Casting my mind back to my Observer debut, it occurred to me that, had I been celebrating half a century of writing on films for the paper in 1963, I would have been reflecting on a career begun by reviewing the arrival of Charlie Chaplin and going on to DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But the Observer didn't have a movie critic until the mid-1920s, when the Honourable Ivor Montagu (a peer's son, table tennis champion, lifelong communist, the man who saved Hitchcock's bacon by re-editing The Lodger) joined the paper. He was succeeded in 1928 by the Manchester Guardian's critic, CA Lejeune, who helped create the view widely held in Fleet Street that reviewing films was women's work. Indeed, her first two regular successors were Penelope Gilliatt and Penelope Mortimer who, together with Penelope Houston (then editor of Sight and Sound) led to the belief that you had to be either gay or called Penelope to get a top job reviewing films. Which may explain why 15 years passed before I became the paper's full-time critic.

When I started out there were, at the most, three or four films shown to the press each week. You had, however, to see them in cinemas. Nowadays there are frequently 10 or 11, but most smaller distributors are keen to give you a disc to watch at home. There were more cinemas then, many of them in side streets, delightfully insalubrious and, unlike movie houses today, they all had an individual character. Most showed films in continuous performances so you could come and go whenever you liked, a practice that gave us the expression, "this is where we came in".

Thirty years ago, the majority of us thought that movie critics would soon be following saddlers and harness-makers into oblivion. Luckily that hasn't proved the case in a world where films are more widely available than ever, are taken more seriously and are so well entrenched culturally that we no longer need to describe the products of the 10th muse as the new rock'n'roll. My successors will inherit a profession with a remarkable past and an assured future.

The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino Sunday 4 March 1979

The Deer Hunter is not just a political or a polemical film. As the title suggests there are links with [James] Fenimore Cooper, and its themes and situations take us directly to Hemingway's Great War stories. One recalls Soldier's Home, where an army veteran finds himself incapable of communicating with his old friends, and The Big Two-Hearted River, in which Hemingway's fictional alter ego Nick Adams (one of Cimino's characters is also called Nick) goes on a solitary fishing expedition after he returns traumatised from Europe.

The picture is about that perennial American preoccupation with male friendship, seen as a finer and stronger thing than love between men and women. And it's about that other side of the coin, loneliness, the brooding cosmic solitude Americans have felt ever since they confronted the overpowering vastness of their continent. Unlike [Karel] Reisz's Dog Soldiers, The Deer Hunter deals with an ethnic community largely untouched by the great social currents of the 1960s and is constructed quite deliberately to eliminate discussion of war-aims and the larger issues involved in the Vietnam conflict. This is a grave weakness (some will think it an invalidating one) but it is also what enables Cimino to attain something approaching the tragic grandeur of a popular epic… The Deer Hunter is a rich and powerful picture that without a trace of patronisation or the slightest touch of cultural superiority, speaks eloquently for the inarticulate.

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Louis Malle Sunday 9 October 1988

Malle's subtly detailed movie takes place in occupied France during January 1944, less than six months before D-day, at a school for the sons of wealthy Catholics outside Fontainebleau… When a new boy called Jean Bonnet is introduced into a class of 12-year-olds, he is made the object of practical jokes and bullying despite a special request from the priests that he be treated with kindness. Initially the brightest lad in the class, Julien Quentin, joins in, to ingratiate himself with his fellows and because he recognises in the clever, scholarly Jean an academic rival.

But gradually the two become friends, sharing an interest in music and literature. And Julien discovers that this anxious outsider, posing as a protestant, is in fact Jean Kippelstein, one of three Jewish boys being hidden by the fathers – though precisely what a Jew is he cannot understand…

Eventually, of course, the Gestapo come, tipped off by an informer. The ending is quiet, understated and shattering. Denying us the easy comfort of tears, Malle makes us share a memory that has haunted him for over 40 years, a memory that must have become intensified over the years, as Julien increasingly understands the background from which Jean came, the destination to which he was being sent, and the historical circumstances that made such a tragedy possible. This can never be exorcised.

Au Revoir Les Enfants is not only the best movie on the subject of the Occupation since Malle's own Lacombe Lucien: it is also one of the best pictures ever made about childhood, and the finest French film for several years.

All About My Mother

Pedro Almodóvar Sunday 29 August 1999

From the start of his career in the early 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar has been fascinated by the Spanish obsession with love and death, with his countrymen's taste for histrionics and emotional extremes, and the traditional rigidity of sexual identity… All About My Mother, which brought Almodóvar the best director award at Cannes and should have received the Palme d'Or, is his finest film to date.

This superbly plotted, supremely confident black comedy begins with the senior nurse and single parent, Manuela (Cecilia Roth), watching All About Eve on TV with her handsome son Esteban, on the eve of his 17th birthday. He wants to become a writer and is engaged on a school project called "All About My Mother", for which he wants to hear about the father he's never met and about whom he knows nothing.

This funny, sad and emotionally generous movie is about love, parenthood, friendship and loyalty, about life, art and acting roles, about recreating oneself according to one's dreams, and about what, if anything, is truly natural. All the performances are excellent and the picture is immaculately designed in a manner recalling Douglas Sirk's work at Universal in the Fifties. While the three writers specifically cited – Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Federico García Lorca – are homosexual, this isn't in a narrow, excluding sense a gay picture. Nor, despite the fact that the only two heterosexual males of any consequence are a boy who dies in the first 10 minutes and an old man with Alzheimer's whose dog takes him for walks, is this a women's picture other than in the way it draws on certain Hollywood conventions. The film is, however, dedicated "to every actress who has ever played an actress" and to the director's mother.

Memento

Christopher Nolan Sunday 22 October 2000

Last year, [Christopher Nolan] made an auspicious debut with the zero-budget Following, shot in black-and-white on London streets. He has now written and directed one of the year's most exciting pictures, Memento, which is, like Point Blank, a revenge thriller set in southern California that repays with interest its debts to Alain Resnais. Also like Point Blank, its progress is circular, ending where it begins.

The movie (based on a story by the director's brother, Jonathan Nolan), uses a favourite plot device of postwar Freudian film noir, the hero suffering from amnesia. Hitchcock's Spellbound is perhaps the most celebrated example. But Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), the protagonist of Memento, suffers from a special form of amnesia. Due to a blow received from the man who raped and murdered his wife, Leonard suffers from short-term memory loss. He can recall his life up to the murder, but thereafter he can't remember anything for more than a few minutes at best, though he's painfully aware of his condition.

The photography, editing and production design are of the first rank, belying the film's modest budget, and the performances have a strange intensity. Guy Pearce brings total conviction to Leonard, making an everyman of this bewildered questor.

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke Sunday 15 November 2009

Numerous novelists, dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the first world war to give their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or historical resonance.

Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke uses this historical setting in his masterly The White Ribbon. It isn't, however, until more than two hours into his picture that its timespan is revealed as being from the early summer of 1913 to August the following year.

The neat, north German Protestant village has a timeless quality that, with the absence of motor cars, gas and electricity and the reliance on horse-drawn transport and rather primitive bicycles, suggests a feudal community at any time in the late 19th or early 20th century.

The White Ribbon is a spellbinding movie, as exciting as a thriller, which, indeed, it resembles. Among other things, it's about an unjust social system yoked to a repressive society that is morally and physically disintegrating, though no one's prepared to confront it. The final long-held shot is an unforgettable tableau of the villagers gathered in a small, bare church just after the outbreak of war, a portrait of a nation on the point of history. Luther's A Mighty Fortress Is Our God is being played on the organ, and the camera is viewing the congregation from the position of the altar, as if God himself is observing and interrogating his creations.