation on love and death, with a profoundly moving last act. Asano, who must have worked with every Japanese cult director of the past 15 years, is a total hottie, though if his character is serious about becoming a doctor he'll have to learn to tie his hair back from his face.

VOLCANO (1997) Sublimely silly disaster movie in which a solfatara (how I love that word) erupts out of the La Brea tar pits and pelts Los Angeles with great balls of fire. Just watch that molten lava flowing down Wilshire Boulevard and threatening the Beverly Center shopping mall! Tommy Lee Jones plays the man who must stop the magma, while Anne Heche is the feisty seismologist who first senses something is not quite kosher when one of her colleagues spontaneously combusts. Dogs in jeopardy, kiddies in peril, black teens and white cops pulling together to save lives - no cliché is left unturned, though I did feel sorry for the heroic subway worker who expires in a Wicked Witch of the West-style meltdown.

VOLVER (2006) Penelope Cruz (equipped with false derrière) is in gorgeous earth-mother mode and flaunts truly magnificent cleavage in Pedro Almodóvar's comedy-drama about two sisters and the ghost of their mother (Carmen Maura, returning to the director's fold for the first time since 1988), the disposal of an inconvenient corpse, running a restaurant and looking after a friend with cancer. That's enough for an entire soap opera, and indeed, with subplots shooting off in all directions without ever meshing satisfactorily, it's often like stumbling across a mid-season episode of a long-running serial. Still, Almodóvar has the eye of a world-class window dresser, and from the opening shot of women cleaning graves, this is a mouth-watering riot of saturated colour, female solidarity and Spanish cooking.

VOYAGE IN ITALY (1953 or 4, b/w) Ingrid Bergman caused a scandal when she left her husband and child for the Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini. In the second of the films the actress and director made together, she and George Sanders play a married couple of bourgeois Brits who arrive in Naples to sort out an inheritance (a villa with views of Vesuvius, Capri and the Sorrento Peninsula – we should all be so lucky) and realise their marriage is a sham. She wanders off sightseeing, while he dallies with the local Eurocuties, but it's Italy that has the last laugh. It's part portrait of a marriage, part travelogue, all masterpiece - though probably best avoided by young 'uns with Attention Deficit Disorder.

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TABOO (1999) See Gohatto.

TAI-CHI MASTER (1993) See Twin Warriors.

TAKE MY EYES (2003) Well made, well-meaning Spanish drama about the attempts of a young wife and mother (Laia Marull) to assert her identity and stand up to her abusive husband (Luis Tosar). Unfortunately he's such a charmless, aggressive, angry-looking bloke that it's hard to understand what she saw in him in the first place, let alone why she might be tempted to stick around. Still, there are some hilarious group therapy sessions, stocked with macho types unable to come up with anything to say to their spouses other than, "Where's my dinner?", and Toledo looks like a lovely place to visit - providing you can steer clear of all the wife-beating Spanish guys, of which there are apparently lots.

TAKING LIVES (2004) This psychothriller about a serial killer who steals the identities of his victims might have been easier to take seriously had the detective in charge not been played by Angelina Jolie, whose intriguing quirks (lying in graves to empathise with her quarry, studying autopsy photos as she eats dinner) are eclipsed by the actress's glamour and youthfulness, not to mention the character's barely credible readiness to jump into bed with her chief witness. Still, those absurdly squishy lips are fun to watch, as are the Montreal locations and a cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and Ethan Hawke. The best bit is a coda that teeters tantalisingly on the brink of bad taste.

TAKING OF PELHAM 123, THE (1974) Eighteen years before Reservoir Dogs, another set of villains address each other as "Mr Blue" and "Mr Brown" in this rippingly effective thriller packed with cynical wisecracks, familiar New York stereotypes and grungy 1970s urban ambience. Robert Shaw is always convincing as a villain with ice in his veins; he and his cohorts, in fake Groucho Marx specs and moustaches, threaten to bump off the luckless passengers of a NYC subway train unless the city coughs up $1 million within the hour. Walter Matthau is on top serious form as Lt Zachary Garber, the harassed Transit Authority Inspector who takes charge from the control room, and this is the only thriller I can think of that manages to wring a twist out of the word "Gesundheit!"

TALE OF TWO SISTERS, A (2003) Brace yourself for another round of spooky young women with faces obscured by long black hair from the GOOSEPIMPLES R US school of Asian film-making. Kim Jee-Woon’s superb psycho-chiller is a Korean spin on a very Grimm fairy tale, with two young girls trapped in a creaky old house and a father who looks the other way when their wicked stepmother mistreats them. Can Su-Mi protect her little sister? And omigod what’s that under the kitchen sink? There’s a supper party from hell, as well as a mind-blowing narrative twist - which isn’t necessarily the one you’re expecting.

TALENTED MR RIPLEY, THE (2000) Anthony Minghella directed and wrote this uneven but fabby-looking adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel set among ex-pat Americans in 1950s Italy. Matt Damon gives a fearless performance as Tom Ripley, an impoverished oik who kills the man he's been sent to track down before assuming his identity (and wealth) in a semi-farcical imbroglio of forgery and hasty homicide. Jude Law exudes effortless glamour as the doomed Dickie Greenleaf; both leading actors give good value, even if they should have swapped roles. Minghella overplays the homosexual angle and loses his way towards the end, but one should never underestimate the pleasures afforded by scenic views of Venice or the Amalfi Coast, Gwyneth Paltrow answering to the name of "Marge" as Greenleaf's girlfriend, or Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the ghastly Freddie Miles, dismissing Ripley's attempt at tasteful décor with a drawled, "It's so bourgeois!"

TALES FROM EARTHSEA (2006) Goro Miyazaki shows he hasn't (yet) inherited the storytelling genius of his father Hayao in this animated adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's celebrated fantasy novels. But despite a few dead spots and too much earnest discussion, his heartfelt anime directing debut contains enough wizards and dragons to capture the imagination of younger viewers. The film kicks off with teenage Prince Arren murdering his father (paging Dr Freud!) and stealing the royal sword, for reasons that are never really made clear, before fleeing through the quasi-mediaeval kingdom, hooking up with a good wizard called Sparrowhawk, rescuing a young girl from slave-traders and trying to restore the balance of nature by confronting an evil wizard called Cob, who's so effeminate I assumed he was a she until I read a synopsis.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972) Hoodie-wearing Ralph Richardson lures a bunch of sinners into the catacombs at Highgate Cemetery to give them a glimpse of the future, which is anything but rosy in this Amicus omnibus that was obviously a big influence on TV's The League of Gentlemen and stylistically has more in common with Tales of the Unexpected than with the original horror comics from which the stories were drawn. See Joan Collins menaced by Santa Claus! See Richard Greene (TV's Robin Hood) come a cropper in an update of The Monkey's Paw! Watch Peter Cushing rip out Robin Phillips' heart! See Nigel Patrick…razor blades… no, it's just too horrible.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT (1994) Zesty slice of B-movie-style horror hokum directed by Spike Lee's erstwhile cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson. William Sadler plays a mysterious drifter who's on the run from a demon called "The Collector", played to the hilt by bald Billy Zane. The hunted man takes refuge in an isolated motel populated by a shower of hookers, alcoholics and ex-cons who are variously mesmerised, menaced and mangled by the forces of evil before the tattered remnants band together to fight back. Fast-paced genre fun complete with a superabundance of rubber monster meltdowns and flashbacks to - where else? - Golgotha.

TALES OF TERROR (1962) Edgar Allan Poe could not have found a better cinematic interpreter than Roger Corman, whose adaptations of the writer's work are every bit as lush, morbid and suffocating as their source material. And who better to play the Poe protagonist than febrile, lip-curling, ever-so-slightly camp Vincent Price, who stars in all three segments of this portmanteau horror - stalked by his dead wife, bricked up in a cellar by a gloriously dipsomaniac Peter Lorre and hypnotised by evil Basil Rathbone, with extremely unpleasant results. Let's just say it makes a mess of the carpet.

TALK TO HER (2002) If it's political incorrectness you're after, look no further than Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who invariably manages to spin a sensitive adult twist out of material no Hollywood studio would dare touch; one of the protagonists here is a rapist, and yet it's impossible to hate him. It's basically a study of male friendship, but the plot also embraces the stories of two comatose women (a dancer and a bullfighter), Pina Bausch, music by Purcell and Caetano Veloso and even a self-contained silent film about a shrinking man who seeks refuge in his lover's vagina. Enthralling, emotionally complex entertainment for grown-ups, not to be missed.

TALL T, THE (1957) Gripping B-western directed by Budd Boetticher and adapted from a story by Elmore Leonard, who made his name writing about cowboys before turning to the crime novels for which he's now best known. Charming villain Richard Boone and his two vicious sidekicks make the mistake of holding up a stage-coach containing Randolph Scott. One of the other passengers offers his own wife (Maureen O'Sullivan) as ransom and is promptly shot dead for his pains, leaving Scott playing games of psychological cat and mouse against his captors.

TALL TARGET, THE (1951, b/w) Anthony Mann took time off from directing westerns to turn out this snappy noir-ish thriller set in 1861 and set almost entirely on a train. Abraham Lincoln's on his way from New York to his presidential inauguration in Washington DC. Dick Powell plays a policeman called John Kennedy (no relation to JFK) who gets wind of an assassination plot. No one believes him, so he tries to foil the plot on his own. What a shame he wasn't around when Abe went to the theatre four years later.

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (2005) Will Ferrell fans will need no encouragement to tune into this glorious send-up of Nascar racing with its affectionate skewerings of redneck culture, male buddy bonding and product placement overkill. The story is the rise and fall and rise again of a buffoon who prays to Lord Baby Jesus and names his sons "Walker" and "Texas Ranger" in homage to the Chuck Norris TV show. There are splendid contributions from Gary Cole as Ricky's dad, John C Reilly as his best friend and Sacha Baron Cohen as a gay French driver who reads Camus behind the wheel. Days of Thunder eat your heart out.

TAO OF STEVE, THE (2000) Overweight characters are usually given a raw deal in American cinema, so it's nice to see a fatty who's cool, for once, in this likeable low budget indie rom-com. Donal Logue plays a fat slob called Dex, who, 10 years after leaving college, is still living a wastrel's life of dope-smoking and frisbee in laid-back Santa Fe. The twist is that he's also hugely successful with women, combining Kierkegaard, Zen and Steve McQueen into a foolproof way of getting laid. He finally meets his match in a cynical set designer who refuses to succumb to his charm, resulting in some delightfully snippy dialogue and some of the best intellectual name-dropping since the heyday of Woody Allen.

TAPE (2001) Richard Linklater, seemingly as comfortable directing family pics like School of Rock as he is at tackling arty-farty subjects, pushes the envelope in this fascinating three-hander that unfolds in real time in a dingy motel room. Robert Sean Leonard plays a budding film-maker who meets up with an old school-chum (Ethan Hawke), now a fire-fighter who deals dope on the side. The conversation turns to a girl they both slept with, and lo and behold she turns up in the lovely-but-not-terribly-impressive-as-an-actress form of Uma Thurman. Shocking revelations ensue, as Uma turns out to have a hidden agenda of her own.

TARGETS (1968) Back in the days when Peter Bogdanovich was the Next Big Hollywood Thing instead of one of the supporting therapists on The Sopranos, he directed this taut little thriller which is also a commentary on the nature of horror. Boris Karloff plays Byron Orlok, a horror star on the verge of retirement, who tells his director (played by Bogdanovich himself) that traditional horror movies can no longer compete with the horrors of everyday life. Meanwhile, as if to prove his point, an apparently normal clean-cut young American goes postal on his family and stations himself on a tower overlooking a busy freeway, where he starts taking potshots at passing motorists. (The film was made not long after Charles Whitman went on a shooting spree at the University of Texas, one of the first American mass killings to get the full media treatment.) The two strands of the story finally collide in unforgettable fashion at a drive-in movie theatre showing one of Karloff/Orlok's old movies.

TAXI DRIVER (1976) The first time I saw this film by a (then) little-known director called Martin Scorsese, the blood-splattered shoot-out in the brothel near the end caught me so off guard that I had to put my head between my knees to stop myself fainting. The combination of Bernard Herrman's brooding final score and that horrible yellowish filter was just too intense. There I was, expecting to see a jolly caper about a New York cabbie, and what I got, of course, was an incredibly violent psychodrama starring a (then) little-known actor called Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a deranged Vietnam veteran who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old hooker and turns into a vigilante with a Mohican haircut.

TAXIDERMIA (2006) Warning: Hungarian director György Pálfi's second film contains scenes of sexual perversion and graphic disembowelling in big close-up. And that's putting it mildly. This Franco-Austro-Hungarian production has three acts. The first concerns an orderly and his masturbation fantasies (which include dead pigs) in World War Two. The second is about the marriage of his son, a national speed eating champ who makes Monty Python's Mr Creosote look like a picky eater. The third's about his son, a taxidermist who, in a five minute bravura but very yucky sequence at the film's climax, creates his ultimate artwork. It's a little light on narrative but will appeal to fans of surreal Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, and some of the imagery is truly extraordinary. Good to see East Europeans letting it all hang out. Literally.

