DUNKIRK

Only days after its cinema opening it has already become fashionable to knock Christopher Nolan's magnificent "Dunkirk" as if Nolan's past success was tantamount to some kind of blot in his present copybook or did the films naysayers simply expect more? I admit a bit of CGI might have helped the films scale; there seemed to me a paucity of both men and boats but for once scale isn't the raison d'etre for Nolan's film. Clocking in at under two hours and eschewing stars in favour of a handful of decent actors Nolan homes in, not on the epic, but on the small

At the beginning of the film titles tell us that we are actually seeing three different time-spans running concurrently; a week at the Mole, (Dunkirk itself), a day on the sea and an hour in the air and thanks to some brilliant editing we experience events on the beaches, in one small pleasure cruiser and in an air battle simultaneously. This is no "The Longest Day" but something altogether more intimate. If the action sequences are on a relatively small scale for a war picture of this size, the suspense and the fear they generate are epic and Nolan ensures that every dogfight and burning vessel looks damn real. Here is a war film that has a ring of truth to it and I found it deeply moving.

The cast may seem large but by using talented players who can actually act, the characters he concentrates on come vividly to life. Newcomer Fionn Whitehead is excellent as the young soldier we are first introduced to at the beginning of the film and follow through to the very end while Mark Rylance has no trouble stealing every scene he's in as the civilian determined to make it to the beaches and back again. If Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy seem more like guest stars, they too create credible characters with whom we can identify while technically the film cannot be faulted; this is a film that can safely expect a slew of Oscars next year. It's also the film most likely to pick up the coveted Best Picture prize. Nolan has finally proved he is a lot more than the sum of his parts.

TORN CURTAIN

Largely dismissed at the time of its release, "Torn Curtain" is, I feel, one of Alfred Hitchcock's most underrated films. Okay, it's no masterpiece but it is consistently entertaining and has several splendid Hitchcockian set-pieces, (including one particularly gruesome murder and another very suspenseful sequence set once again in a theatre). It's also very nicely played by Paul Newman as a would-be defector and Julie Andrews as his fiancee who unwittingly gets caught up in his schemes and there's an excellent supporting turn from Ludwig Donath as the German professor whose brain contains the secrets Newman is after as well as a terrific cameo from Madame Hortense herself, Lila Kedrova while the Cold War espionage plot harks back to some of Hitch's classic '40's spy pictures. The fine script is by Belfast-born novelist Brian Moore and Hitchcock makes excellent use of his European locations as well as some suitably artificial studio settings.

THE DAMNED

Much maligned at the time of its release, (even by me), Visconti's late, great masterwork on the rise and fall of a German industrial family at the time of the Third Reich is now finally getting the recognition it deserves. It's a cross between "Macbeth" and "Gotterdammerung" with extra incest, paedophilia and homosexuality thrown in just to make sure we get it, that the Nazis were a thoroughly depraved lot. Visconti shot it in English with a huge international cast, many of whom were dubbed, and it is unevenly acted. Dirk Bogarde, never much good when playing 'butch' heterosexuals, is utterly miscast as the outsider being thrust into power by his mistress, (a superb Ingrid Thulin), whose son just happens to be the businesses major shareholder. Helmut Berger plays him as a child-molesting mother's boy, (he finally rapes mother), who likes to dress up as Marlene Dietrich. It is an extraordinary performance in many ways even if it is 'bad' acting. Others involved include Charlotte Rampling, Helmut Griem, (excellent) and Reinhard Kolldehoff.

The film's main centrepiece is The Night of the Long Knives when Ernst Rohm's SA were murdered on Hitler's orders in a bid to consolidate power, (here it's basically The Family doing things their way). Visconti films it as a bloodthirsty orgy, Genet out of Fassbinder, (Fassbinder rated the film as his own personal favourite), and the sequence is certainly a masterclass on how such things should be filmed even when it's a monument to bad taste. This is a hot-house movie with so many 'perversions' that it keeps going over the top but it is also one of the great Nazi films whose very 'campness' works in its favour. Aficionados of Visconti won't want to miss it.

THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID

"The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" wasn't Philip Kaufman's first film but it was the one that put him on the map. It was a revisionist western clearly influenced by "The Wild Bunch" and "Bonnie and Clyde" and dealt with the events that lead to the capture of Cole Younger when the bank raid of the title went disastrously wrong and it starred Cliff Robertson as Younger and Robert Duvall as Jesse James, (he escaped and lived to fight another day). Naturally, realism and violence were the order of the day. Here was a western about outlaws that broke the rules; here was a western with a baseball game in the middle, introduced as America's national sport, though Cole Younger counters that remark by reminding the speaker that shooting was, and always will be, America's national sport.

Kaufman, of course, treats everything, not just 'realistically', but with a good deal of irreverence and a steak of black comedy with the raid itself brilliantly handled. The film certainly marked Kaufman out as one of the brightest of the new kids on the block and he followed it with a handful of brilliantly deverse films that included "The Incredible Lightness of Being" and "The Right Stuff" but he never really had the career one might have expected of him and ended up making only twelve feature films in total.

SABRINA

Billy Wilder in a benign mood but then what other kind of mood could he be in when his title character, "Sabrina" is none other than Audrey Hepburn. She's the chauffeur's daughter in this charming Cinderella tale, who leaves Long Island for Paris where she's to learn cooking, (yes, like me, you may think her chauffeur father a tad extravagant when it comes to his daughter's education), only to return, no longer an ugly duckling, (as if she ever was one in the first place), but a fairytale princess. Her Prince Charming is William Holden but he's slightly tarnished, (he's actually something of a heel), and Audrey has been too busy gazing longingly at him to notice it's his older brother, sweet, old-fashioned Humphrey Bogart, that she really loves.

It's based on a play by Samuel Taylor and Taylor, Wilder and Ernest Lehman did the adaptation and it's very fine. Wilder directs with the lightest of touches and his cast responds accordingly. Hepburn, acting and looking more beautiful than ever, is charm personified, Holden displays a rare comic streak and seems much more comfortable than in many of his dramatic roles while Bogart is the revelation here. Of course, he played comedy before, (and won the Oscar for it in "The African Queen"), but he's so good, (and so relaxed), here it makes you wish he had done comedy more often. A huge hit, the film has  remained a perennial favourite. It was remade with Julia Ormond as Sabrina and Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear in the Bogart/Holden roles. It wasn't a patch on the original.