Exploitation cinema wearing it's Sunday Best. Decent production values cannot disguise the paucity of social or political comment which is a thin veneer for a pseudo-kinky parade of girlie-magazine smut. Probably Brass' most accomplished work but it quickly runs out of steam after a striking first thirty minutes: all exposition and little narrative drive.

Listless adaptation falling somewhat short of Fitzgerald's first person prose amid a gauzy recreation of a jazz age seemingly permanently danced to The Charleston. The strongest moments remind one more of Steinbeck or Williams, but this is scant recommendation for a lovingly assembled parade of period chintz. Redford is stolid and Farrow hysterical, leaving Waterstone and Chiles to achieve the required air.

A generally interesting exercise in desperation, despite some longuers. The detached manner lives on in the mind long after. Fassbender enthrals with small gestures although Mulligan tips the balance somewhat by trying too hard.

… and a rather dull one too. The expected Cronenberg clinical detachment is present but it holds the subject so far at arm’s length that engagement, let alone much interest, is hard to sustain. One can see the joins in Knightley’s performance but Fassbender and Mortensen atone with crisply realised interpretations. Anaemic.

Sweet natured but generally trite pastiche. We've been here so many times before and Singin' in the Rain did it better on all counts. As ever Hollywood rewards exercises in navel gazing and it's success can only be ascribed to offering a warm, if empty headed, alternative to the slam-dunk offerings down the local mutliplex. A cinematic cream cake.

An eye for a very illiberal eye… Little more than a right-ring reactionary exploiter. Winner lays it on with a shovel with no room for liberal discourse, just a single-minded series of manipulative knee-jerks towards brute vengeance. It has a certain spaced-out economy of style and moves at a fair lick, but this is nothing in the way of commendation. Hancock’s score merely adds to the heavy underlining.

Benign, but tame and timid musical in the Lubitsch mode, rather too self satisfied with its own perceived naughtiness which might only be shocking to a novice emerging from cloisters, otherwise it lacks any courage or convictions. However it’s played with good natured zest and a useful extension of the Andrews persona, but is strangely hampered by some poor songs and lumpy direction from Edwards in his farceur style.

Generally zippy pastiche-piffle that gets by on sheer energy and dopey charm. All a bit of a sugar rush really but a pleasant diversion with peppy performances and a good feel for a re-imagined period whipping-up the paper-thin plot into a whirling dervish of silly fun. Probably the closest Aunt Edna got to a sixties loosening of her corset without flopping-out entirely at Woodstock.

No matter how much money was thrown at this film it rarely takes hold as anything other than beautiful hubris and nearly drowns a generally appealing libretto and score with needless opulence. Woefully miscast and distracted leads add to the jolly misery and it’s yet another clunking attempt to replicate Warner’s earlier My Fair Lady, itself no stranger to largesse served as whimsy. Oh Julie, where for art thou?

The Good Companions revisited. Amiable enough but goes in no particular direction apart from putting on a show in that proverbial barn. A very undemanding little scherzo enlivened by ripe ham. One could categorise into a sub-genre of sorts: the 'holiday' picture where directors attempt to have a bit of frivolous fun between more substantial fare. Maybe that means Michael Bay will tackle Ibsen during his.

Flatfooted collision of jazzy ‘wow man’ vernacular with British cardigans and bow ties. It never quite takes flight and feels like the British with their envious faces at the window of American noir.

Deliciously dour early Leigh with a feeling that the sky is permanently leaden and only six-feet above your head. As ever there’s the irritating Leigh disdain for aspiration, but that’s somewhat held at bay in a circus of characters who feel rather like chickens scrabbling about eking out a miserable living. Can you imagine such a bleak treatise on the human lot being broadcast at peak-time on a major network now?

A rather excellent chamber piece with the oxygen slowly draining out... Grotesque and pithy by turns it’s a frequently uncomfortable riff on some favourite British topics: status, gender and class, albeit sweetened by Steadman’s hulking hostess. Technically rudimentary, but at least the dialogue and interplay aren’t lost in a swirl of showy camera moves. As ever though with Leigh there's a whiff of inverted snobbery.

Delightfully whimsical comic-strip rendering of Grossmith's episodic original with suitably droll narration and dotty visuals. It never outstays its welcome and it's a shame this scuttling little gem hasn't found a wider audience.

The speculative framing device provides an annoying and overly-repetitive structure to a drama that dips and scrapes into ‘key’ moments of Thatcher’s life resulting in a bitty survey of an important political figure. One never really gets a sense of the woman or her times, jumping as it does from 1970s economic meltdown through to an unexplained mid-80s boom. A superbly judged central performance nevertheless.