TE DOY MIS OJOS (2003) See Take My Eyes.

TEACHING MRS TINGLE (1999) Katie Holmes kidnaps Helen Mirren, the only teacher who refuses to give her top marks, in misfired teen comedy written and directed by Kevin Williamson. Your sympathies will be with the teaching staff.

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004) Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park, come up with a puppet film which makes Thunderbirds look like a team of pussies. It's a scabrous, tasteless send-up of Hollywood action movies - complete with sex and violence, bigotry and vomiting – all done with puppets. Watch our heroes trash Paris, Cairo ("That's in Egypt") and the Film Actors' Guild ("FAG" for short) in the war against terrorism! Listen to Kim Jong II singing, "I'm Ronery" and arab terrorists babbling "durka mohammed jihad" as they launch their WMDs! Watch Hollywood lefties come to gory ends, and never let it be said that Stone and Parker are not equal opportunity offenders. Hilarious, though if rude words make you flinch, don't even think about it.

TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER (2000) One-of-a-kind Thai western that makes no claims whatsoever to realism in its mish-mash of Leone-style squinty close-ups, Peckinpah-style spurting bullet-wounds and swoony romance. Peasant-turned-outlaw Dum (and possessor of an awesome kiss-curl) keeps clutching the hanky of his high-born childhood sweetheart Rumpoey, even though she’s engaged to a police captain. But forget the wafer-thin story and wallow in the ravishingly kitsch visuals, which look just like animated versions of those campy photo-montages by kitsch Gallic artists Pierre et Gilles.

TELL NO ONE (2006) French actor Guillaume Canet's second film as director is a cracking adaptation of Harlan Coben's bestseller about a Parisian pediatrician (François Cluzet) who suddenly finds himself Suspect Number One in the murder of his wife eight years previously. And then someone starts sending him enigmatic emails... Kristin Scott-Thomas, Jean Rochefort, André Dussollier and the director himself provide solid support in an absorbing, intricately plotted thriller with a couple of sensational chase scenes - there's more than one heart-stoppingly authentic-looking moment that will have you fearing for the leading actor's safety.

TEMP, THE (1993) Let's hear it for Lara Flynn Boyle, Twin Peaks' girl-next-door, Men in Black 2's lingerie-clad alien and Jack Nicholson's esrtwhile on-off gal pal. The freckle-faced foxy one gets a role worthy of her wicked talents in this campy thriller in which she plays the super-efficient secretary of a cookie company executive (Timothy Hutton again) who finds his career going into crunchy almond overdrive when colleagues start succumbing to freak "accidents". Faye Dunaway plays a superbitch called Charlene. If only office politics were always this much fun. Oh, and watch out for that paper shredder.

TEN CANOES (2006) David Gulpilil, who first came to fame in 1971's Walkabout, provides English narration for this anthropological oddity, giving it the flavour of a National Geographic nature special complete with luscious cinematography of Australia's Northern Territory and oodles of unabashed nakedness. Gulpilil's son Jamie plays a dual role in this multi-layered Aboriginal fable of hunting, gathering and wife-stealing; it's less rip-roaring, more challenging and authentic than films like Apocalypto. In a word, educational.

TEN COMMANDMENTS, THE (1956) Two hundred and 22 minutes of prime Hollywood kitsch directed by Cecil B DeMille at his most spectacularly silly. And lo, Charlton Heston as Moses was so gobsmacked by the Burning Bush that he did come down off Mount Sinai with a new bouffant hair-do. And slimy Vincent Price did present cloth to a slave-girl, saying unto her, "Did you know this golden web was spun from the beards of shellfish?"And the filmgoers did gaze in awe at the Plagues of Egypt, the Parting of the Red Sea and the orgy of the Golden Calf. And lo, it was tosh. But pretty damn irresistible.

TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY (2006) Jack Black and the lesser-known but equally pudgy Kyle Gass, members of the comedy rock band Tenacious D, co-star in a patchy but sporadically amusing overgrown adolescent Wayne's World-type fantasy about two losers who form a hard rock band, steal a legendary guitar pick from a museum and have a showdown against the Devil, played by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl. Other famous names who chip in with cameos include Ben Stiller, Tim Robbins and Ronnie James Dio, and there are gags about erections and magic mushrooms.

TENANT, THE (1976) Roman Polanski's black comedy, adapted from a novel by absurdist cartoonist Roland Topor, is a companion piece to his earlier Repulsion as a flat-dwellers' nightmare. The director himself plays Trelkovsky, a mild-mannered Pole who moves into a Paris appartment, where he becomes obsessed with the former tenant, who committed suicide, and increasingly paranoid about his neighbours, leading to a grotesque climax. Anyone who, like me, has been unjustly accused by the bloke downstairs of making noises in the the night (but I was tucked up in bed, reading! And the rotter never even apologised for getting it wrong!) will find it too close to real life for comfort.

TEQUILA SUNRISE (1988) Robert Towne, who wrote some of the finest screenplays of the 1970s (The Last Detail, Chinatown), never really made it as a director, and you can see why from this nicely plotted romantic thriller that really needed some ruthless cutting and visual pizzazz, but he gets good service from his stars. Michelle Pfeiffer, at her most soignée, plays a Los Angeles restaurateur who can't choose between former drug-dealer Mel Gibson and his old buddy, Kurt Russell as a sensitive cop. All three stars are at their most seductive and charming, and the cross-currents between their characters look promising until a standard action denouement takes over. Meanwhile, and for no reason that I could ever fathom, Towne the Director gives us a meaningful shot of an ashtray.

TERMINAL, THE (2004) Tom Hanks plays a hapless East European stranded in JFK airport and forced to make it his home after a military coup in his (fictional) homeland; Catherine Zeta-Jones is a stewardess who befriends him. It's like a feature-length commercial for JFK, with Steven Spielberg directing on cruise control.

TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES (2003) Arnold Schwarzengger hauls himself into the action seat for one last round of terminating as the now rather creaky old cyborg assigned to protect Nick Stahl, future saviour of mankind, and his girl-pal from a super-duper TX killing machine disguised as a hot chick in a red leather jumpsuit. The formula's much as before, and while fans of Terminator 2: Judgment Day may be disappointed by the lack of innovative special effects, anyone who prefers the original 1984 Terminator will appreciate the back-to-basics approach in which pacing and story (call me blind but I, for one, didn't see that twist coming) take precedence over technology.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) Can creaky old robo-Schwarzennegger save mankind's future saviour from a super-duper killing machine disguised as hot chick in red leather jumpsuit?

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a gentler, kinder type of Terminator in this super-duper megabudget sequel to the sci-fi sleeper hit of 1984. This time he's sent back from the future to protect bratty Edward Furlong, destined to be the saviour of mankind, from a unstoppable killer robot made of shape-shifting liquid metal. But first he has to spring Furlong's mom, Linda Hamilton, from the asylum where she's somehow managed to develop biceps almost as big as Arnie's. You have to admire the gall of a director, James Cameron, who makes a film with a peace-on-earth message and then stuffs it full of violence and big explosions.

TERMINATOR, THE (1984) Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been quite so perfectly cast as he was here, as an unstoppable killer robot sent from the future to kill the waitress destined to give birth to the man who, in the future, will save the world from the machines who sent the unstoppable killer robot... Got that? Now forget it, and just revel in pre-Titanic James Cameron on unstoppable killer form, chase scenes that never let up, and Arnie vowing, "I’ll be back" prior to demolishing the police station where you thought the heroine would be safe.

TERROR AT THE OPERA (1987) There was always something operatic about Dario Argento's splatter movies, so it was no surprise when he finally set one of his gruesome murder mysteries amid preparations for a mildly avant-garde (live birds and laser beams) version of Verdi's Macbeth. Cristina Marsillach is way too skinny and model-girl pretty to convince as the soprano-in-peril, but since when have Italian horror movies kowtowed to realism? There are some amazing set-pieces – ravens swooping down over the opera-goers' heads, or the heroine forced to watch a murder with her eyes pinned open. And it's hard not to admire a director who has the gall to alternate Bellini and Verdi with a heavy metal band called Steel Grave.

TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (1958, b/w) Joseph H Lewis, whose B-movies were invariably a cut above the norm, directed this low-budget western framed by a showdown between a hired gun and a whaling harpoon. Sterling Hayden plays a Swedish sailor on the track of his father’s killer, Sebastian Cabot’s the land-grabbing oil baron who kills off the townsfolk who refuse to sell up, and Ned Young’s a riot as the ageing, leather-clad gunslinger who’s lost the use of his right hand. The screenwriter "Ben Perry", was a front for blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, so you can read an anti-McCarthy subtext into it, if you like.

TESIS (1997) Before The Others and Open Your Eyes, the Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar made a striking debut with this thriller about a university student who stumbles across a snuff video while researching her thesis about violence in the cinema. Some of the plot's a little creaky, but the overall mood and clever use of sound effects already hint at a major talent at work. Eduardo Noriega and Fele Martínez, two of Spain's hottest actors, are among the suspects, and the heroine is played by none other than Ana Torrent, who made her film debut aged seven in the 1970s classic Spirit of the Beehive.

TESTAMENT OF DR MABUSE, THE (1933) I started watching this out of duty, completely forgetting it was directed by the great Fritz Lang. Though made in 1933, it's no creaky black and white talkie but an action-packed thriller with gripping set-pieces (a murder in heavy traffic) and use of sound that have barely dated, and which must have seemed sensationally innovative when the film first came out (though not in Germany, where it was banned). Rudolf Klein-Rogge, reprising his role from the eariler Dr Mabuse, the Gambler, plays the insane genius who's building an Empire of Crime from the lunatic asylum where he's incarcerated. There's interesting pre-CSI use of forensics and eerie prefiguring of Nazi Germany (Hitler was appointed Chancellor that same year) though even eerier, for today's audiences, is Mabuse's avowed strategy of terrorism.

TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, THE (1974) "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" Forget the recent remake; here’s one old horror movie that hasn’t lost its power to shock over the last quarter of a century. In fact, it’s surprisingly lacking in gore, but don’t think that makes it any less gruelling to watch, with a unique atmosphere of putrefaction confirming all your worst fears about Dubya’s home state. And the message? Don’t pick up weird-looking hitchhikers. Try not to run out of petrol in rural areas. Never ever explore an empty-looking house. And, if you see a bloke with a chainsaw coming towards you, run like hell.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE (2003) Tobe Hooper's 1973 classic shocker undergoes a makeover for a generation that refuses to watch anything not featuring slick visuals and hot chicks in cropped T-shirts. Not surprisingly, the results are devoid of the uniquely unhealthy atmosphere that makes the original so hard to watch even now - just another bog-standard slasher pic about pretty but charmless teens whom you can't wait to see die horribly at the hands of inbred Texans. R Lee Ermey is huge fun as a psycho sheriff, but otherwise it's the usual running and screaming and falling over and getting chopped into little pieces.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, THE (2006) Before Leatherface was a psycho with a chainsaw, he was... yes! a psycho with a chainsaw. Oh, and he worked in an abbatoir. Might have been more interesting if he'd started out as an accountant.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005) Aaron Eckhart, finally getting a leading role that does justice to his slightly scary good looks, plays a slick spin doctor for the tobacco industry in this deliciously cynical satire adapted (from Christopher Buckley's novel) and directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan. Instead of condemning this "yuppie Mephistopheles", Reitman actually has you rooting for him as he connives with a Hollywood agent (Rob Lowe) to insert more positive smoking role models into movies (though not this one; the film's a strict no-smoking zone), opposes a move to stamp skulls on ciggie packets, or sweet-talks a child with lung cancer. The film's at its weakest when it gets down to plot (investigative journalist, death threats, kidnapping), but hilarious when it sticks to slogans, politically incorrect one-liners and Eckhart's outrageously cosy chats with his counterparts in firearms and alcohol.

THAT’LL BE THE DAY (1973) Back in the early 1970s there was a brief revival of 1950s rock 'n' roll, fuelled by the stage musical Grease and this dubious exercise in cod nostalgia. David Essex set a thousand schoolgirl hearts a-flutter (but not mine, I'm glad to say) as Jim MacLaine, a working-class lad who drops out of school so he can loiter around fairgrounds and try his luck with the guitar. The moralising is piled on with a trowel (get a proper job, don't leave your wife etc) but rock fans will want to see Ringo Starr being embarrassing as a teddy-boy, Keith Moon as (what else?) a mad drummer and Billy Fury, resplendent in gold lamé as a singer called Stormy Tempest.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT! (1974) All-singing, all-dancing compilation of clips from the MGM musical archives, ranging from the familiar ("Singin' in the Rain") to the fairly obscure (a 13-year-old Judy Garland and her sister singing "La Cucaracha"). The all-star commentary is staggeringly inane, and the fragmentary way in which the clips are edited will drive you round the bend, but it's always a pleasure to get glimpses of Astaire, Kelly, Charisse and the others strutting their stuff.

THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973) Vincent Price has a whale of a time camping it up in this Grand Guignol horror comedy as Edward Lionheart, a disgruntled luvvie who dons flamboyant disguises (hairdresser, surgeon, chef etc) to wreak vengeance on the critics who failed to give him their Best Actor award. Diana Rigg plays his devoted daughter, while a striking Who's Who of Great British acting talent is dispatched in a variety of spectacularly gory ways inspired by some of the more gruesome moments in the plays of Shakespeare. Michael Horden is stabbed to death à la Julius Caesar, Arthur Lowe loses his head like Cloten in Cymbeline, and if you can remember the horrible fate of Tamora in Titus Andronicus you’ll have an inkling of what’s in store for poor old Robert Morley.

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991) Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis ditch their macho menfolk for a swinging weekend in the Arkansas boondocks in this barnstorming female buddy movie, but it all goes horribly wrong when Sarandon shoots a would-be rapist, forcing them to head for Mexico in a 1966 T-Bird convertible. Why didn't they plead self-defence? Don't even ask. But it gives the gals a chance to find themselves, and since the movie was directed by Ridley Scott, they do this very prettily against lots of picturesque desert backdrops. Watch out for Brad Pitt showing his bottom as the hitchhiker who puts a big grin on Davis' face. The ending's either wildly romantic or just plain stupid, depending on your mood.

THEM (2006) "Never live in a big old house in the middle of a spooky forest" must be near the top of the List of Rules for Characters in Horror Movies. The middle-class French couple in this Franco-Romanian shocker ignore this rule and duly find themselves besieged by mysterious figures. The short, sharp, efficient feature debut ("inspired by real events") from writing-directing team David Moreau and Xavier Palud wrings some modish twists out of slasher clichés - the attackers wear hoodies and the foreign setting adds a touch of Hostel-type xenophobia. The second half is essentially one long chase sequence with a nasty pay-off. It's not exactly fun but it gets the adrenalin going and must have worked as a calling-card since Moreau and Palud were subsequently invited to Hollywood to direct the remake of The Eye.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (1998) Two set-pieces here are the sort of classic gags that make gross-out cinema history: Ben Stiller gets his testicles caught in a zip, and Cameron Diaz mistakes semen for hair gel, with hilarious results. The Farrelly brothers, who wrote and directed, are big softies at heart, so this is also a slushy romantic comedy in which boy meets girl, loses her and then has to win her all over again. But I’ve always wondered: if geeky-looking guys like Stiller are destined to find true love with gorgeous-looking girls like Diaz, then who are the geeky-looking girls supposed to get off with? The brothers' contempt for older women who don't look like Diaz is as annoying here as it is in Kingpin, but Matt Dillon is a scream as a detective whose encounter with a small yappy dog goes hilariously pear-shaped.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2008) The film many people thought should have beaten No Country for Old Men to the Best Picture Oscar features a stonking Academy Award-winner of a performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, channelling John Huston in Chinatown as turn-of-the-century oilman Daniel Plainview. Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil is the uncompromising portrait of a greedy misanthropist as ruthless as the landscapes, bilked from local farmers, into which he sinks his wells. Paul Dano plays his younger nemesis, an evangelical preacher; Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood provides a dissonant, ominous score. Without laughs, romance or easy messages, it's not comfortable viewing, but it is an extraordinary spectacle and uniquely tense, even if the film-maker does lose his grip in the home stretch.

THEY LIVE (1988) "I've come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." If you ever suspected the folk responsible for the latest economic meltdown were not like you and me, this deliberately (and delightfully) cheesy B-movie written and directed by John Carpenter in the Reaganomics era will only add to your doubts. Ex-wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (a poor man's Kurt Russell) plays a lunkhead drifter who stumbles across a secret stash of sunglasses which enable wearers to see things as they really are: advertising billboards are stamped with the word, "OBEY" and dollar bills are marked, "THIS IS YOUR GOD". Oh, and the people in power are aliens from outer space with faces like skulls. Roddy also gets embroiled in a five-minute fistfight, during which you'll have ample time to pop into the kitchen and make yourself a cup of tea.

THIEF (1981) Michael Mann had already paid his writing dues on episodes of Starsky and Hutch and directed a TV film, but this brooding, neon-lit crime movie was his cinematic feature debut. James Caan plays an expert safecracker who finds his chosen profession is not compatible with domestic happiness with Tuesday Weld – a theme the film-maker would later revisit in films like Heat. It's more character study than action flick, but the heist scenes, played out in fetishistic hi-tech detail to a shummering synth-rock soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, are dazzling, and there's a chilling bad guy turn ("I'll whack out your whole family" is only the most printable of his threats) from Robert Prosky, whom you may know as the avuncular Sergeant Jablonski from Hill Street Blues.

THIEF OF BAGDAD, THE (1941) Alexander Korda's Arabian Nights fantasy stars Sabu as a cheeky tea-leaf who helps reunite a dispossessed prince with the lovely princess who has fallen into the clutches of evil magician Conrad Veidt. The special effects were considered amazing in their day and still look pretty good – there's a six-armed blue statue who stabs people in the back, a magic carpet and, best of all, a towering genie (a fabulous performance by Rex Ingram in a loincloth) who escapes from a bottle and tries to crush Sabu beneath his enormous foot. Just look at the detail on those giant toenails!

THIEF, THE (1997) For a film that starts off with a Russian wench giving birth in a ditch (oh no! not another Russian-wench-giving-birth-in-a-ditch film!) this turns out to be an unexpectedly compelling yarn about a mother and son who fall in with a charming nogoodnik called Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov, who's worth falling in with) who has a portrait of Stalin tattooed on his chest. The three of them travel by train all over post-war Soviet Union, inveigling their way into apartment blocks, robbing the poverty-stricken boarders and encountering all manner of vodka-swilling, accordion-playing minor characters.

THIN MAN, THE (1934, b/w) Were there ever such a couple of deliciously witty drunks as Nick and Nora Charles? Myrna Loy and William Powell give alcoholism a good name as they trade wisecracks and solve a murder or two on the side in this insouciant adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, which slipped out just before the Hays Code clamped down on screen naughtiness. Moral guardians in a pc futureworld may be able to make all those cigarettes disappear with the help of computers, but they'll have a hard time erasing the alcohol when, for example, Nora turns up late at a rendez-vous and asks Nick how many drinks he's had. When he tells her six Martinis, she turns to the waiter and orders another five, so she can catch up. Six Martinis! Jeez, I only need one and I'm under the host.

THIN RED LINE, THE (1998) I was seriously underwhelmed by Terrence Malick’s loose adaptation of James Jones’ superb novel about the battle for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal in the Second World War, but friends with better taste than me have declared it a masterpiece, so who am I to argue. Jim The Passion of the Christ Caviezel and John Cusack are among the soldiers of C for Charlie company ordered to attack a hill, but the director seems more interested in parrots, rippling grass and native Melanesians skipping around and banging coconuts together. Maybe that’s the point, but I found myself increasingly irritated by the David Attenborough-type nature footage, babble of voice-overs and the difficulty of distinguishing one helmeted actor from another.

THING CALLED LOVE, THE (1993) A pre-Speed Sandra Bullock co-stars with River Phoenix in his last completed film, a likeable romance about young songwriters hoping to make it big in Nashville.

THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, THE (1951, b/w) Classic sci-fi chiller adapted from John W Campbell's novella Who Goes There? (later filmed, more faithfully, by John Carpenter) and directed by Christian Nyby, though film buffs contend that the producer, Howard Hawks, also had a hand in it. Scientists on an isolated Arctic outpost dig up a frozen extra-terrestrial. Then some dimwit accidentally thaws it out, and it runs amok. This "intellectual carrot" is all too evidently played by an actor (Gunsmoke's James Arness) in a monster suit, and the action's a little sedentary for modern tastes, but there are some unforgettable images and a great last line, which I'm not going to spoil for you by quoting here.

THING, THE (1982) John Carpenter’s adaptation of John W Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? (previously filmed, less faithfully, in 1951) was a gigantic flop but has since built up a well-deserved reputation as one of the scariest films ever made. Kurt Russell heads an all-male research team holed up for the winter in the Antarctic, where they’re infiltrated by a parasitic alien that can perfectly mimic its host’s appearance. Dean Cundey's cinematography is unfailingly elegant, Ennio Morricone's minimalist score is spine-tingling and Rob Bottin's special effects are some of the most imaginative ever conceived, but it's the paranoid tension, as the men try to guess which of them is an alien, that makes this a modern horror classic. Critics snootily dimissed it as "Alien on Ice" - or worse - on its original release, but they were fools. (I liked this film so much wrote a book about it.)

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995) After Reservoir Dogs, it sometimes seemed that screens were awash with heist movies directed by would-be Tarantinos. Gary Fleder’s feature debut is one of the better ones, with enough original touches and sharp performances to make it stand out from the pack. Andy Garcia plays "Jimmy the Saint" who’s hired by Christopher Walken (with even madder hair than usual) to put the frighteners on someone. Of course it all goes horribly wrong, thanks to Jimmy’s deadbeat associates, including Christopher Lloyd as a porn projectionist whose toes are falling off and Treat Williams as a coprophagous morgue attendant who hurls himself at an assailant with the words, "I am Godzilla - you are Japan!"

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE (2007) The fire was in the past, and anyway it's symbolic, so don't expect Towering Inferno-style excitement in Danish director Susanne Bier's English language debut, which cleaves to that increasingly popular and invariably fun-free subgenre - the bereavement drama. Halle Berry (already widowed to Oscar-winning effect in Monster's Ball) plays a comfortably-off mother of two whose husband (David Duchovny, seen in flashback) is killed in a random act of violence. Benicio Del Toro plays an ex-lawyer turned heroin addict to whom Duchovny remained loyal against his wife's wishes. Mercifully, the film steers clear of romance between the two, but shows how they deal with their loss by reaching out to each other. It's all very tasteful and just a little dull, but the two leads are good value.

THIRD MAN, THE (1949, b/w) Evergreen British film noir with a smart screenplay by Graham Greene. Joseph Cotton plays the naïve pulp novelist on the trail of his chum, a black marketeer lying low amid the rubble-strewn bomb-sites of post-war Vienna. The zither score is never as annoying as you think it's going to be, and the mood of moral decay is brilliantly caught by Robert Krasker's striking black and white camerawork, but did you know the role of Harry Lime was originally offered to Noël Coward? Not as daft as it sounds; as The Italian Job's Mr Big he could almost have been the Kray brothers' upper-class cousin. But it's hard now to imagine Carol Reed's film without Orson Welles, even though cinema's most charming villain is on screen for a total of only 10 minutes. But boy, are they memorable ones, from his first appearance (I'll never forget the time Channel 4 inserted an ad break between the kitten playing with the shoes and the first glimpse of Lime's face) to the cuckoo clock speech on the ferris wheel, to the fingers through the grating. In fact, the fingers belonged to the director, since Welles had decided he didn't want to film in the sewer and went home.

THIRTEEN (2003) Blimey, I really missed out as a 13-year-old. Instead of doing my homework and watching TV, I could have been out shoplifting on Melrose Place, taking drugs, having oral sex and getting my tongue pierced, like Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) in Catherine Hardwicke’s directing debut. Hardwicke co-wrote it with 15-year old Nikki Reid, who plays Tracy’s best pal and bad influence. I have a feeling it’s supposed to be a warning to divorced parents (like the one played here by Holly Hunter) about awful teen habits such as aerosol-sniffing and self-mutilation with scissors, but I spent most of it making fashion notes (nice bracelets, cool top, must dig out those hoop earrings) and wondering if I’m too old to get away with low-slung jeans.

THIRTEEN DAYS (2000) Historians are always whingeing about inaccuracies in Hollywood movies based on real events, but they'll have a hard time finding something to carp about in this wilfully dry account of men in suits, speaking dialogue based largely on official transcripts during one of the biggest political pissing contests of the 20th century – the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, as seen from Kennedy's Oval Office. But it's the sobriety that makes this game of bluff and counter-bluff such compelling viewing, and reminds us that, while he might have conducted his private life like a randy porker, JFK saved everyone's bacon by eschewing the macho gung-ho approach, resisting the exhortations of his trigger-happy military, and solving the problem by listening, thinking, talking. Diplomacy, in other words. It should be obligatory viewing for all politicians.

