Won't hurt you

True Romance is the best thing that Tarantino has been involved in and....

Tarantino should stay behind the camera.

Chevy Chase was a great comedy actor. the Fletch films are genius.

I'll try and think of more...

Will access enclosed mainframe IT systems almost immediatley on laptops with boot-up times of less than a second (yet they must be crammed full of supercool sabotage software?) and will run a set of scripts to decode the password which will only be handful of characters long. Like 'KRONOS' - all in uppercase, or the name of the mad professors son, JOSHUA. When they should be things like t*23_)webnhY_)9 involving long finger stretches, mistakes and swearing...

Short story adaptations are good - Stand by Me, Shawshank

Novel adaptations are rubbish - everything else

was far better than Nick Hornby's book.

The movie version of Hornby's Fever Pitch was far worse than, well probably pretty much anything!

Directors:
Ridley Scott is close to ruining a once great CV
Tony Scott is only slightly more acceptable than Michael Bay.
Michael Mann is also on a downwards spiral.
Kenneth Branagh is a crap director but a very good actor

Actors:
Gene Hackman never gave a bad performance
Kate Winslet is overrated
So is Nicole Kidman.
Warren Oates was the greatest character actor of all.

Films:
There are no hard men anymore.

can't do English characters very well at all, they either speak like Terry Thomas on one hand or Danny Dyer on the other and think that Dick Van Dyke had it down to a tee.
Even when they get an English actor/actress to play an English character they get it wrong...e.g. Daphne in Frasier, Aidan Gillen in The Wire (Dominic West is the exception).

1. Anything with Powers Boothe in it is worth giving a shot.

2. Anything with Lou Diamond Philips in it is worth giving a miss.

3. When the dialogue features the line "What the fuck...?", you know you're within ten minutes of a slo-mo helicopter explosion.

4. George Lucas is the luckiest man alive.

5. A blonde female character on the run will (a) have to be shown how to use the gun, and (b) break a heel and twist her ankle.

6. A Hispanic female character on the run will (a) be an Uzi-packing badass, (b) wear a sweat-stained boobie-clinging khaki vest, (c) smoke cigars, and (d) die.

7. Pedro Almodóvar is to crafting a narrative structure as Lars van Trier is to nuking an asteroid.

8. The entrance to the Extreme Sex Club That's Like Totally Secret, besides being bathed in red light, is marshalled by a Siouxsie-Sioux-with-implants greeter, with backup from a seven-foot-tall black bouncer. With a shaved head. In a tuxedo. Who's gay.

9. Any film flagged on the poster as "a film by" will be far inferior to anything by the same director with only a "directed by" credit in small letters.

10. If Steve Buscemi smokes, he'll die.

When Harry Met Sally is the best film ever.
It just is.
It's funny and it's romantic; and that's all that really matters.

Pulp Fiction is hollow nonsense: a better example of style over substance you will not find.
Speaking of which, True Romance is terrible.

None of the Star Wars films is actually that good.

Robert DeNiro's greatest performance is in The King Of Comedy.

The most depressing performances in The Godfather Part III come from those who have bags of talent, but are inexplicably awful in the film: Diane Keaton, Joe Mantegna and Eli Wallach.

Martin Scorsese's most emotionally potent film is The Age Of Innocence.

Woody Allen's best film is Crimes And Misdemeanors.

Russell Crowe is sometimes really good.

Love Actually is indefensible on every single level.

make them like they used to do they?

The best cinema mixes art and commerce. The moment you lean too far towards one or the other interest fades.

75% of Westerns have the same story. Man wonders into town. Man meets trouble and girl. Man sorts out trouble and leaves girl because a man’s gotta do, etc. (This is a good thing.)

The Pixar films represent the most consistent run of filmmaking in the history of cinema.

The Disney Princesses branding is at once the greatest and most cynical piece of marketing in the history of just about anything.

Actors never have anything interesting to say about their films.

Independent movies are often every bit as bad as anything churned out by Hollywood.

Clint Eastwood is the last of the Hollywood greats.

99% of the time CGI is just laziness.

David Lean in black and white is better than David Lean in colour.

Michael Powell in any colour is better than David Lean in black and white.

Absolutely. Brief Encounter over Lawrence Of Arabia; Great Expectations over Dr. Zhivago.

Nicholas Cage
Nicole Kidman
Anyone from Friends (except maybe Courtney Cox)
Cuba Gooding Jr
Sadie Frost
MacKenzie Crook

humourless man and all of his films are boring. Heat is the exception but it's overrated and could have been a lot more entertaining. His original 90 minute TV movie version LA Takedown is better. All of his films would be better if directed by someone else.

The Boat That Rocks is a weirder film than anything David Lynch or Bunel ever even imagined filming. It is the work of a madman. I'm not kidding. Curtis is living in an insane world if he thinks that film reflects real life in anyway.

Tim Burton is a pretty poor director and most of his films are plodding insubstantial messes. Just because he has a Goth sensibility doesn't mean he's good.

The first Star Wars out Kubrick's Stanley Kubrick and out Scott's Ridley Scott's abilities to imagine another world.

Chinatown is the best directed movie ever. "Meticulous but unfussy", I believe critic David Thompson said about it.

Nicole Kidman is incapable of playing anyone on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

that there are no hard men anymore. Ethan Hawke said something along the lines of...

'It makes me laugh whenever an actor is described as a man's man. Whatever he's doing on screen, he just got up out of a make-up chair.'

...Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films

...Terry-Thomas

...1960s kitchen sink dramas set in the north.

...Last Orders

And I reckon:

The Railway Children is the biggest weepie

Robin Williams should never cry in films

Memento has the most original plot

You can't go wrong with a Coen Brothers film (apart from The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty)

The award for 'Luvviest' Actor In A Scary Role goes to Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place and/or Brighton Rock

doesn't direct films, he directs scenes.
Jim Carrey is even more annoying than Ricky Gervais.
Will Smith is even more irritating than the aforementioned.
Carry on films virtually ended the British film industry.
Stanley Kubrick is hugely overrated.
Citizen Kane is not the greatest film ever made.

is a great actor who deserves to have been in better movies.

Unless it's CGI.

Many films I have loved now seem all the poorer since giving up herbal substances.

Quentin Tarantino, I suspect, really needs to give up herbal substances. It may do his critical faculties some good.

It is the fault of the movie industry that I have only seen one of this years Oscar nominations for best film, not me.

Viggo Mortenson is starting to look like one of the best actors of his generation. But boy is he annoying in interviews.

TV programmes like The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc should be worrying film execs more than they appear to be.

Any film that has a trailer that halfway through has voiceover guy saying '...but then things got better.." cue James brown yelp and then 'I feel good' should be avoided at all costs

Sorry but Denzel or Russell Crowe or Michael Douglas in the 80's = Good 'man' film

Battle of Algiers deserves its reputation and is unlike any other film

Stephen Spielberg has not directed a bad film

Every Star Wars film has something good in it

James Bond films are just not nearly as good as we would hope them to be - in most cases the plots are lazy dull and repetitive

I still get excited by the thought of a new James Bond film

Its worth putting up with bad CGI in order to have the benefit of good CGI

Anything in film sounds more profound when said in French.

Any location - even a prison hell-hole - looks cooler in a French movie.

And American films set in London must contain one, or indeed all, of the following in an establishing shot:

Big Ben
Tower Bridge
Houses of Parliament
Mini
London Taxi
Bowler-hatted gents

Just to make sure we all know where we are.

Finally, if anything bad happens to an airliner in a Holllywood action film the airline will be a made up non-American one (cf Die Hard 2 for the best example of this).

The bigger the budget the less plausible the 'scientists' will be - think Kelly McGillis in Top Gun vs Colin Pillinger.

shouldn´t be allowed anywhere near a comedy

I think DeNiro is very, very funny in Meet The Parents.

2. Jodie Foster has the sexiest accent I've ever heard. (in Silence of the Lambs- not sure if's her actual one or not?)

3. Will Smith is a good actor.

4. A film that lasts longer than two and a half hours is not worth watching.

5. There has never been a film franchise (e.g Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Godfather) that doesn't contain at least one terrible film.

6. 'My Girl' is the best thing Dan Akyroyd has been involved in.

...Mrs Incredible from the Incredibles, but I can't help it. I think it's the accent.

Star Wars was great when I was 7, now it's a clunking pile of bad actors hamstrung by bad dialogue.

Sean Connery always plays Sean Connery and he's rubbish

Michael Caine always plays Michael Caine and he's ace.

Beware of any film advertised by a trailer dubbed by that deep-voiced guy.

Beware of any film whose trailer starts "Imagine a wuurrrld..."

Disney can no longer find the plot. They've lost it.

James Cameron's best movie was "The Abyss"

Sylvester Stallone should quit. His "Rocky" series is getting dangerously close to the parody poster in Airplane II

Tom and Jerry from the 40s are insanely violent.

You can't go wrong with a 60-70s war movie.

Shot for shot films based on comic books don't work. I'm looking at you Sin City and Watchmen.

The X-Men look pretty silly "in real life". Spiderman looked OK, though.

1. The small talk that peppers our lives must not be in a film.
2. Meetings with lawyers, businessmen etc will take about 30 seconds.
3. If a well-known actor appears briefly early on as, say, a mild-mannered librarian, then he/she will be deeply involved later.
4. Never say goodbye at the end of phone call - just hang up.
5. A cop following a sudden "hunch" will spontaneously leave and his hapless partner will lag behind saying "where are you going...?".
6. Monetary transactions with barmen, taxi drivers, hot dog sellers etc must be done without talking to them.
7. A knocked door must be broken down by a shoulder charge after waiting about one second.
8. Apartments in New York must not be well-lit.
9. No-one is to argue about whose round it is.

or at least the last reel.

