Parky at the Pictures (DVD 22/12/2011)

Television programmes have also been excluded, in spite of the fact such an adjudication banishes such old favourites as Upstairs, Downstairs and Colditz. And pictures released in cinemas in 2011 have also been omitted, as their chance to shine should come in the theatrical review rather than here.

Thus, this eclectic selection is mostly comprised of durable oldies, although there are a couple of more recent releases and one delicious discovery that only goes to show that even someone who spends such ridiculous amounts of time watching flickering shadows can still discover something to surprise and restore their faith in the face of the terrifying amount of dross that hits cinema, television and computer screens each year.

10) NINETY DEGREES IN THE SHADE The mood is instantly established by the dingy Prague interiors created at Barrandov Studios by Bohuslav Kulic and Vera Líznerová for Jirí Weiss's stark allegory, Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965). Scripted by David Mercer from a story by Weiss and Jirí Mucha, this British-backed production feels like the kind of television drama that was then being showcased in programmes like The Wednesday Play. Yet it also has much in common with such early Milos Forman pictures as Peter and Pavla (1964) and A Blonde in Love (1965), which confirmed the connection between the Czech New Wave and Free Cinema, which had been so crucial to the emergence of social realism in Britain at the end of the 1950s.

At the centre of the story is Anne Heywood, who works in an off-licence managed by married lover James Booth. She likes to spend her lunch hours on the banks of the Vltava River and is mortified to return to the shop one day to find government inspectors Donald Wolfit and Rudolf Hrusínský about to do a stock take, as she has been helping Booth sell whisky on the black market and fill the storeroom bottles with cold tea. Managing to stall the visitors, she succeeds in postponing the check until the morning and returns with Booth after hours to break in through the back door and remove the adulterated bottles. However, their efforts to purchase replacements as dusk descends upon the city proves more troublesome and the strain on their already fractious relationship soon begins to show.

For all his menace, Hrusínský also has an unhappy home life, with wife Ann Todd considering him a lackey of the state she despise, while teenage son Ladislav Potmesil constantly rebels against his creaking authority. Yet when he discovers the deception at the off-licence and witnesses Booth's willingness to let Heywood take the blame, Hrusínský finds himself torn between doing his duty and siding with the persecuted.

Shooting mostly in close-ups to emphasise the oppressive sense of constant surveillance and suspicion, Weiss adopts a stylised realism that he had first employed while making documentaries in Britain during the war. But he never solves the problem of integrating Heywood, Booth, Todd and Wolfit into a Czech cast and, consequently, the performances are distractingly uneven. Nevertheless, this offers a fascinating insight into life in the capital on the eve of the Prague Spring and suggests that Heywood (who will be 80 in December) was capable of being a fine actress under the guidance of a director who was prepared to see her as more than a former beauty queen.

9) THE MOON OVER THE ALLEY William Dumaresq's dialogue and lyrics for the singular Notting Hill musical The Moon Over the Alley (1976) perfectly suit the mood of heightened realism that is established by vagrants Doris Fishwick and Peter Farrell, as they observe the moon's portents while settling down to sleep in the alley behind German émigré Erna May's rooming house. The area has been earmarked for demolition by the council, but director Joseph Despins is quick to point out that the erection of yet another soulless high-rise will destroy the sense of multi-cultural community that exists so contentedly around the Portobello Road.

Endlessly mangling her words, May scolds husband John Gay and teenage son Patrick Murray and constantly chivvies her tenants for the rent. But there's indulgence in her mother-henning, even though she is viewed with suspicion by newsagent Norman Mitchell's shrewish wife, Joan Geary, who heartily disapproves of Murray seeing her daughter, Lesley Roach. However, they somehow manage to sneak out together and snuggle happily in a near-empty cinema to watch Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here (1965), a fantasy about the Nazi occupation of Britain that is scarcely the ideal date movie.

Irish lodger Sean Caffrey also gives May a wide berth, but that's because he is always broke, even though he is about to start a second job at the post office to supplement his meagre earnings from the local pub. He hopes to marry Vari Sylvester, who has been his girl for 18 years. But he's appalled to discover that she has been working in a Soho strip joint to make the big bucks that could finally allow them to wed.

Caffrey has just been joined at the Warwick Castle by Jamaican Leroy Hyde, who has also moved into May's townhouse with wife Sharon Forester and their baby. She sings lullabies with the radio and invites Murray and new Californian resident Bill Williams for coffee and a discussion of the latter's ambition to become a pop star. But not everyone is so accepting and Hyde, Forester and two of their friends are bundled into the back of a paddy wagon during a white, liberal demonstration against a supermarket that suddenly turns tense. Luckily, Williams finds the infant in its pram and brings it home and everyone laughs about the incident rather than fulminating against the police's institutionalised racism.