THIRTY NINE STEPS, THE (1935, b/w) Alfred Hitchcock's best British film is this dated but still ripping adventure adapted from one of John Buchan's yarns. Dashing Robert Donat plays Richard Hannay, the regular guy who gets mixed up in murder and has to go on the run to prove his innocence. John Laurie is at his most gloriously dour ("Praise God for us miserable sinners!") as the crofter in whose cottage our hero takes refuge, while Madeleine Carroll plays the blonde to whom he finds himself handcuffed. The moral? Never trust a man with a missing finger.

THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO (1944, b/w) Tip-top wartime propaganda which gives a far more satisfying account of the celebrated Doolittle Raid than Pearl Harbor (plus it's also the title of a seminal track by the great 1970s experimental garage band Pere Ubu). Van Johnson plays Ted Lawson, on whose memoirs the film was based, and Spencer Tracy plays Doolittle, who has the bright idea of using an aircraft carrier as a base from which to bomb Japan. For logistical reasons, the squad then has to make its getaway through China. Lovey-dovey stuff with the sweethearts back home gives way to some exciting aerial action and a poignant scene in which a Chinese well-wisher tries to cheer up a pilot who has just had his leg amputated by offering him a pair of slippers.

THIS BOY'S LIFE (1993) Leonardo DiCaprio, oozing promise in his first leading role, holds his own against Robert De Niro in this decent if slightly plodding adaptation of Tobias Wolff's autobiograpical novel about a troubled teenager growing up in the 1950s in a Pacific North-West town called Concrete. Ellen Barkin plays his spirited mom, De Niro the tyrannical bigot she marries in a misguided attempt to provide her delinquent son with a stable upbringing. The all-embracing, uplifting message is we can all escape our personal Concretes if we try hard enough. But De Niro in a Scout uniform, pretending to be an all-American dad, is somehow more terrifying than any amount of Cape Fear psycho behaviour.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2004) The amusingly named Kirby Dick directed this documentary about the American film ratings system. He talks to film-makers who have been forced to censor their own work in order to avoid getting the dreaded NC-17 rating, the commercial kiss of death, and hires a private investigator to try and identify the anonymous members of the MPAA ratings board which, though it claims to be protecting the "family", seems mainly to be acting in the interests of the big studios. This unaccountable body goes easy on violence but looks askance at anything other than the Missionary Position and refuses to pass an extended close-up of Chloe Sevigny's face as she's having an orgasm in Boys Don't Cry. In fact, Dick's film is a shambles, but gets by on the strength of its fascinating subject matter, as well as the chance to see some of the filthy puppet sex that was cut out of Team America.

THIS IS ENGLAND (2006) Shane Meadows's film is a coming-of-age yarn set in the early 1980s on the writer-director's regular stomping ground - a housing estate somewhere Up North. At its centre is a fantastically naturalistic performance from 12-year-old Thomas Turgoose, whose soldier dad has been killed in the Falklands. He joins a surprisingly likeable (and mixed race) gang of skinheads; it's only when they're joined by an older ex-con with National Front tendencies (a scarily plausible Stephen Graham) that things start to turn ugly. Meadows's semi-improvisational style has a deceptively rambling look, but his handling of the mounting tension is tight as a drum and will have you peeking through your fingers in dread. Essential viewing for anyone interested in current British cinema.

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) Heavy metal went primetime with The Osbournes, but the original loveable headbangers were the fictional stars of this Rob Reiner mockumentary (or "rockumentary", if you will) about a has-been British metal band on a disastrous comeback tour of the US. American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer adopt startlingly accurate English accents and the jokes come thick and fast – the amplifier that goes up to "11", the scale model of Stonehenge, as well as brilliantly simulated archive clips and spot-on pastiches such as Big Bottom: "Talk about bum cakes, My gal's got 'em".

THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963, b/w) Thank goodness I never played rugby, because all it does is lead to heartbreak, broken teeth and cruelty to spiders. Richard Harris gave one of his most impressive performances in this, one of the few enduring jewels in the crown of 1960s British cinema, directed without an ounce of sentimentality by Lindsay Anderson, photographed with gritty realism by director-to-be Karel Reisz, and adapted by David Storey from his own novel set Up North, where life is grim. Harris plays Frank Machin, an ex-miner who for all his success as a rugby league player can't begin to express his feelings for his widowed landlady (Rachel Roberts).

THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE (1968) Split screen madness! Steve McQueen at his coollest! Faye Dunaway at her sleekest as an unfeasibly glam insurance investigator clad in Thea Van Runkle! Dune buggies and erotic chess games! Noel Harrison lisping his way through The Windmills of Your Mind! McQueen plays a jaded businessman who masterminds a Boston bank robbery, just for kicks; Dunaway's the glam insurance investigator snapping at his heels. Of course Norman Jewison's silly, stylish caper movie has dated, with its split-screens inspired by an Oscar-winning documentary from the Ontario Tourist Board, and of course McQueen can't laugh for toffee (check out those phony ha-ha-has) but that's all part of its charm.

THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE (1999) This ultra-slick remake of a 1960s caper movie manages to top the original in nearly every way, including silliness, but this only makes it all the more fun. Pierce Brosnan plays a fabulously wealthy super-thief who steals priceless paintings for kicks but meets his match in a sexy insurance investigator played by Rene Russo, clearly having the time of her life in a role that requires her to go brazenly topless or shimmy around in see-thru frocks or skirts split to the thigh. John McTiernan directs with the subtlety of a Sherman tank, resulting in such nuggets of kitsch as a naked sex scene on a marble floor. (Don't try this at home unless you're a masochist.)

¡THREE AMIGOS! (1986) Steve Martin (back when he was funny), Martin Short (always a hoot) and Chevy Chase (let's not go there) play a trio of dimwitted silent movie stars in this silly but delightful spoof, directed by John Landis, which shares the same premise as Galaxy Quest. It's set in 1916, and the ersatz cowboys travel to a tiny Mexican village called Santa Poco in the mistaken belief they've been hired to put on a show, only to find the marauding bandits are real and so are the bullets. The Amigos sing "My Little Buttercup" to an audience of baffled cutthroats, strum guitars beneath the desert stars and generally bemuse a lot of hardboiled Tex-Mex types with their hip-thrusting salute: cross arms, thrust hips, grunt!

THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA, THE (2005) Tommy Lee Jones makes an impressive directing debut with this slice of Tex-Mex Gothic about a ranch-hand (Jones, even more grizzled and taciturn than usual) who sets out to keep a promise he made to a Mexican colleague whose corpse is found in the desert. The sheriff can't be bothered to investigate the death of an illegal, so Jones takes matters into his own hands and embarks on a Peckinpah-esque trek with the decaying cadaver in tow. Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay echoes his previous work (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) with its chronology-juggling and seemingly unrelated characters whose stories dovetail. Barry Pepper plays a newbie Border Patrol guard, Mad Men's January Jones is his bored wife and Chris Menges' cinematography of the harsh landscape is quite simply beautiful.

THREE COLOURS: BLUE (1993) The first – and best – of Krzystof Kieslowski’s trilogy on themes based on the French flag is an ultra-chic European art movie starring Juliette Binoche as a woman trying to forge a new life after her daughter and husband, a famous composer, are killed in a car crash. She rents a nice little pad in the Rue Mouffetard, goes swimming in a deserted pool and swans around in understated designer knits (in short, my blueprint for the perfect Paris lifestyle) until her emotions are reawakened by a needy neighbour and the discovery of her late husband’s infidelity. As always, you could watch Binoche’s face until the cows come home.

THREE COLOURS: RED (1994) The final part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy inspired by the French flag is easily the most accessible of the three films and you don't need to have seen the others to enjoy its agreeable blend of multi-layered art movie and glossy cinéma de look. Irène Jacob, who did her best work for the Polish director, is unfailingly gorgeous as the fashion model who unexpectedly finds a soulmate in a retired judge (a mature but still attractive Jean-Louis Trintignant) a cynical recluse who lives on the other side of Geneva and gets his kicks from spying on his neighbours.

THREE COLOURS: WHITE (1994) The middle story in Krzysztof Kieslowksi's trilogy inspired by the tricolore flag is the relatively light-hearted (or at least as light-hearted as a Polish director with an overabundance of consonants in his name can be) tale of a woebegone Polish hairdresser (the rather tasty Zbigniew Zamachowski) who picks himself up out of the Parisian gutter, smuggles himself back to Poland in a suitcase and builds a capitalist empire in order to wreak revenge on his heartless French ex-wife, played by the all-too-delectable Julie Delpy.

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975) "I'm not a spy! I just read books!" Robert Redford plays a low-ranking CIA researcher - codename Condor - in this well-plotted paranoia thriller directed by Sydney Pollack. Bob, striving valiantly to act like a bookish nerd and not a glamorous celluloid icon, pops out of his Manhattan office to get sandwiches, but on his return finds all his colleagues dead. Which makes him Number One Suspect, fleeing from former employers and assassin Max Von Sydow, and forced to lie doggo in the apartment of a complete stranger (Faye Dunaway). As with the best 1970s thrillers, the possibility that it might not end happily only makes it all the more thrilling.

THREE KINGS (1999) David O Russell's darkly comic war movie, set at the end of the first Gulf War, starts like a Hogan's Heroes-style romp, with George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze (taking time off directing) as American soldiers crossing the desert in search of Saddam's hidden gold in the Wake of Operation Desert Storm, but develops into a sharp critique of US foreign policy as our anti-heroes find themselves backing an uprising of Iraqui civilians. Entertaining, thought-provoking and packed with surreal touches such as an anatomic demonstration of what happens to your innards when they're hit by a bullet, and a torturer who keeps demanding, "What is the problem with Michael Jackson?"

THREE MUSKETEERS, THE (1948) You might have expected Hollywood to have made a dog's dinner out of the swashbuckling Dumas classic, but this colourful romp is about a million times better (not to mention more faithful) than the naff 1990s Charlie Sheen version, and never shies away from the darker aspects of the original story, though the repeated use of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet on the soundtrack becomes a trifle disconcerting. Gene Kelly bounces all over the place as D'Artagnan, Vincent Price plays Richelieu with Bond-villain cat, and Lana Turner is luscious as the conniving femme fatale Milady De Winter, whose sublime facial expression as she prepares to keep her appointment with the Executioner of Lille is one of my favourite movie moments.

THREE MUSKETEERS, THE (1973) Super all-star swashbuckling romp adapted from the first half of Dumas's novel and directed at full-tilt by Richard Lester, who stuffs it full of terrific slapstick set-pieces and droll humour. Michael York is great as the naïve D'Artagnan, with rock-solid back-up from Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay as the musketeers, Charlton Heston as Richelieu and Christopher Lee in an eye-patch as the dastardly Rochefort. Faye Dunaway is all soignée malice as Milady (one of my favourite literary villainesses) and Raquel Welch's very funny performance as D'Artagnan's accident-prone love interest was incontrovertibly her finest hour.

THREESOME (1994) Lara Flynn Boyle plays Alex, whose unisex name gets her mistakenly billeted in college digs with two guys - party animal Stephen Baldwin and intellectual Josh Charles. Lara falls for Josh, while Josh harbours yearnings for Stephen and Stephen – you've guessed it – lusts after Lara. The result is much three-way groping and sensitive examination of sexual identity. All pretty daring for a mainstream American film – just don't expect anything too steamy.

THRILL SEEKERS (1999, tvm) Martin Sheen, as some geezer from the future, literally phones in his performance in this cheap but diverting telefilm in which a reporter (square-jawed Casper Van Dien) stumbles across a travel agency from the future which arranges for clients to hop through time so they can ogle plane crashes, hurricanes and other catastrophes. When our hero takes steps to avert loss of life, he inadvertently disrupts the space-time continuum and gets chased by folk from the future with strange hair-dos, as well as by the FBI, which assumes he's a terrorist. If you can get past the tacky beginning, there are unexpected twists and a smart screenplay that puts many bigger budget time-travelling yarns to shame.

THRONE OF BLOOD (1957, b/w) Akira Kurosawa's version of Macbeth is a cross between a samurai movie and a Noh play, with lots of added fog. Once you get past all the expository shouting and endless galloping around, the familiar story starts to exercise its grip, and the images are simply stunning. Toshiro Mifune is at his fiercest as Washizu, who lets his scary wife talk him into murdering their visiting lord. The witches have been transformed into a single wispy sorceress with a spinning wheel in the middle of a magic forest, and Mifune ends up a human pincushion, skewered by the arrows of his own men.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961) Ingmar Bergman confessed in a recent interview that even he found some of his films depressing, and this is definitely one of the downers. Four people are stuck in a holiday home on a remote island. Harriet Andersson plays a disturbed woman who sinks deeper into schizophrenia and embarks on an alarming relationship with the attic wallpaper while her father, husband and younger brother look on and wring their hands and, occasionally, discuss her case in a hopelessly detached manner. Thank God for Sven Nykvist's glorious black and white cinematography, which at least invests the gloomy proceedings with a rigorous beauty.

THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (1994) I have yet to meet an Iranian film that hasn’t sent me to sleep, but don’t let that put you off. Abbas Kiarostami's gentle, low-key study of a film crew trying to shoot a movie in an earthquake-torn village is a real charmer, a sort of Middle Eastern Day for Night. It’s slow, repetitive but frequently droll as the "actors" forget their lines or, more usually, refuse to say them because the dialogue doesn’t tally with their own experience of life. If you can stay awake long enough, the gloriously uplifting ending is guaranteed to put a huge smile on your face.

THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN (1987) Danny DeVito's directing debut starts off as a comic riff on Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, with the unloveable Billy Crystal as a Professor of Creative Writing suffering from writer's block. DeVito himself plays one of Crystal's students, who mistakenly assumes he's supposed to kill Crystal's ex-wife in return for Crystal murdering his tyrannical mother. Unlike the same director's War of the Roses, the film shies away from ever turning too dark, but there are pleasures to be had from the incidentals, such as the mild-mannered writing student who submits an idea for a book called 100 Women I Would Like to Pork.

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT (1974) Four years before he won an Oscar for The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino made his directing debut with this relatively modest but likeable buddy caper movie set in rural Montana. Clint Eastwood saunters through the film as a fugitive bank robber who teams up with Jeff Bridges, superb in his role as an irreverent young drifter. There's meaty support from George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis as fellow gang members who think Clint's absconded with their loot, and the action culminates in a big bank robbery which, of course, goes horribly wrong. Like Bonnie and Clyde, it's a film in which knockabout comedy rubs shoulders with real violence.

THUNDERHEART (1992) Interesting mish-mash of cop thriller, mismatched buddy yarn and ecological conspiracy movie, starring Val Kilmer as an FBI agent whose denial of his own Sioux heritage is put to the test when he's assigned to investigate a murder on a South Dakota reservation. It looks like a cut and dried case, but Val hooks up with a three-legged dog, breaks out in spontaneous sweat attacks and appears to be suffering from the dreaded Wounded Knee flashback disease. Despite all this, Graham Greene still manages to steal the show as a tribal police officer who combines the deadpan wit of Philip Marlowe with the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes.

THURSDAY (1998) Amoral shaggy-dog tale in which ironic humour, quasi-lowlife characters and Tarantino-esque ultra-violence are combined in a throwaway manner that was ever so fashionable not so long ago, but which now seems oh-so-1990s. Thomas Jane plays a yuppie architect whose orderly life is disrupted after an old chum dumps a suitcase full of drugs on him, leading to blood-splattered visits from rasta gangsters, drug dealers and ex-model Paulina Porizkova as a rubber-skirted psycho-slut who, ahem, rapes our hero at gunpoint. Diverting enough as a museum piece.

TICHBORNE CLAIMANT, THE (1998) Fascinating if slightly plodding account of a real-life 19th century incident in which an Australian butcher claimed to be an English aristicrat, the missing-presumed-drowned heir to the Tichborne estate. This Ealing-esque tale is related from the point of view of a manipulative Benson-like black servant (John Kani) and culminates in a court case, allowing for much affectionate satirising of the class system and bursting at the seams with familiar faces such as Charles Gray, Dudley Sutton, John Gielgud, Robert Hardy...

TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (1990) I always found the spectacle of a porno actress being beaten and gagged too discomfiting to appreciate Pedro Almodóvar’s claim that his wacky comic melodrama is a metaphor for the bonds of co-existence. All Victoria Abril needs is a good rogering and olé! She’s locked in a steaming paella of passion with her kidnapper, a former mental patient. On the other hand, this psycho is played by Antonio Banderas, who was devilishly cute back then, and Abril’s scene with the toy scuba diver is definitely one for the kinky erotic archives.

TIGERLAND (2001) Joel Schumacher tried to atone for the egregious Batman and Robin by directing a series of relatively low-budget dramas with gritty camerawork. This one’s a Catch-22-lite set in 1971, when a group of grunts arrives at a Louisiana military camp to be licked into shape for Vietnam. Despite familiar conflicts and characters (brutal sergeant, psycho private, idealistic intellectual and so on) it’s an oddly ungruelling experience in which assault course action alternates with interminable speechifying, but worth catching for Colin Farrell, fresh from Ballykissangel, in a look-at-me-I’m-a-star turn as Bozz, the Texan rebel who turns out to be a natural born leader.

TIME AFTER TIME (1980) Malcolm McDowell turns in an atypical but disarming performance as HG Wells, who according to this engaging sci-fi yarn not only wrote about time machines - he actually constructed one. So when Jack the Ripper (a splendidly creepy David Warner) borrows it to flee Victorian London into the San Francisco of 1979, Wells gives chase. Alas, Wells, self-styled prophet of the future, finds himself hopelessly out of his depth in the modern world, whereas the killer, naturally, feels right at home amid the sleaze and violence. Mary Steenburgen (who would later marry and subsequently divorce her leading man) is delightful as the kooky bank clerk who falls for our hero's old-fashioned ways.

TIME OUT (2001) Known in France as L'emploi du temps, Laurent Cantet's film is an incredibly long and slow but hypnotic study of a white collar worker (Aurélien Recoing) who doesn't tell his family when he loses his job. Instead he continues to set off to work and take business trips, driving aimlessly or sleeping in his car and duping his friends into giving him money for non-existent investment schemes. The real-life case that inspired this story (described in Emmanuel Carrere's fascinating book, The Adversary) ended in murder, but Cantet is clearly more interested in modern man's place - or lack of it - in the corporate world and his ending is, in its own low-key way, just as troubling.

TIME TO LEAVE (2005) French director François Ozon alternates between bagatelles such as Swimming Pool, and elegant but heavyweight emotional studies such as this one about a youngish Parisian fashion photographer (Melvil Poupaud) who learns he is dying from inoperable cancer. The fact that he's gay is only incidental to the story of a man who keeps his condition secret from everyone - lovers, friends, family - excepting his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) and a waitress (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) at a motorway rest-stop, with whom he comes to an unusual arrangement. It's a finely observed meditation on all our deaths that manages, for the most part, to steer clear of Hollywood-style sentimentality, though, for obvious reasons, it's not what you'd call lighthearted Friday-night-after-the-pub fare.

TIMECODE (2000) Mike Figgis, ever the maverick, directed this interactive movie in which the screen is split into four different segments featuring two dozen actors (including Saffron Burrows and Stellan Skårsgard) improvising around a predetermined storyline about a Hollywood film company casting its new production, The Bitch from Louisiana. It's up to you, the audience, to choose which frame to watch, though Figgis tips the scales by manipulating sound and music to direct your attention. As far as arty experiments go, it's surprisingly watchable, and it's not every day you find yourself wishing you could see more of Julian Sands, who's very funny as as a New Age masseur.

TIMECOP (1994) Jean-Claude Van Damme claims to be able to crack nuts between his buttocks, which is something I would gladly pay to see, though for now we have to make do with watching him do the splits on kitchen worktops in films like this cheesy but diverting sci-fi action flick. The Muscles from Brussels plays a cop whose job is to travel back in time and arrest time-travellers who try to alter history. But can he stop evil senator Ron Silver from changing the past in order to make himself President in the present?

TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) Henry Selick's sublimely spooky Coraline opens next week, so now's the time to revisit his first animated feature, which somehow got saddled with a title that makes everyone think it was directed by Burton. He produced and had a hand in the story, it's true, but it's time Selick got due credit for this fantasmagorical yarn in which skull-headed Jack Skellington, head honcho of Halloweentown, kidnaps Santa Claus and takes his place on Christmas Eve. That's the backbone of the story, but it seethes with a spirited supporting cast of ghosts, vampires and werewolves, all intricately animated in glorious stop-motion. Burton's regular collaborator Danny Elfman provided the catchy songs. Children with macabre tastes will be enchanted, as will many of their parents.

TIN CUP (1996) If you let the words "golf" and "Kevin Costner" put you off, you'll be letting personal prejudice stand between you and a delightful romantic comedy. The director's Ron Shelton, who specialises in films with sporty settings. Kevin gives a surprisingly relaxed and funny performance as a self-destructive golfer (he'd rather end up in the rough than play it safe) who competes in the US Open in the hope that sassy Rene Russo will be sufficiently impressed to choose him over Don Johnson, also on good form as Kev's smarmy rival.

TITANIC (1997) It's easy to be cynical about the biggest-grossing movie in history, harder to resist being sucked in. Let's face it, had the characters in James Cameron's blockbuster been fully realised human beings instead of cardboard cut-outs, the ending, in which most of them drown, would have been unbearable. Instead, we get two hours of tiresome canoodling between rich-but-suicidal Kate Winslet and poor-but-honest Irish yobbo Leonard DiCaprio, followed by one hour of breathtaking special effects as the ship goes down. And you have to admire the cheek of a film-maker who manages to twist a devastating tragedy with a death toll of 1500 into the emotionally uplifting tale of one woman's emancipation.

TITUS (1999) Rape, murder, dismemberment - Shakespeare's earliest tragedy is so gruesome many scholars prefer to think it wasn't written by him, but Julie Taymor's stylised screen version, with production design deliberately pick 'n' mixing ancient and modern, is thrilling if you're in the mood for some stentorian ranting. Anthony Hopkins lets rip as the victorious Roman general whose ritual sacrifice of a captive sets off a chain reaction of vengeance; just hearing that voice on full-throttle is likely to make your hair stand on end. Jessica Lange vamps it up as the Queen of the Goths, elevated from POW to empress when bratty decadent ruler Alan Cumming takes a shine to her. And if the escalating atrocity ultimately tips over into farce, who better than Hannibal Lecter to deliver the cannibalistic coup de grâce?

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942, b/w) "Heil myself!" Anti-German jokes may be old hat nowadays, post-Mel Brooks, but for obvious reasons they were a rarity back in World War Two, when Ernst Lubitsch directed this wicked black comedy. Jack Benny plays a conceited Shakespearean ham and the fabulously funny Carole Lombard his flirty actress wife. The audacious twist is they're both Polish Jews, this is occupied Warsaw in 1939, and between marital spats they're embroiled in a plot to foil the Nazi invaders. Tragically, it turned out to be Lombard's last role; she was killed in a plane crash soon afterwards.

TO CATCH A THIEF (1955) "You want a leg or breast?" Alfred Hitchcock at his sauciest, Grace Kelly at her sleekest and Cary Grant at his most debonair team up for this irresistible piece of froth set on the French Riviera, where wealthy socialites are having their baubles pinched by an audacious cat burglar. Minimal plot plus maximum elegance plus Grace's show-stopping gold ballgown add up to le dernier cri in escapism, though the way she takes those hairpin bends in her Sunbeam Talbot Alpine Roadster might give you pause for thought, given what happened to her 27 years later.

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944, b/w) You might not recognise the Ernest Hemingway story on which this Howard Hawks Casablanca-style yarn was based, but there's no mistaking the sexual chemistry between 45-year-old Humphrey Bogart, as a fishing boat skipper hired to smuggle a French resistance leader into Martinique, and 19-year-old model-turned-actress Lauren Bacall, who plays a chanteuse called Slim (now there's a nickname for you) with a singing voice so deep it was rumoured she'd been dubbed by Andy Williams. It's the risque exchanges between these two - "You just put your lips together and blow" - that dominate the movie, but there's also amusing work from Walter Brennan as Bogey's pickled partner.

TO KILL A KING (2003) English Civil War movies are rare, so even though this one's not first-rate we should be grateful. It's basically a romantic triangle between General Tom Fairfax (charmless Dougray Scott), his wife Lady Anne (Olivia Williams, who adds a touch of class to everything she's in) and his second-in-command Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth playing the future Lord Protector as a weaselly psychopath, which may not be historically accurate but at least it's fun). Jenny Mayhew's screenplay never finds the right balance between the personal and the political, but there's compensation in the form of Rupert Everett's impressive impersonation of Charles I. (He's a little tall for the role, but they cut him down to size.)

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1963, b/w) Americans are fond of Robert Mulligan's adaptation of Harper Lee's novel, which deals with subjects they like to sentimentalize about - childhood, holy fools and a Deep South in which Afro-Americans know their place and women, even white ones, are not to be trusted. I exaggerate, but why else would Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the lawyer defending a black man accused of rape, be voted Number One in a recent American Film Institute list of movie heroes? The child's eye view wears thin, but Peck is perfectly cast as the sort of guy you wish had been your dad, and it's fun to see Robert Duvall, in his film debut, looking like Max Headroom. But when you consider the material (lynch mobs, miscegenation, wife-beating) it's all terribly polite and unthreatening.

TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA (1985) Imagine an exceptionally cynical episode of Miami Vice relocated to LA and you've got a fair idea of this cop thriller directed by William Friedkin, who manages even to top his French Connection car chase with a hair-raising pursuit on an LA freeway - in the wrong direction. Young William Petersen (aka CSI's Gus Grissom) and John Pankow play two disaster-prone cops who inadvertently wreak havoc as they go after a ruthless forger (Willem Dafoe). Wang Chung provides the turbo-charged soundtrack. A very 1980s treat and one of my favourite films from the era. Just don’t go looking for uplifting sentiment.

TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1976) This devil-baby movie, the last 1970s horror movie from Hammer studios, is an adaptation of a Dennis Wheatley novel and features a full-frontal nude scene from 17-year old Nastassja Kinski. She plays the young nun chosen to be the Devil's concubine and thus the subject of a spiritual tug-of-war between Christopher Lee as a satanic priest and Richard Widmark (who hated the film and kept threatening to quit) as a Wheatley-style novelist. I'm particularly fond of the supporting contributions from Anthony Valentine as a literary agent and Honor Blackman as his wife - both of whom come to sticky ends.

TOKYO STORY (1953, b/w) Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece is an austerely shot slice of life about an elderly provincial couple on a visit to Tokyo, where their grown-up children are too busy to take them sightseeing and only their widowed daughter-in-law goes out of her way to make them feel welcome. The highlight is when one character asks, "Isn't life disappointing?" and another one smiles and replies, "I'm afraid it is." Yet, strangely, this 135 minutes of apparently nothing much happening is one of the most affecting movies ever made and I weep buckets every time I see it. All of human life is here.

TOM JONES (1963) It is somehow critically incorrect to admit to liking Tony Richardson's bawdy film of the Henry Fielding novel (screenplay by John Osborne) but I first saw it as a member of the paying public and enjoyed its blend of English heritage costume pic and Carry On-style romp, with young Albert Finney looking roguishly adorable in the title role. The then modish jump-cuts and speeded-up action now look dated, but Finney's famous chicken-munching dinner with Joyce Redman still hits the spot. The film was such a hit for United Artists that American studios started pumping money into the British film industry - which collapsed when they pulled it out again a decade later, during the oil crisis.

TOMB OF LIGEIA, THE (1965) Most of Roger Corman's classy Edgar Allan Poe adaptations were shot in the studio, but parts of this one, his last, were filmed on location in eerie Norfolk locations such as the ruins of Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham. The result is one of the most visually ravishing in the series, heavier on ambience than narrative, but effectively evoking the slightly druggy spirit of the original story. Vincent Price, in symbolic dark glasses, plays an aristocrat whose second marriage is somewhat blighted by his belief that he's being haunted by the ghost of his first wife, who might as well have inscribed the words, "I’ll be back" on her tombstone. Both women are played by the bewitching Elizabeth Shepherd, whose hair colour plays an important role, and there's a nifty performance from a black cat. The Freudian screenplay was penned by Robert Towne, a decade before he wrote Chinatown.

TOMBSTONE (1993) It's one of Hollywood's funny little idiosyncracies that competing projects on identical themes so often surface simultaneously, whether it's movies about killer asteroids or Truman Capote. Back in 1993-4, it was a brace of Wyatt Earp westerns. Everyone expected Lawrence Kasdan's 191-minute epic to reap the kudos, but it's George P Cosmatos' more fleetfooted shoot-em-up which has proved to have staying power. Men with large moustaches face off against each other at the O.K. Corral; Kurt Russell sports a big black albatross on his upper lip as Earp; Val Kilmer has a ball wih the scene-stealing role of Doc Holliday.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) Pierce Brosnan's second outing as 007 is an oddly chilly affair with nary a bikini-ed Bond girl or Monte Carlo casino in sight. Instead, it's all aircraft hangars at Mildenhall and parts of the Brent Cross shopping centre pretending to be a multi-storey carpark in Hamburg, with Jonathan Pryce as a mildly crazed media mogul (who wants to start World War Three to boost his ratings) as a curiously ineffectual bad guy. There are compensations, though, in the five-mile freefall parachute jump, corpse-faced Vincent Schiavelli as an eccentric secondary villain (a shame they didn't give him more screen time) and the fabulous Michelle Yeoh, whose super-duper kung-fu skills show Bond up as a limp-wristed wuss.

TONY TAKITANI (2004) Jun Ichikawa's small but perfectly formed adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story is an elegant tragicomedy about an illustrator whose Americanized name somehow ostracised him from his peers while he was growing up. He finally assuages his loneliness by marrying a young woman who's the ideal wife, except for one fatal flaw – she's addicted to designer clothes. With the camera creeping from left to right, omnipresent voice-over narration (with the characters themselves occasionally chipping in), Ryuichi Sakamoto's melancholy piano score and low-key performances, this is that rare and lovely thing – an adaptation that beautifully captures the voice of its literary source. The designer clothes are pretty fabby, as well.

TOOTSIE (1982) "I was a better man with you as a woman then I ever was with a woman as a man." Dustin Hoffman can sometimes be a hard actor to warm to, but funnily enough he seems a nicer human being when he's all dragged up in women's clothing. In this slick and very enjoyable comedy, he plays an out-of-work actor who pretends to be an actress called Dorothy Michaels in order to land a role on a daytime TV hospital soap. Things get complicated when he falls for his co-star (Oscar-winning Jessica Lange), and her widowed father (Charles Durning, rather touching) falls for Dorothy. Bill Murray, in an unbilled role as Hoffman's flatmate, brings down the house with two words.

TOP HAT (1935, b/w) "I’m steppin’ out, my dear, to breath an atmosphere that simply reeks with class." Yes, it’s Fred Astaire at the top of his game (and that’s saying something) backed up by Ginger Rogers, Eric Blore, Irving Berlin and one of those daft mistaken identity plots that pads the gaps between utterly sublime dance numbers, including "Isn’t It a Lovely Day To Get Caught in the Rain", with Ginger in jodhpurs, and "Cheek to Cheek", in which feathers from her marabou-trimmed frock kept getting up Fred’s nose. I burst into tears every time, mainly because I'll never be able to dance like that.

TOP SECRET! (1984) Silly but occasionally very funny spoof from the team that brought you Airplane! Val Kilmer, in his screen debut, plays an Elvis-type American rock star whose tour of 1980s East Germany unaccountably devolves into a tussle between Nazis and a French Resistance not a million miles from 'Allo, 'Allo. Like all such comedies it's a hit-and-miss affair, but the scene with the ballet dancers' codpieces is a classic, there's an ingenious bit of nonsense with Peter Cushing in a bookshop and those of us with infantile senses of humour have a tendency to fall about at the very mention of Frenchmen called Latrine and Chocolate Mousse.

TOPAZ (1969) Alfred Hitchcock's globe-trotting film of Leon Uris' sprawling espionage intrigue, set during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, is not the director's finest hour. The hero is played by Czech-born Frederick Stafford, a poor man's Sean Connery with all the charisma of a shop window dummy, there's a surfeit of French actors speaking English to each other in heavy French accents, and I wish you luck with the impenetrable plot. On the other hand, the set-pieces (defection, sneaky photography, murder) are the tours de force you'd expect, and the director's symbolic use of red, yellow and purple is a sight for sore eyes.

TOPSY-TURVY (1999) I’m not a Mike Leigh fan, but this Gilbert and Sullivan biopic has me eating out of his hand, not to mention sobbing convulsively into a hanky towards the end. Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner are magnificent as the mismatched twosome (the Lennon and McCartney of their day?) whose comic operas took Victorian society by storm, and they’re backed to the hilt by a sprawling cast of Leigh regulars such as Timothy Spall and Alison Steadman, all on top form, with Shirley Henderson performing a deeply moving version of "The Sun Whose Rays". The film takes us, step by step, through the gestation, rehearsal and eventual performance of The Mikado, and teaches us a lot of things about human nature in the process. Lovely tunes, great performances, smashing film.

TORA! TORA! TORA! (1970) "Tora" is the Japanese word for "tiger" and the title was the codeword to launch the attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in this fascinating recreation of the events leading up to 7 December, 1941, the "Day of Infamy". There are occasional stodgy patches, but not least of the film's strengths is its determination to show things from both sides, with the American scenes directed by Richard Fleischer, the Japanese ones by Battle Royale's Kinji Fukasuku (after Akira Kurosawa dropped out). The air-raid itself is brilliantly staged, with truly awesome pyrotechnics in which stuntmen are obviously dicing with death before your very eyes. It all looks ten times more dangerous than anything in Pearl Harbor. Exploding battleships! Flaming planes! Mitsubishi madness!

TORN CURTAIN (1966) This espionage yarn is usually dismissed as one of Alfred Hitchcock's failures, but after a sluggish start it gets into high gear when Paul Newman, playing an American physicist on a visit to Europe, defects to East Germany. (Is he really a traitor? What do you reckon?) Julie Andrews, in the underwritten role of the bewildered asistant and fiancee who sticks by him, is miscast (you keep expecting her to burst into "Do-Re-Mi") but forget the actors - once the action gets going, it's one nail-biting set-up after another. The fight to the death in the farmhouse is justly celebrated, but Hithcock also manages to whip such everyday events as a busride or a post office queue into little masterpieces of unease, and even conjures nail-biting suspense out of two physicists chalking incomprehensible equations on a blackboard.

TOTAL RECALL (1990) The second blockbuster adaptation of Philip K Dick's writing, directed by Paul Verhoeven, may lack the visionary production design of its predecessor, Blade Runner, but makes up for it with crunchy action and endearingly trashy pre-CGI special effects. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker whose memory implant session with a virtual travel agency called Rekall Inc results in seriously scrambled braincells, lots of people trying to kill him and a trip to Mars. The action never lets up: exploding heads, multi-breasted Martian mutants, Sharon Stone as a kick-boxing sleeper agent, Arnie extracting a massive tracking device via his nostril and some clever mindgames courtesy of the source material. It's Minority Report's vulgar older brother, and all the better for it.

TOUCHING THE VOID (2002) This gruelling documentary by Kevin Macdonald shows truth can be more gripping than fiction, even when we know the outcome. With the help of interviews and dramatic reconstruction we're taken back to the Andes in1985, when Joe Simpson breaks his leg while descending a 21,000ft peak and his partner, Simon Yates, is forced to cut the rope binding them together. Simpson falls into a crevasse and death seems certain before he summons the will to start crawling down the mountain. It's a terrifying, inspiring study in survival that will leave even armchair viewers physically and mentally shattered. Thrillers like Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit are all very well, but this is the real deal.

TOWERING INFERNO, THE (1974) The events of September 2001 transformed this 1970s disaster movie from an innocent drama about a group of people trapped in a blazing skyscraper into distinctly uncomfortable viewing. But it’s impossible not to feel a little nostalgia for a long-gone world in which the most serious problem besetting Steve McQueen, who played chief fireman, and Paul Newman, as architect of the doomed building, was the question of which star would get top billing on the poster. Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones are among the unfortunate has-beens whose former celebrity is no guarantee of survival. And guess who else is in there, dodging the flames? Yes, it’s O.J. Simpson as chief of security. Those were the days.

TOY STORY (1995) "We worship the claw!" John Lasseter's film made history as the first ever fully computer animated feature, but its appeal still stems from good old-fashioned storytelling and characters you care about. In this case, it's a bedroom full of children's toys who come to life when Andy, their owner, isn't looking. Woody the Cowboy (speaking with the voice of Tom Hanks) embarks on a power struggle against new-toy-on-the-block Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen's larynx) until both toys are thrust into the wide world and have to join forces to survive. Pure genius.

TOY STORY 2 (1999) Woody the cowboy (voiced by Tom Hanks) is stolen by a toy collector and forced to choose between old chums like Buzz Lightyear and shiny new friends like Jessie the Cowgirl. Like all the best kiddy films, this digitally animated masterpiece homes in on bitter truths with a directness that would make most adult movies flinch: there will come a time when no-one will want to play with you, and you'll be left on the shelf.

TRADING PLACES (1983) Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny? Less than a year after 48 Hrs, he was making it a double-whammy with this sophisticated comedy directed by John Landis. And I bet you never thought you’d read the words "Murphy" and "sophisticated" in the same sentence, did you? But it’s true there’s a touch of Lubitsch here, probably due to the presence of Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as two old codgers who place bets as to whether a street-bum (Murphy) can successfully swap lifestyles with commodities broker Dan Aykroyd. Of course there’s some base humour as well (hookers, gorilla suits) but it’s sprightly stuff, light years ahead of Norbit.

TRAFFIC (2000) Uneven but, for the most part, gripping exposé of the drug trade, adapted from a Channel 4 mini-series and cannily directed by Steven Soderbergh. Michael Douglas stars in the soapiest of three interwoven stories as a Washington DC drugs tsar who finds his own teenage daughter is not just a junkie but (the ultimate degradation in Hollywood's eyes) having sex with a black man. Meanwhile, over in sunny San Diego, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a socialite forced to take over her husband's dealership after he's arrested. But the most gripping part of the film, hands down, stars Benicio Del Toro in his Oscar-winning performance as a Tijuana cop walking a perilous tightrope between honesty and corruption.

