The fractured Europe post-World War II is perfectly captured in Carol Reed's masterpiece thriller, set in a Vienna still shell-shocked from battle. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an alcoholic pulp writer come to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). But when Cotton first arrives in Vienna, Lime's funeral is under way. From Lime's girlfriend and an occupying British officer, Martins learns of allegations of Lime's involvement in racketeering, which Martins vows to clear from his friend's reputation. As he is drawn deeper into post-war intrigue, Martins finds layer upon layer of deception, which he desperately tries to sort out. Welles' long-delayed entrance in the film has become one of the hallmarks of modern cinematography and it is just one of dozens of cockeyed camera angles that seem to mirror the off-kilter post-war society. Cotten and Welles give career-making performances and the Anton Karas zither theme will haunt you. -Anne Hurley.

This classic among Hitchcock's British movies of the 30s draws, unusually for him, on the work of a major writer for its source-Joseph Conrad's tale of seedy London-based espionage, The Secret Agent. Not that Hitch and his screenwriter, Charles Bennett, kept much of Conrad's novel beyond the bare bones of the plot. Verloc, an anarchist (played with appealing melancholy by Oscar Homolka), runs a South London fleapit cinema as a cover for his political activities. (In the original it's a porno bookstore-Hitch clearly thought the cinema was the nearest the censor would pass. ) His young wife (the sad-eyed Sylvia Sidney) knows nothing of his undercover assignments. She's devoted to her naïve younger brother, and when Verloc involves the lad in his schemes the results are catastrophic. The cast also features a young hero, a police detective woodenly played by John Loder, but Homolka and Sidney, as the sadly mismatched couple held together only by need, are unfailingly watchable as the brooding domestic atmosphere darkens towards tragedy. The trademark Hitchcock tension is well in evidence, though Hitch later reckoned he committed a "grave error" in letting one nail-biting scene end with the death of a sympathetic character (and a cute puppy). Though the film was shot almost entirely on studio sets, the director drew on his own Cockney childhood to create a wonderfully shabby, down-at-heel milieu of grubby London backstreets where the reek of gas lamps and rotting vegetables on the cobbles is all but palpable. -Philip Kemp.

Point Blank's hero, Walker (Lee Marvin), strides through Los Angeles with the steely stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and his best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting, did he return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel, set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and the eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed and assisted by Angie Dickinson as he desperately searches for someone, anyone, who can just give him his money. But if Walker is an extreme incarnation of the revenge-driven noir anti-hero, the modern syndicate has been transformed into a world of paper jungles and corporate businessmen: an alienating concept for the two-fisted, gun-wielding gangster. Boorman creates a hard, austere look for the film and scatters flashes of painful memory throughout the story, grafting the New Wave onto old genres with confidence and style. Haunting and brutal, Point Blank remains one of the most distinctive crime thrillers ever made. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

An absolute stunner of a movie, Memento combines a bold, mind-bending script with compelling action and virtuoso performances. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, hunting down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The problem is that "the incident" that robbed Leonard of his wife also stole his ability to make new memories. Unable to retain a location, a face, or a new clue on his own, Leonard continues his search with the help of notes, Polaroids, and even homemade tattoos for vital information. Because of his condition, Leonard essentially lives his life in short, present-tense segments, with no clear idea of what's just happened to him. That's where Memento gets really interesting; the story begins at the end, and the movie jumps backward in 10-minute segments. The suspense of the movie lies not in discovering what happens, but in finding out why it happened. Amazingly, the movie achieves edge-of-your-seat excitement even as it moves backward in time! , and it keeps the mind hopping as cause and effect are pieced together. Pearce captures Leonard perfectly, conveying both the tragic romance of his quest and his wry humour in dealing with his condition. He is bolstered by several excellent supporting players including Carrie-Anne Moss, and the movie is all but stolen by Moss' fellow Matrix co-star Joe Pantoliano, who delivers an amazing performance as Teddy, the guy who may or may not be on his side. [+]

This modern-day teen update of Les Liaisons Dangereuses suffered at the hands of both critics and moviegoers thanks to its sumptuous ad campaign, which hyped the film as an arch, highly sexual, faux-serious drama (not unlike the successful, Oscar-nominated Dangerous Liaisons). In fact, Cruel Intentions plays like high comedy for its first two-thirds, as its two evil heroes, rich stepsiblings Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe), blithely ruin lives and reputations with hearts as black as coal. Kathryn wants revenge on a boyfriend who dumped her, so she befriends his new intended, the gawky Cecile (Selma Blair), and gets Sebastian to deflower the innocent virgin. The meat of the game, though, lies in Sebastian's seduction of good girl Annette (a down-to-earth Reese Witherspoon), who has written a nationally published essay entitled "Why I Choose to Wait. " If he fails, Kathryn gets his precious vintage convertible; if he wins, he gets Kathryn-in the sack. When the movie sticks to the merry ruination of Kathryn and Sebastian's pawns, it's highly enjoyable: Gellar in particular is a two-faced manipulator extraordinaire, and Phillippe, usually a black hole, manages some fun as a hipster Eurotrash stud. Most pleasantly surprising of all is Witherspoon, who puts a remarkably self-assured spin on a character usually considered vulnerable and tortured (see Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons). Unfortunately, writer-director Roger Kumble undermines everything he's built up with a false ending that's true to neither the reconceived characters nor the original story-revenge is a dish best served cold, not cooked up with unnecessary plot twists. -Mark Englehart, Amazon. com.

