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“... Lovers of the films of Max Ophuls always return to La Ronde (1950). Its intricate, revolving story, visually represented by a highly stylised carousel, is certainly gracefully told. Each character in the film moves on from one partner to another, prostitute to soldier to servant to rich young man to erring wife to worldly husband to midinette to writer to actress to foppish aristocrat and back to the prostitute, and the narrative seems full of wisdom about the shallows of the human heart ...”

“... Money talks, but it doesn’t write all that well, and it can scarcely direct a movie at all. Spider-Man 3, which we are told is the most successful new film release in history, beating even Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and prompting Sony Pictures to offer three more sequels straight off, is more of a mess than you can quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been replaced by weary memories of what the movies used to be like – what the two previous Spider-Man movies were like, I mean ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... We are on the edge of the Moroccan desert. Bleak, low mountains, vast sky. A flight of birds fills the screen, and then is gone. Two boys prepare to take a herd of goats to find what food they can on the hillside, and I think: let’s stay here – although I know we won’t. We don’t. Before long we are in San Diego, California, where a middle-aged Mexican nanny is putting two American children to bed; then in a glittering Japanese city, where a group of deaf-mute girls is ferociously playing volleyball in the school gym ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Whatever else it may be, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (now available on DVD from Artificial Eye) does not resemble the afternoon bill at the old Plaza or the new Cineplex. He first thought of creating a history of cinema in 1978. It would be told, he said, ‘archaeologically and biologically’. In spite of the metaphors, the plan seemed conventional enough: an account of movements and techniques, of changes of ‘cultural terrain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in his crime movies, and no family friendliness as in the Godfather films. No one suffers like Michael Corleone from the anxieties of extreme power (‘If history has taught us anything, it is that we can kill anyone’). Everyone, by implication, still wants to be a gangster, but the wish is insane and not just lawless. Scorsese doesn’t deny or moralise ...”

“... His name modulated into that of a country, but he dreamed of uniting an entire continent. At one point he was president not only of Bolivia but also of what are now Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He has been the subject of much stilted painting, of thousands of pompous statues; the object of endless hagiography and heroic rhetoric. He is the Liberator, in this novel simply called the General until the end of the first chapter, when the full roll-call of his name is solemnly performed: General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios ...”

“... The opposite of time-lapse photography would seem to be slow motion, but there is an alternative: elision. You can lose time or hide it, put it away for two years or nine years, and then invite it back for a visit. Movies (and novels) do this regularly as a matter of narrative efficiency: you cut out the ‘and then and then’ and go straight to the next chosen moment, from the take-off to the landing say, without the details of the long flight ...”

“... Pandora’s Box​, G.W. Pabst’s great silent film from 1929, is a classic portrait of the femme fatale. Or is it? The new print showing at the BFI allows us to think again, and the film now seems rather sceptical about fate, and much devoted to the ideas of chance and greed and obsession. The old story of Pandora’s box, an urn apparently until its Greek turned into Latin, was surely about blaming the ills of the world on the behaviour of a woman, and by extension on all the women who came after her ...”

“... When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ This sturdy piece of advice becomes a refrain in Spike Lee’s new movie, Inside Man, where it is ludicrously literalised by the attempt of a bin Laden nephew to purchase an apartment in Manhattan, and grimly moralised in the story of an American banker who made a fortune by trading with the Nazis, and indeed by trading on the suffering of the Jews ...”

“... Monsieur Hulot​ , with his manic politeness and his endless, baffled curiosity, loped into movies in 1953 in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. He became instantly familiar, although there was a lot we didn’t know about him, like his first name or where he lived, or how he paid for his smart jackets and too short trousers. He bowed a lot and lifted his hat, he walked like a kangaroo trained by Groucho Marx, everything he touched went wrong or wild, like the shed full of fireworks in the movie ...”