TRAIN, THE (1964, b/w) Orson Welles famously said that a film studio was the "biggest train set a boy ever had" but John Frankenheimer went one better when he directed this superior thriller - the French government gave him lots of real old rolling-stock to smash up. Paul Scofield plays a Nazi colonel who tries to make off with a train stuffed with French art treasures. Burt Lancaster not only looks dapper in suit and tie but, at the age of 50, performs his own stunts as the French resistance fighter, Labiche, who starts off thinking the paintings expendable but gradually comes to realise their symbolic value. He embarks on a battle of wits to save his country's national heritage with the help of Jeanne Moreau, Michel Simon and the rest of a fine French supporting cast.

TRAINING DAY (2002) After coming perilously close to being typecast as a paragon, Denzel Washington finally got a villainous role he could sink his teeth into and won an Oscar for it. Alonzo Harris is a streetwise LA cop showing a naïve rookie (Ethan Hawke) the ropes as they cruise around town, busting students for dope, dropping in on dealers or stopping off at Harris' girlfriend's house so he can get laid. As the day wears on, however, it becomes apparent that Harris has a hidden agenda. He may be corrupt as hell but - until the disappointingly formulaic ending - he's a great guy to spend time with.

TRAINSPOTTING (1996) Danny Boyle was on a roll when he directed this adrenaline-charged adaptation of Irvine Welsh's cult novel about Edinburgh junkies, though his career has hit a few bumps since then. Ewan McGregor plays Renton, the most self-aware of the characters featuring in a succession of fast, vicious, funny vignettes ranging from disgusting lavatory gags to grotesque domestic tragedies to satirical tourist montages, all served up with lashings of f-words, snazzy camera tricks and enough sleaze to put anyone off heroin for life, even if the film is hi-jacked by the one character who doesn't do drugs - Robert Carlyle, scary as hell as Begbie, who instead gets his kicks from beating people's heads to a pulp.

TRAITOR (2009) Don Cheadle keeps us guessing in this topical thriller in which he plays a devout Muslim of Sudanese origin, formerly an explosives expert with US Special Ops. With the help of a member of an Islamic terror group (a nicely shaded performance from French actor Saïd Taghmaoui), he breaks out of a Yemeni prison to join a terrorist cell in Marseilles which is plotting a major atrocity on American soil. Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough play FBI agents trying to work out whether Cheadle is a double or even triple agent. Ambiguous characters and motivations, the ethics of collateral damage, an acknowledgment that not all Muslims are evil and a genuinely tense final reel make this a cut above the usual Hollywood Iraq-related fare, though that didn't save it from sinking without trace at the box-office.

TRANSAMERICA (2005) Felicity Huffman's Oscar-nominated performance as a transexual male (complete with gruff monotone and obligatory glimpse of prosthetic penis) is so persuasive you'll never look at her Lynette in Desperate Housewives in quite the same way again. As the title of Duncan Tucker's writing-directing debut suggests, it's a road movie. One week before her op, Sabrina (née Stanley) is horrified to discover she's a father - of a teenage rent-boy (Kevin Zegers). Most of the film consists of their drive from New York to Los Angeles; Sabrina keeps mum about their true relationship, he thinks she's a charity worker. The verbal sparring between prim tranny and louche teen hustler is droll, but the highlight's the visit to Sabrina's family in Arizona, where Fionnula Flanagan serves up a magnificently monstrous turn as the mother from hell.

TRANSFORMERS (2007) Shia LaBeouf does his likeable nerd act (though not so nerdy that he can't get off with hottie Megan Fox) who buys a battered yellow Camaro which is really a giant robot from outer space. Like the Transformers themselves - metallic aliens that disguise themselves as cars or planes - this Hollywood spin-off from the Japanese toy franchise is two things at once. Parts of it are the sort of mildly amusing comedy of suburban family life familiar from early films by Steven Spielberg (executive producer here). But the military hardware and bombastic showdowns between good and evil robots are clearly directed by Michael Bay, who can't go two milliseconds without lots of pointless cutting and jitterbugging camera. It's like having the contents of a scrap-metal yard repeatedly flung in your face.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005) Jason Statham, still endearingly resistant to the idea of showing a glimmer of emotion, reprises his role as cool action hero who trounces the baddies with a combination of martial arts and slick driving. The sort of film where the action is about as realistic as Looney Tunes, and machine-gun-wielding hitwomen dress in nothing but bra and panties.

TRANSPORTER 3 (2008) In terms of Jason Statham action franchises, the Transporter movies (co-written and produced by Luc Besson) come a poor second to the Crank films. Statham plays dapper Frank Martin, forced to drive the daughter of a Ukrainian minister from Marseilles to Odessa so the bad guy (Robert Knepper, better known as Prison Break's T-Bag) can blackmail her dad. Jason gets fitted with a bracelet which will explode if he strays too far from his car, resulting in a crazy chase scene when the car's stolen and he goes after it on a pushbike. Corey Yuen's fight choreography is obscured by antsy editing and Olivier Megaton's hamfisted directing, but the worst thing here is Natalya Rudakova as the kidnap victim, who's so annoying you pray for Frank to shoot her in the head. Alas, he falls in love with her instead.

TRANSSIBERIAN (2008) Brad Anderson, responsible for underrated genre offerings Session 9 and The Machinist, wrote and directed this agreeably old-fashioned B-movie-style thriller; in other words, attention is paid to plot and characters, not just to special effects and action. The story, which grips like a vice, revolves around a train journey from Beijing to Moscow, and exploits every tourist's worst nightmare scenario about being a stranger in a strange and possibly very dangerous land. Ben Kingsley is a Russian detective investigating a murder; Woody Harrelson plays against type as a Christian volunteer worker and trainspotter, but the main character is Harrelson's wife, played by Emily Mortimer, who's always interesting in supporting parts, but here at last gets a meaty leading role she can sink her teeth into.

TREMORS (1990) If you have to see one film about killer worms, better make it this latter-day B-movie, the sort of rollicking monster romp you thought they didn't make any more. The story strikes the ideal balance between thrills and giggles when the tiny Nevada desert town of Perfection (pop 14) is menaced by giant invertebrates that burrow through the earth, rather like tube trains with teeth. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward make a great comic team as the "good ole boys" who find themselves trapped on a rickety roof with a seismology student and the so-called "graboids" snapping at their toes.

TRESPASS (1992) Two of Hollywood's favourite B-list actors, Bill Paxton and William Sadler, play redneck firemen who stumble across hidden gold in a derelict factory on the outskirts of St Louis. Unfortunately for them, the building is also used as a hangout by a drug baron and his posse of bad boys, who are armed to the teeth with guns and mobile phones. Cue for escalating mayhem and reprehensible behaviour all round, deftly directed by Walter Hill. And if you think you know your Ice T from your Ice Cube, here's your chance to prove it; both rappers can be spotted playing mean mo-fos.

TRIP, THE (1967) Peter Fonda plays a clean-cut Californian TV commercials director who scores acid off his guru-esque chum (bearded Bruce Dern) and embarks on a groovy film-long psychedelic experience in which, among other things, he shows his bottom, listens to a washing-machine and says, "I can see right into my brain!" Jack Nicholson wrote the screenplay, duly directed by Roger Corman with a full complement of lava-lamp effects, naked chicks, hooded horsemen and out-takes from his own Poe movies, but nothing really awful happens to Fonda, unless you count an encounter with Dennis Hopper in full-on psychobabble mode. A fascinating period piece, though probably best avoided by anyone with epilepsy.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE (2005) Sophia Myles is refreshingly unaffected as the Irish princess whose marriage to Rufus Sewell, as the Cornish warlord struggling to unite the squabbling English against Irish aggression, is compromised by her passion for Sewell's pet warrior, played by James Franco in a sissy hair-do. Like King Arthur, it's an attempt to demystify a Dark Ages myth by replacing rich Pre-Raphaelite velvets with scratchy-looking knitwear, and Kevin Reynolds directs with a laudable determination to play it straight, but what makes the film interesting - and ironically scuppers its chances as cult teen romance - is Sewell as Marke. Far from being a hissable villain, he's the most sympathetic and principled character in the story, all the more tragic because you can't tell which of the lovers he's more jealous of.

TROY (2004) You may think you know your classics, but Wolfgang Petersen's peplum epic plays so fast and loose with Homer that there are narrative surprises in store, not least that the siege itself is over in a couple of days. No gods here, just Brad Pitt as a lustily hetero Achilles versus honourable Hector (Eric Bana). The rent-a-blonde who plays Helen is so forgettable I kept forgetting who she was (ETA It's Diane Kruger) but at least she and Orlando Bloom's Paris make a suitably colourless match. Peter O'Toole, as Priam, acts everyone else off the screen. The CGI battles are messy and there's rather too much of that wailing woman soundtrack made popular by Gladiator, but I'm a sucker for films about men in short skirts. Everyone dribbles lots of red drool and Brad is so outrageously buff (and in the buff, several times) that it would be churlish to complain.

TRUE CRIME (1999) At 69, Clint Eastwood may be just a tad too old to be playing an investigative reporter on The Oakland Tribune whose race against the clock to prove a condemned man's innocence offers him the proverbial one last shot at redemption. But this is a character-study as much as a thriller, and as usual the actor-director shows a commendable lack of vanity; his character is a wreck of a womanising alcoholic who's mean to his small daughter (played by Clint's own six-year-old) and whose torso, when he reveals it by taking his shirt off, is visibly of pensionable age. In fact, the film is the exact opposite of an ego-trip - the star lets James Woods and Denis Leary steal all their newspaper office scenes. It may be one of the director's minor efforts, but I'll take it over the much trumpeted Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby any day.

TRUE LIES (1994) Long before Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron was thinking big, which is probably why he chose Arnold Schwarzenegger to star in three of his movies. In this gargantuan remake of a modest French action-comedy, the gubernatorial candidate for California plays an American super-agent (albeit one with a heavy Austrian accent) called Harry Tasker whose wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) thinks he's a boring computer salesman until one day she gets sucked into his work protecting Western democracy from Islamic terrorists, with not-so-hilarious results that actually end up being rather demeaning to women. There's a subplot featuring Bill Paxton as a used car salesman who fancies his chances with Mrs Tasker, but Cameron's main interest is blowing things up, whether it's bad guys, buildings or the Florida Keys.

TRUE ROMANCE (1993) An expletive-filled showdown between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken is the highlight of Tony Scott's film of an early Tarantino screenplay which is ostensibly aimed at nerdy male film buffs (Sonny Chiba references) who are impressed by films featuring big-breasted hookers (Patricia Arquette) and fashionable amounts of violence.

TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES, THE (1957) Nicolas Ray (hampered by studio interference) directs Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter (as brother Frank) clad in unfeasibly spotless duster coats as disaffected Confederate rebels without a cause. It kicks off with the aftermath of the Northfield raid and and flashes back (via swirly music and mist) to Quantrill's raiders, Yankee atrocities and Pinkerton provocation.

TRUMAN SHOW, THE (1998) Peter Weir's fable about a regular guy who lives an idyllic smalltown life, unaware that his every move is being filmed and broadcast to billions of viewers around the world and that his family and friends are all actors, could almost be an unofficial remake of The Prisoner, but with the 1960s secret agent element replaced by the 1990s vogue for reality TV. Or maybe it's a variation on the paranoid Philip K Dick scenario, so prevalent in today's fantasy cinema, that Reality Is Not What You Think It Is. Either way, it's fascinating stuff, with Jim Carrey's manic happy-chappy features put to good use, though I found the ending dramatically unsatisfying. After all, if they're watching Truman, and we're watching them, then who's watching us?

TRUTH ABOUT CATS AND DOGS, THE (1995) Women are rarely allowed to be funny in Hollywood movies (qv Knocked Up and The Hangover), but one exception is Janeane Garofolo, who can deliver an acidic quip with the best of them. She enjoys a rare starring role in this rom-com as the host of a pet-therapy radio show who falls for Ben Chaplin over the airwaves and on the phone. Lacking the self-esteem to meet him in person, she asks her model-girl neighbour (Uma Thurman proving once again that she can't do light comedy) to stand in for her. Chaplin is either so dumb or so dazzled that he can't tell the difference, which doesn't exactly make him much of a catch, but the ensuing Cyrano-esque farce is not without its fair share of cherishable one-liners, such as, "Rejection kills. Disappointment only maims."

TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, THE (2002) Fans of Stanley Donen's ultra-chic romantic thriller Charade will be irritated beyond belief by this self-consciously hip remake directed by Jonathan Demme as an arch homage to all things French and nouvelle vague, complete with cameo pop-ups from the likes of Anna Karina and Charles Aznavour. Mark Wahlberg, bless him, tries hard but just can't cut it in the Cary Grant role (George Clooney might just have pulled it off) as the mystery man who comes to the aid of a young widow when she's menaced by her dead husband's former associates, but Thandie Newton makes a surprisingly fair fist of filling Audrey Hepburn's elegant shoes, and while the plot's a mess, the Paris locations are never less than enchanting.