Fifty years on, it's hard to appreciate just how shocking one key scene in The Blue Lamp was considered by British audiences. Young delinquent Tom Riley (played with sensuous malevolence by Dirk Bogarde) guns down kindly, benevolent copper, PC Dixon (Jack Warner. ) In early 1950s Britain, murdering a policeman was the ultimate taboo. Even the underworld's denizens help the police flush Riley out. Made by Ealing Studios, The Blue Lamp is not a comedy but shares many of the studio's characteristic comic hallmarks, as well as the same writer (TEB Clarke) for their classics Hue And Cry and The Lavender Hill Mob. Consensus and tolerance are the watchwords. Individualism is frowned upon. There are no extravagant displays of emotion, not even from Mrs Dixon (Gladys Henson) when she learns what happened to her husband. The understatement is very moving, although by today's standards the representation of the police seems absurdly idealised. Were they ever the doughty, patient sorts depicted here? It is no surprise to learn that Scotland Yard co-operated in the making of the film but this is much more than just police propaganda. [+]

Clint Eastwood (making his very assured directorial debut) is a poetry-spouting stud-muffin DJ stalked by a maniacally amorous fan after a misguided one-night stand in this enjoyably schlocky, undeniably effective film about good intentions gone murderously wacky. Although many of the very 1970s trappings presented here may ultimately be too dated to be taken seriously (including a highly self-indulgent jazz number and a hilariously gooey seduction number between Eastwood and Donna Mills), the core premise of infatuation taken out of bounds remains uncomfortably plausible-and was influential enough to be appropriated by one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. (Here's a hint-it starred Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and a very unfortunate bunny rabbit. ) A well-staged and occasionally very frightening thriller worth watching for Jessica Walter's peerlessly unhinged performance alone. Frequent Eastwood collaborator Don Siegel (director of Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff and The Beguiled, to name but a few) has a nice cameo as Murphy, the moustachioed, chess-playing bartender. -Andrew Wright, Amazon. com.

This 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story adds well over an hour of new material to the original tale. The reason is, while director Robert Siodmak, star Burt Lancaster, and an outstanding supporting cast are faithful to Hemingway's work, his story only takes up about 15 minutes of screen time. Burt Lancaster plays the doomed man sought by hired guns in a small town. Hemingway's bruisingly concise dialogue makes an early sequence set in a diner quite unnerving, but after the killers dispense with their prey, Siodmak turns to an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) who looks into the reasons behind the murder. An exemplary film noir piece (complete with a fickle femme fatale played by Ava Gardner) The Killers is all mood and fatalism. -Tom Keogh.

Millionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is also a high-stakes thief; his latest caper is an elaborate heist at a Boston bank. Why does he do it? For the same reason he flies gliders, bets on golf strokes and races dune buggies: he needs the thrill to feel alive. Insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway) gets her own thrills by busting crooks, and she's got Crown in her cross hairs. Naturally, these two will get it on, because they have a lot in common: they're not people, they're walking clothes racks. (McQueen looks like he'd rather be in jeans than Crown's natty three-piece suits. ) The Thomas Crown Affair is a catalogue of 60s conventions, from its clipped editing style to its photographic trickery (the inventive Haskell Wexler behind the camera) to its mod design. You can almost sense director Norman Jewison deciding to "tell his story visually," like those newfangled European films; this would explain the long passages of Michel Legrand's lounge jazz ladled over endless montages of the pretty Dunaway and McQueen at play. (The opening-credits song, "Windmills of Your Mind," won an Oscar. ) It's like a "What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?" ad come to life, and much more interesting as a cultural snapshot than a piece of storytelling. -Robert Horton.

Based on the chilling bestseller by Stephen King, Misery was brought to the screen by director Rob Reiner as one of the most effective thrillers of the 1990s. From a brilliant adaptation by screenwriter William Goldman, Reiner turned King's cautionary tale of fame and idolatry into a mainstream masterpiece of escalating suspense, translating King's own experience with obsessive fans into a frightening tale of entrapment and psychotic behaviour. Kathy Bates deservedly won an Academy Award for her performance as Annie Wilkes, an unbalanced devotee of romance novels written by Paul Sheldon (James Caan), whose books provide Annie with a much-needed escape from her pathetic life and her secret, violent past. After Annie rescues the injured Sheldon from a car accident, she seizes the opportunity to nurse her favourite writer back to health, but her tender loving care soon turns to terrorism as she demands that Sheldon write his latest novel according to her wish-fulfilment fantasies. From this point forward, Misery percolates to a boil as equal parts mystery, thriller and cleverly dark comedy, with the helpless author pitched in deadly warfare against his number-one fan. While Bates carefully modulates her role from doting kindness to sympathetic loneliness and finally to horrifying ferocity, Caan is equally superb as the celebrated author who must literally write for his life. It's essentially a two-actor film, but Richard Farnsworth and Lauren Bacall are excellent in supporting roles as they investigate the writer's mysterious disappearance. Frightening, funny and totally irresistible, Misery was such a hit that some of Bates' dialogue entered the popular lexicon (particularly her nagging reference to Caan as "Mister Man"), and its nail-biting thrills remain timelessly intense. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.