Syriana is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it made me feel hopeful -- a rare sensation in a cinema.

It's a deeply honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years.

The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of 60 years passed (a lending library in Boots the chemist! a string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.

It's that breed of verbal swordplay that so impresses on stage while seeming so redundant and brittle on screen.

Steve Martin's script sneers at the vanity of fake LA girls and their plastic surgery. He is in no position to sneer.

Tupac, you can sleep easy. Richard Pryor, watch out.

Eric Bana gives a performance that deserves something more serious than an Oscar. It's a sublimely convincing portrayal of a man who is travelling far from who he is in order to defend who he is.

In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That's a shame, because it's a great film.

Casanova is a silly film. Half Carry On, half Shakespearean comedy, everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a great Twelfth Night.

The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification.