“... Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels everywhere, and the first of no doubt many movies based on the series opened at the end of last year.* But vampires haven’t really been away. From Dracula to Buffy they have sustained an extraordinary attendance record among human communities, have never stopped being almost everyone’s favourite form of the undead ...”

“... David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. As long as it stays with the details of its tale – the faces, the clothes, the dialogue, the rooms, the parties, the sleek restaurants – the movie seems both restrained and sure-footed, willing to leave the thinking and the conclusions to us ...”

“... Once​ upon a time there was a place called Europe. All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference. They were very rich and they had terrific furniture ...”

“... Many critics and viewers have felt that Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s best film since Match Point. The accompanying implication is that the intervening works – seven movies, starting with Scoop and ending at To Rome with Love – are just international chaff, too lightweight to get interested in. If you think, as I do, that such a judgment confuses solemnity with seriousness, that Match Point represents one of the worst dips in Allen’s career, and that the later films were often funny and showed at least flickers of artistic life, you have a bit of explaining to do ...”

“... On screen​ , Katharine Hepburn looks as if she has made a curious contract with time. She has promised not to change, and time has promised not to count properly. Of course time can’t halt entirely. It’s a long long way from May to December, as the song says, or from Bill of Divorcement (1932) to Love Affair (1994), and you can see much of the road in the current season of Hepburn films at the BFI ...”

“... There​ is a difference between being slow and being sluggish, although it’s not easy to define. Perhaps we’re sluggish if we’re failing to make progress. If we’re slow, there may not be any progress to make. In a slow movie, we can pay attention to the scenery, the outfits, the accents and think about what’s in the corner of the frame. We can remember there used to be something called a Princess phone, even if the name doesn’t come to us straightaway when we see a private detective using it all the time, making it his best supporting actor ...”

“... In​ a memo about Touch of Evil, Orson Welles asked Universal Studios to pay attention to the ‘brief visual pattern’ he had drawn, suggesting improvements for the film. This was probably the last sort of help they needed. They wanted a beefy blockbuster and here he was talking about a sliver of art. The studio had added scenes to his work, re-edited others ...”

“... Jean-Luc Godard​ ’s Le Mépris has many admirers, and a restored print of it gets star billing in the BFI’s current season devoted to the director. Certainly it offers some fine quirky moments and angles, but it seems too distracted and awkward to count among Godard’s best films. He is too far away from his movie home. But then he was the one who chose to wander ...”

“... The places​ were Philadelphia and New York, the names were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans and a few others, heirs to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, spoken of with awe in every version of the story. Something called West Coast jazz, thought by many to be an oxymoron, was making itself heard in the persons of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne and Dave Brubeck ...”

“... Billy Wilder’s​  Some Like It Hot, now showing in a new print at the BFI, was based on a German film called Fanfares of Love, first made in French in 1935 and then remade in 1951. Wilder, in 1959, was thinking mainly of the original, which he said was ‘deliriously bad’. Coming from him this was a compliment rather than a complaint, and he certainly found in the old work the basic premise of the new one: two male musicians join an all-woman band ...”

“... There is a tradition of dictator jokes in Latin America (‘What time is it?’ ‘Whatever time you say, General’), and there is even a genre known as the dictator novel, of which Autumn of the Patriarch is no doubt the most famous instance. When it was learned that the remains of Carlos Fuentes, who died last month, were to be taken to Montparnasse Cemetery, observers were not slow to note that Porfirio Díaz, the last Mexican despot – well, the last pre-revolutionary despot – is also buried there ...”

“... People weren’t walking out in droves from the suburban cinema in which we saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master because there weren’t droves there: just perhaps eight or nine people. But they did all walk out, in a slow trickle that started about halfway through the film. Staying there made us feel like loyalists in a lost cause – the future of film perhaps – but I’m not sure we were less bewildered or even less bored than those who had left ...”

“... Age cannot wither her, but it doesn’t improve her much either. Not when she is Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. Age seems simply to have left her alone, as it often does with movie actors. But then the chance of time travel is very real, especially since a restored print of the film is now showing at various cinemas around the country. The trip doesn’t have to be nostalgic ...”

“... The​ camera proceeds down a corridor in a nursing home. It isn’t in a hurry but it is looking for someone. It veers slightly to the right towards an alcove, decides it doesn’t need to go there, and continues straight ahead. It turns left into a larger room and moves more confidently towards an old man in a wheelchair, seen from the back. The camera circles round him and pauses in the air close to his face – too close for any plausible human view ...”

“... It wouldn’t work without Toshiro Mifune. In this role he remains perfectly Japanese but also manages to look like a mixture of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper – the sly, amused Gable of screwball comedy and the weathered Cooper of the Western. And then he looks a little like, actually prefigures, someone else, whom I’ll get to in a minute. Mifune sometimes ambles, sometimes strides, scratches himself, shrugs one shoulder ...”