Largely successful translation of Orton's stage play retaining the baroque dialogue and providing Reid with a wonderful outlet for fruity grotesquery. As typical with filmed plays, once it moves indoors it becomes a tad hidebound, but the mordant cheek shines through.

Amiable nonsense and not much more than arsing about. However it’s structurally quite playful with cinematic conventions – the opening inter-titles, the extended black-screen ending, etc. and has a silly charm – although Life of Brian is more satisfying on most levels – with the absurdist scenarios amusing in fits and starts. The feeling of filmed end-of-term revue never quite leave the mind. A jolly canter.

Rogues in brogues. An antecedent to Hollywood caper films (Ocean's Eleven et al) and a tad sullied by association (a problem with the later). On its own terms a solidly crafted, if overlong, romp; in the context of British cinema rather an interesting bridge between the middle-class comedies of Rank and the more satirical Boulting Brothers films of the same period. Sly, although crime doesn't pay when you're rated A.

A skilled raconteur, despite being somewhat a prisoner of his own celebrity. As filmed theatre: perfunctory (although what else can it be?); as hilarious monologue: divine.

A gloriously epic wallow in the conflicting plates of repressive English class and suppressive Catholicism. The shift from sunny carefree Oxford summers to the melancholic descent into the Winter of Ryder’s life is magnificently conveyed (It takes almost a season in itself to reach that point). Its monumental reputation is deserved although the accumulated baggage of wistful conservatism over the years is regrettable

The drama maybe at sea, but the certainties of the British class system certainly aren't with this deft balance of drawing room niceties time-dissolving back and forth into suspenseful sea drama. As ever with Coward the mix of Surrey-on-a-stick contrasted with cor' blimey Cockneyness is negated with the general decency of the effort. Johnson captures the tea-time spirit with aplomb.Lips were never so politely stiff.

Taut, tight and telling adaptation with a far from picaresque view of Victorian London. Beautifully balanced in almost every facet, this is lean Lean converting an essentially written truth into one of great visual beauty. One of the highest points of British cinema.

Neat if rather musty, this is in Ealing's more sly comedic vein, although much broader than the rapier wit of Kind Hearts & Coronets. One can never quite dispel an air of smugness, although that might have been acquired by the film long after production with its slightly undeserved reputation. Nevertheless a mordant gavotte, despite the unnecessary insertion of Frankie Howerd's barrow-boy.

In two minds here: taken as a single film this is a rollicking adventure filmed with considerable verve and charm, but the corrosive effect of the often juvenile drivel that erupted (and continues to) from Hollywood on the back of the financial success of Star Wars and its ilk reduce too much of mainstream film-making to being great monumental cubes of moulded faeces. What a phenomenal crossroads this was.

The artist's lot is not a happy one... A visually splendid away-day for Russell who revels in the florid kinship of the brothers Pre-Raphaelite with a whirling, swirling downward reverie on the life of the artist (artists, given the bumper crop here). A tad overextended but that's a small criticism for a delectably Gothicised and idiosyncratic concoction that makes heading towards the gutter such intoxicated fun.

Rather routine rendering of an earthy if dull cause celebre which has little of the flinty texture of Russell's earlier rendition of Women in Love. It's easy on the eye, if a little jarring on the ear with occasionally clumsy dialogue. It's not quite a case of going through the motions, but it does lack the spark and flare that marks out so much of the directors earlier work. The latter episodes have more vigour.

In an episodic format that paid such dividends for Russell thirty years earlier this production becomes trapped in a kind of stalled stasis lacking much of the magical essence of a subject's life so deftly captured in the earlier works. A stolid lead and Hyde Park Corner dialogue don't help.

Another small peak from Russell's televisual purple patch with an appropriately mordant reading of Rousseau's life and career. The casting of Lloyd - all flat vowels and dour gesticulations - provides a neat counterpoint to the florid naivety of the painter's work and cuts through the beret and garlic cliché of the French artist.

Life through a wide telescope. Wonderfully frenetic and kaleidoscopic survey of Duncan's life and career. The bumptious pace captures just the right balance between slapstick revisionism and tender pathos. Whilst the declamatory dialogue can grate elsewhere in Russell's work, the foghorn pronouncements of Duncan are carried along by the sheer bounce of the piece.

Semi-style over no content. Beyond the decor and trappings it's a rather tame exploiter that like so many entries in the loose Euro-Sleaze canon relies on a dreary jumble of timid kink and girlie-magazine nudity to pad out the time. Despite the retro-cool of these things, they're generally sad affairs with an almost necrophilic pattern of middle-aged careers in decline colliding with younger eye-candy on the make.