Honourable exception - 'Live And Die In LA'. (Spoiler alert if such a thing can happen on a 25 year old movie). When this came out I had no idea who any of the actors were (Willem Defoe, William Peterson), and just as I was getting used to the main good guy getting all the screen time and building the empathy, BAM, he gets topped. One of the most surprising, shocking and refreshing things I've ever seen strangely enough.

Any women that is seen *really* enjoying sex in an American film will be killed off.

Any film advertised with the words, "In the tradition of..." will be crap. This goes double if the sentence ends with "Alfred Hitchcock."

Fathers are rarely evil in American films. Watch the step-fathers, though.

The expression "things aren't as good as they used to be" is rarely true. In films however, it's tragically accurate.

Star Wars is undoubtedly crap. But people who take it (and the mythos) seriously are the real concern.

Films based on TV shows should be avoided.
Modern remakes of classics should be avoided. Modern remakes of films that weren't that good in the first place should be incinerated.

Martin Scorsese is the best living American director. He's past his best but still always worth watching. This is depressing. (Caveat: Coen Brothers.)

Any crap actor that inexplicably puts in a good performance will be unlikely to follow it up with another.

The taste of the public in the first week of a film's release should not be trusted.

The Oscars are nothing but a marketing exercise and always have been.

No-one ever has acne in a Hollywood film.

This list was depressingly easy to put together.

as by its very nature it is a collaborative business.

and Sophia Loren the most beautiful.

were funnier than Charlie Chaplin

Bill Forsyth makes films that you like - "Comfort and Joy", and especially "Gregory's Girl". I defy anyone with a soul to watch them and not at least generate a feeling of warmth.

"Local Hero" is quirky brilliance.

Shane is the greatest western of all time.

The Ladykillers is the best of the Ealing comedies.

Michael Powell was the greatest British Film director of the 20th century.

James Stewart was the best Hitchcock leading man.

John Wayne didn't really need to act, only to move in front of the camera.

There has never been a truly realistic sex scene in a movie.

Richard Gere was a bad actor.

When the plot involves catching a news item on TV, when the item has finished the actor or actress always switches off the TV. No one does that in real life.

Movie actresses were generally more beautiful in the 40s and 50s than they are now.

The novel is usually better than the movie version.

The 1970s was the golden age of cop and heist thrillers.

At some stage in their lives most men have hit the pause or slow play button during the leg crossing scene in Basic Instinct.

Akira Kurosawa/Orson Welles as the greatest film directors of all time have never, and will never have a girlfriend/boyfriend.

no film longer than 3 hours is worth watching
no 'method' actors are any good
any film school that needs a manifesto is hiding behind rhetoric
any books that are 'unfilmable' are unfilmable
guy ritchie is actually a good director
steven soderbergh isn't
the coen brothers best film was blood simple and its been downhill since
french films are not arty just because they don't make sense
the best film ever made is jaws
any british actor given a title isn't worth a fuck
ken loach is a lot more sneery than mike leigh
the last golden age of film was the 90s
apocalypse now is the most right wing film since birth of a nation
any film with flashback sequences are shite
gary oldman is possibly the worst actor ever but nil by mouth is the best british film of the past 25 years
robert carlyle has never made a good film
the first hour of stir crazy is the funniest hour of comedy in film history
the rest of stir crazy is about as funny as schindlers list
schindlers list would've been better as a musical
all musicals are shite

"... there's no such thing as a really bad Michael Caine film."

You've obviously never seen 'The Hand.'

is terrible.

Any film with Jeff Bridges in it is worth a look.

Hollywood remakes of European films are always awful.

Baz Luhrmann hasn't made a good movie since 'Strictly Ballroom.'

Directors get too much credit.

Editors are the great unsung talents of the film world.

I haven't seen There Will Be Blood, but I have a very strong conviction that I'd hate it, given that Magnolia was sheer torture - in fact I don't know to this day how I managed to stay to the end. I agree about Jeff Bridges, for the most part. However, see your third truism: JB was the villain in the soul-suckingly abysmal Hollywood remake of The Vanishing, and went down with the ship, no one was saved.

Baz Luhrman? I enjoyed Romeo and Juliet too, though even then there were hints of the hubris and self-aggrandisement to come. Moulin Rouge was the first film I ever walked out of. And Australia looked too scary to go near.

Where would Martin Scorcese be without Thelma Shoonmaker? In fairness, he has always given her a lot of credit for the feel and snap of his films.

on The Vanishing.

produced the best films ever made.

Yes, the era of independents of the early 70s - Coppola, Scorsese, Casavetes et al - made some iconic and powerful films - and, of course, sex and violence became intrinsic and explicit - but nothing that matched the sophistication, ingenuity and wit of a "Double Indemnity" or a "Gilda" or a "White Heat".