TSOTSI (2005) Gangster shoots middle-class black driver and makes off with her car, only to find a baby in the back seat. Yes, it's gangster meets baby, gangster carts baby around in carrier bag and becomes gentler, kinder gangster. Can you imagine a Hollywood movie with a plot as hokey as this? John Ford tried a Western variation 70 years ago, in Three Godfathers, but nowadays it would pass muster only as dumb comedy. That South African director Gavin Hood gets away with it, just, is entirely due to a terrific central performance from Presley Chweneyagae as the initially vicious teenage nogoodnik ("tsotsi" is urban slang for thug), and the grim portrait of the Johannesburg townships, where you only have to leave baby alone for five minutes and it gets covered in ants.

TUPAC: RESURRECTION (2004) Gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, killed in a drive-by shooting at the age of 25, has sold more albums since his death in 1996 than he ever did when he was alive. Some of my French friends reckon he's the successor to such people's poets as François Villon, an opinion evidently shared by this MTV-produced hagiopic, executive produced by his mom and skilfully patched together from clips and interviews to make it seem as though Tupac himself is reciting the story of his life. The impression is of a articulate, charismatic guy who loved his mom, beat up people only when they asked for it and respected women, apart from groupies, bitches and a no-good ho who accused him and three of his pals of sexual asault. By the way, could anyone tell me why rappers wear their headscarves like Irene Handl-type cleaning ladies?

TURBULENCE (1997) Uproarious example of the "stewardess flies the plane" subgenre, with Lauren Holly as the air hostess who finds herself on the corpse-strewn flight deck of a 747. ("It's a mess!" she whinges to ground control.) Not only does she have to negotiate a Level Six storm, she's also lumbered with "The Lonely Heart Strangler" (Ray Liotta) who rampages through the plane, throttling flight staff, trashing the autopilot and singing "Buffalo Girls" as he sets fire to the seats. Holly, who's a little slow to catch on, asks, "Did you do what they say you did?" before bravely stripping down to her chemise. This tosh is even more hilarious once you realise she's a dead ringer for Julian Clary.

TWELVE MONKEYS (1995) Bruce Willis gives an amazingly good performance (and shows his bottom twice in the first half hour) in this fascinating Moebius Strip of a film directed by Terry Gilliam from a screenplay inspired by Chris Marker's classic short film La jetée. Bruce, incarcerated in the same Philadelphia mental ward as a horribly hammy Brad Pitt, claims that scientists have sent him back through time from the year 2035 to prevent a lethal virus from wiping out most of life on earth. Can he persuade mini-skirted doctor Madeleine Stowe that he's on the level? Time is running out, and Brad's overacting is getting on our nerves. Bruce's desperate quest is exciting, though things do get a bit homage-heavy towards the end.

TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH (1947, b/w) General Gregory Peck takes command of a demoralised American bomber unit stationed in England during WW2 and deliberately sets out to be a complete bastard in order to whip the boys back into mental shape for their suicidal daylight bombing missions. It's a sober, gripping and, given the date, remarkably non-jingoistic study of the psychology of leadership and men under intolerable pressure, with a flashback structure that was surely borrowed by Saving Private Ryan, and it's up there with the best war movies ever made. The drama is more emotional than physical, but when the aerial action finally arrives, it's authentic combat footage of B-17s in combat against Focke-Wulf fighters and utterly thrilling.

TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934, b/w) Am I alone in finding that screwball comedies from Hollywood's so-called golden age sometimes seem - dare I say it - a bit shrill? This farce, adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their own play and directed by Howard Hawks, is no exception, yet it's worth watching to see John Barrymore (Drew's grandfather) sending up his own flamboyant acting style as Oscar Jaffe, a Svengali-like Broadway producer whose protogée (Carole Lombard as Lily Garland) dumps him to become a Hollywood star. These two egomaniacs bump into each other on the eponymous Chicago to New York train, resulting in much knockabout fun and rat-a-tat dialogue. Oh yes, and some shrillness as well.

TWILIGHT (1998) Not to be confused with the vampire movie of the same title, Robert Benton's elegaic film noir got short shrift in the obituaries for Paul Newman, but it's one of his better latterday roles, and a rather lovely showcase for some of Hollywood's more seasoned talents, harking back in pacing and style to a less frenetic, more chivalrous era. Newman plays a down-at-heel former private eye who agrees to deliver an envelope for a terminally ill buddy (Gene Hackman) and inevitably finds himself up to his neck in corpses. Susan Sarandon and James Garner round out the cast. The plot's not up to much - the dearth of suspects makes it fairly obvious who's done what to whom - but with a line-up like this you can't go wrong. Newman in particular is wonderful as a sort of superannuated Philip Marlowe.

TWILIGHT SAMURAI, THE (2002) Despite the title, this isn't a "chambara" action pic, though it does feature a couple of fights. It's more a superior character study, starring Hiroyuki Sanada (from Ringu and Danny Boyle's Sunshine) as an impoverished low-ranking samurai who works in his clan's storehouse in the mid-19th century. After the death of his wife he becomes dishevelled and smelly, but adores his two small daughters (one of whom narrates as an adult) and refuses to let hidebound convention stand in the way of his family's happiness. If this sounds dull, you should be aware that writer-director Yoji Yamada is best known for having helmed all 48 films in the crowd-pleasing Tora-san series, and is thus an old hand at the art of capturing an audience's attention. Which he does, brilliantly, in this slow-ish but absorbing drama.

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983) "Wanna see something really scary?" Actually, by far the scariest thing about this big budget reworking of four episodes from the cult TV sci-fi series was the helicopter crash that killed the actor Vic Morrow and two children during filming. That aside, the segment directed by Steven Spielberg, about a bunch of oldsters who rediscover their lost youth, is unmitigated treacle. But see it for the cartoon nightmare directed by Joe Dante, a white-knuckle airplane ride directed by George Miller, and the witty prologue starring Dan Aykroyd as a hitcher who likes playing scary games on the road.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) See Fire Walk with Me.

TWIN TOWN (1997) Kevin Allen's scabrous black comedy comes close to doing for Swansea what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh. Any lingering traces of lyrical Under Milk Wood Welshness go up in smoke as a petty vendetta between caravan-dwelling delinquents (Rhys Ifans and his brother Llyr) and a nouveau riche roofing contractor escalates from vandalism to murder. Also in on the act are a doomed poodle and Dougray Scott as a bent copper trying to shift half a ton of cocaine. I can't quote any dialogue here because it consists mostly of F-words, but I fear that, as a portrait of chavvy Britain in the 1990s, it's depressingly authentic.

TWIN WARRIORS (1993) This is also known as Tai-Chi Master, a more appropriate title since the story is noticeably lacking in twins. Two boyhood pals choose separate paths after getting kicked out of a monastery for being naughty Shaolin monks. One becomes a cruel army officer for the evil eunuch emperor, while the other (played by superstar Jet Li) fights on the side of brave rebels whose ranks include feisty Michelle Yeoh. If you've never seen a martial arts movie, this is as good a place as any to start; the amazing combat sequences are directed by Woo-Ping Yuen with all the flair he would later be hired to recreate in the fight scenes for The Matrix.

TWISTED (2004) Ashley Judd plays a San Francisco destective who realises to her alarm that the battered corpses turning up around town are all of guys she's slept with. She drinks too much and suffers from blackouts: could she be the killer? Nope, it's one of her fellow cops in this by-the-numbers thriller than plays like an undemanding telefilm. Take your pick from Andy Garcia, Samuel L Jackson and a clutch of lesser-known red herrings. When this film came out I took a picture of Ashley's chic yet casual haircut to my salon - and ended up with a ridiculously trendy shag-of-the-month that bore no resemblance at all to the photo. Are hairdressers blind, or what?

TWISTER (1996) Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton play meteorologists who chase tornados around Oklahoma in this white-knuckle bad-weather blockbuster directed by Jan de Bont. Some of the impact will inevitably be lost on the small screen, and for heaven's sake don't go looking for plot or characters, but see it for the amazing special effects (you'll believe a cow can fly) and such cherishable lines as the classic, "Go go go go go!" and, "Debris! We have debris!" Debris is putting it mildly since our intrepid heroes are pelted with everything from giant hailstones to plummeting petrol-tankers. It's (quite literally) a blast.

TWO BROTHERS (2004) French director Jean-Jacques Annaud tries to do for tigers what he did for bears (in The Bear) with this anthropomorphic nonsense about a couple of tiger cubs in 1920s Indochina. The cubs are separated after big-game hunting Guy Pearce shoots their father: one is sold to a circus and forced to jump through flaming hoops, the other ends up in a prince's menagerie. Will they find each other again and romp off into the jungle together? Or will they end up as moth-eaten rugs on someone's bedroom floor? Clunky as anything, but the tigers are adorable.

TWO DAYS IN THE VALLEY (1996) Inconsequential but diverting shaggy-dog yarn, a sort of Pulp Fiction Lite, about a botched hit and its affect on various residents of Los Angeles. A strong ensemble cast includes Danny Aiello, Eric Stoltz and Marsha Mason, with James Spader notably creepy as a psychotic assassin with Michael Caine specs. Uncontested highlight, though, is the catfight between Teri Hatcher in skintight cycling shorts and Charlize Theron as a Swedish blonde in a slinky silver jumpsuit.

TWO FOR THE MONEY (2005) Matthew McConaughey plays an ex-football player whose knack for predicting the outcome of games makes him the star of Al Pacino's Manhattan sports betting service, but pride comes before a fall. I kept waiting for the plot to kick in, but this is like The Devil's Advocate without the Devil. Films about gambling only work if they're character studies as well, but this one doesn't cut it. McConaughey, as usual, is fit yet colourless (I wish he would take on more full-blooded character roles like his crazed dragon-fighter in Reign of Fire) and Pacino, as usual, overacts his socks off, though it's doubtful anyone other than diehard Pacino fans will care.

TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967) Audrey Hepburn swaps her beloved Givenchy for groovy swinging London gear in this chic portrait of a marriage, cleverly scripted by Frederic Raphael. After 12 years and one child, she and Albert Finney are contemplating divorce; as they drive south through France, we revisit them making the same journey in more carefree days - as young lovers hitching rides, newly weds with a banged-up MG etc. There are uncomfortable truths tucked away in there, but veteran director Stanley Donen gives it a breezy touch that stops it turning into angst-ridden Ingmar Bergman, and the whole package is so seductive it almost made me want to get married, just so I too could contemplate divorce in such a glamorous way. The fabulous French scenery doesn't hurt, either.

TWO JAKES, THE (1990) Sixteen years after Chinatown, Jack Nicholson directed himself in this flawed but interesting sequel which sank without trace at the box-office. The setting is Los Angeles in 1948, where older-but-no-wiser private dick Jake Gittes once again finds himself immersed in a divorce case that isn’t as simple as it looks. This time it’s not water but oil on the agenda as Jake’s past comes back to haunt him. Harvey Keitel plays the second Jake; Madeleine Stowe provides scorching sex appeal in a fluffy cardigan. Look on it as Nicholson’s love letter to what was maybe the best role he ever had, and it acquires a bittersweet edge almost worthy of its predecessor.

TWO RODE TOGETHER (1961) One of John Ford's less-celebrated Westerns, this has sometimes been dismissed as a pale echo of The Searchers, but it's still worth a detour for its unusually bleak view of the Old West as a place ruled by greed and hypocrisy. James Stewart stars in one of his no-more-Mr-Nice-Guy roles, as a cynical marshal tracking down pioneers' children kidnapped by the Comanches. Richard Widmark plays the idealistic cavalry officer who accompanies him.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964) If you have to see one film by the legendary Herschell Gordon Lewis, aka the "Godfather of Gore", it might as well be this splatter version of Brigadoon, in which a clutch of Yankee tourists stumble across a small Southern town whose inhabitants (unbeknown to the visitors) were massacred by Union troops during the Civil War and rematerialize every 100 years to wreak bloody revenge. Neat idea for a plot, but the execution is Lewis's usual hotch-potch of bad acting and even worse special effects. I have absolutely no hesitation, however, in recommending the excellent theme song: "EEEEE-YA-HA! Oh the South's gonna rise again!"

TWO WEEKS NOTICE (2002) If nothing else, this rom-com will go down in history as the apostrophe-free title that threw Lynne Truss into a tizzy (see her book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves). Sandra Bullock plays a klutzy hippy-chick lawyer who clashes with Hugh Grant, a rich playboy whose corporation wants to redevelop her local Coney Island community centre. Sandra snores, spits gum, gets drunk and eats too many chili dogs. Hugh owns hotels and helicopters and plays strip-chess with his female employees. Naturally, they're made for each other, though the clunky screenplay never makes this relationship of opposites convincing. Bullock and Grant, however, can do this sort of thing in their sleep and their combined charm just about rescues the film.