James Swanton

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All about Eve

Mankiewicz's astringent screenplay is as great a masterpiece as any play by Wilde; a shimmering cast proves that glamour on screen works best when barbed.

Bride of Frankenstein

The film that synthesises the best elements of Whale's horror filmography: the technical wizardry of The Invisible Man, the deranged comedy of The Old Dark House and Karloff, as spellbinding as he was in Frankenstein. A high point for Hollywood fantasy.

The Innocents

All films are arguably ghost stories – but along with Vampyr, this is the greatest of the supernatural variety. I believe in these ghosts with my whole being.

The Maltese Falcon

Never have I wanted to follow two characters out of a film more than Gutman and Cairo. A strangely beautiful friendship hatched between thoroughly despicable people.

The Night of the Hunter

Laughton's career-length frustrations at cinema's expressive limitations are here redeemed. A journey through the heart of darkness, in which heart and dark have equal weight – just as in Laughton's acting.

Oliver Twist

What finer instance of a classic novel translated into an equally classic film? Lean's Great Expectations was but the warm-up for this greater expressionism.

On the Town

Surging euphoria from start to finish; every bit as glorious as Singin' in the Rain and worthy of recognition for coming first.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

The supreme example of what was at risk of being lost when the talkies arrived. Thank God that Murnau slipped this one under the wire.

Vampyr

The underworld of so many horror films is here transformed into an overworld: light-diffusing, revelatory, transcendent. No on-screen space seems to me more three-dimensional – or less knowable.

Vertigo

Hitchcock embraces romance so harshly that he makes his film bleed: in its coruscating colours, in its penetrating Herrmann score, in its mean-spirited, cruelly inexplicable central tragedy. Overwhelming.