Indeed, instead of arresting innocent bystanders and dope-smoking buskers, the local coppers would do well to keep an eye on 10 year-old Debbie Evans, who waits outside the pub until closing time while blowsy mother Ginny Lewis gets sloshed and picks up her latest sleeping companion. Street musician Miguel Sergides takes pity on Evans and teaches her a song. But she continues to be stalked by elderly loner Basil Clarke, whose penchant for offering her sweets and following her home finally attracts the attention of a gang of likely lads (although it's never made entirely clear whether Clarke is a paedophile, a disenfranchised grandfather or just a concerned citizen).

The sudden eruption of violence against Clarke and then Murray and Roach (after they're ambushed during a backstreet smooching session) lets reality come rushing into this unlikely neverland, where the rhythms of life prompt virtually everyone to break into song. But Despins never sentimentalises the situation and just about keeps cliché and caricature at bay by channelling them into McDermott and Dumaresq's songs, which draw on pop, gospel, reggae, folk and show tune traditions to comment on the passing scene and provide insights into lives of naive hope and anguished disappointment.

The majority of the numbers are neatly integrated into the narrative. But those performed in the Warwick and the Meard Street club sit more awkwardly, although Sylvester's buttock-flashing routine is a splendid pastiche of the sort of saucy ditty presented in Soho cabarets. However, each song is sung with a sincerity that is reinforced by Peter Hannan's affectionate monochrome photography and the benevolent direction of Despins, whose bold bid to impart a Brechtian spin on a Gracie Fields-style musical on the eve of the punk revolution deserves to be much better known.

8) CITY GIRL Adapted from Elliott Lester's 1925 play, The Mud Turtle, City Girl (1930) was the last dramatic feature made by the master German director FW Murnau. He had hoped to call it Our Daily Bread and shoot it silently, in defiance of the talkie vogue that was then sweeping Hollywood. However, when William Fox, his champion at the Fox Film Corporation, was seriously injured in a car crash, the executives occupying the front office removed Murnau from the project and handed it to AF `Buddy' Erickson for completion. He filmed the finale and the comic interludes that punctuate the action. Ironically, however, the sound version he signed off was subsequently lost and it is the silent that has now been released on DVD.

Wheat farmer David Torrence has grave misgivings about letting naive son Charles Farrell travel to Chicago to sell his annual crop. He issues strict instructions on getting the best price and warns him about the perils of urban immorality. Heeding his father's words, Farrell ignores the flirtatious attentions of fellow train passenger Helen Lynch. But he is so overwhelmed by the pace of life in the Windy City and ashamed of being duped into underselling his wares that he gratefully accepts the kindness of diner waitress Mary Duncan.

She hates her job and being cooped in a single-room apartment in a seedy part of town. So, she accepts his marriage proposal and they head back to Blair, Minnesota and the awaiting Torrence's fury that his son has failed him. Mother Edith Yorke and sister Anne Shirley try to make Duncan feel welcome. But her father-in-law is convinced she is a gold-digger and he repeatedly rejects her attempts to please him and seizes every opportunity to question her character.

He finally succeeds in driving a wedge between the newlyweds during a hailstorm that requires the entire workforce to toil through the night in order to save the harvest. When foreman Richard Alexander damages his hand in the threshing machine, he makes a clumsy play for Duncan as she treats him and Torrence draws Farrell's attention to her struggle. Convinced Farrell is indifferent towards her, Duncan declares her intention to leave. But Alexander insists he will call the workers out on strike unless she becomes his mistress. As chaos descends, a fight breaks out between Farrell and Alexander and Torrence loads his gun in a bid to restore order.

The consequence of this gunshot will not surprise those familiar with the workings of American screen melodrama. But this incident also connects City Girl to the other pastoral masterpiece of 1930, Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth, which used its steppe setting to promote agricultural reform rather than simply entertain. Moreover, the romantic triangle links the picture to Murnau's Hollywood debut, Sunrise (1927), in which farmer George O'Brien was led astray from devoted wife Janet Gaynor by city temptress Margaret Livingston.

Indeed, Murnau again makes evocative use of Edgar G. Ulmer's production design, Ernest Palmer's lustrous cinematography and Katherine Hilliker's seamless editing to convey the contrasts between the metropolitan bustle, the joy experienced by Farrell and Duncan as they run through the fields and the desperate urgency of the nocturnal crop gathering. Set on producing a country equivalent of the `city symphonies' that were then attracting critical acclaim, Murnau called the film `a symphony of wheat'. But, while the visual technique was conspicuously audacious - as Murnau sought to expose the inertia of talkies that required actors to group around concealed microphones whose sensitivity precluded camera movement - the narrative is as conservative as anything made by DW Griffith in the previous two decades.

Yet there is something charming about the use of the mechanical caged bird to symbolise Duncan's entrapment and Torrence and Shirley's contrasting attitudes to urban modernity. The performances are equally engaging, even though Murnau was reportedly unhappy at having to reunite with Duncan (the star of his now-lost 1928 drama, 4 Devils) instead of teaming Farrell with his regular partner, Janet Gaynor. But what is most compelling here is the eloquence of the silence and the effortless combination of realism and poetry that has only since been matched in American bucolic cinema by Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven (1978).

As theoretical debate about the expressive use of sound intensified, Murnau was killed in a road accident the following year at the age of just 42. It would have been fascinating to see whether the man who had achieved such visual purity would have eventually reconciled himself to talking pictures. But one suspects he would have become as adept at using speech, effects and music as he was shadow, nuance and silence.

7) COME AND SEE Produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985) is a harrowing recreation of an actual event that occurred in Byelorussia during the Second World War. An undisputed masterpiece, it proved to be the last film Klimov directed, as he reportedly had nothing else he wished to say on screen once he had concluded a seven-year struggle to persuade executives at Goskino to show the full horror of what ordinary citizens had endured at the hands of not just the SS, but also the supposedly more chivalrous Wehrmacht.

In 1943, 11 year-old Aleksey Kravchenko goes searching for a rifle with his friend so they can join the partisans fighting the occupying German army. The next day, local commander Liubomiras Lauciavicius comes to recruit Kravchenko, whose mother is distraught that she and her daughters will be defenceless without a male to protect them. But the boy is left behind in camp when the unit goes on patrol and he finds himself having to console the frightened Olga Mironova after a parachute assault on the forest leaves the resistance scattered and Kravchenko deaf from the cacophony of gunfire and explosions.

Once he is convinced the enemy has gone, Kravchenko takes Mironova home, only to find the cottage deserted. Flies are buzzing everywhere, but the oven is still warm and the pair tuck into the food they find inside. But, as they head off to the island where Kravchenko is sure his family is hiding, Mironova turns to see a stack of naked corpses piled against a wall. The lad becomes hysterical, but they still manage to cross the swamp and find shelter on the island with Vladas Bagdonas, who convinces Kravchenko that his mother and sisters have perished by showing him some of the survivors of the brutal Nazi assault.

Bagdonas takes a shine to Kravchenko and takes him on a mission to liberate supplies from a German food store. The boy narrowly escapes death when he accidentally strays into a minefield and when Bagdonas is gunned down after stealing a cow. But Kravchenko is taken in by a sympathetic farmer, who accompanies him to the nearby village of Perekhody to obtain some forged identity papers. However, a commando unit encircles the settlement and locks the entire population in the small wooden church. The sneering commander offers freedom to anyone willing to climb out of the window and Kravchenko accepts the challenge. But a mother trying to save her child is led away to be gang-raped and her infant tossed back into the building before it is torched by troops who congratulate each other on a job well done and even take souvenir photographs of the blaze.

Horrified by what he has seen, Kravchenko goes to retrieve his rifle and finds a can of petrol, which he offers to the head of the partisan brigade that has captured the Germans responsible for the Perekhody atrocity and the local collaborators who assisted them. The commander pleads that he is a decent man who was carried away by the exigencies of combat. But his deputy sneers at his pusillanimity and refuses to show his fear as he and his fellow prisoners are doused in petrol. However, the onlookers prefer to shoot the captives rather than let them share the fate of their lost neighbours and Kravchenko again stands by in grim amazement.

As he walks away, however, he sees a portrait of Hitler lying in a puddle. He shoots the picture and Klimov presents a series of montages reversing back through the Führer's life and, at each break, Kravchenko fires another bullet into the frame. But he desists on seeing an image of Hitler as a baby in his mother's arms, thus proving the mocking German's earlier contention that children should be the first killed in any genocide, as they are the trouble of the future.

Ending with Kravchenko disappearing into the distance with his comrades, this shocking reconstruction leaves viewers with the indelible impression of the physical toll that the youth's rite of passage has taken on his once innocently trusting face. Klimov achieved the transformation by restricting Kravchenko's food intake during the nine-month shoot and by working him long hours and even subjecting him to live ammunition during certain key sequences. Few will condone such extreme tactics, but there is no denying the power and potency of the debutant's performance. Klimov could also be accused of embellishing the war crimes for dramatic effect and the same baroque intensity informs Oleg Yanchenko's score. But how else could anyone be persuaded of the savagery of the acts perpetrated by supposedly civilised men and Klimov employs Aleksei Rodionov's unflinching cinematography, Viktor Mors's nightmare-inducing sound design and Valeriya Belova's relentless editing to force the audience to witness humanity at its most barbaric.

6) AN ORDINARY EXECUTION Marc Dugain puts a totalitarian slant on the use and abuse of power in An Ordinary Execution, which he has adapted from the first part of his own bestselling novel about recent Russian history. Loweringly photographed by Yves Angelo in sombre browns and blacks, this is a chilling supposition set in the last days of Joseph Stalin's tyrannical regime that has a terrible ring of authenticity. Yet, for all its austerity, credible conspiracy theories and sense of shrouding suspicion, this is just a touch self-satisfied in its academicism and its allusions to both Raputin and Vladimir Putin.

Doctor Marina Hands has incurred the wrath of her colleagues at a Moscow hospital for her ability to heal patients by unconventional means. Indeed, only the protection of director Tom Novembre has prevented lustful rival Alain Stern's report on her activities from being sent to the authorities. Even at home, she is under the constant watch of concierge Denis Podalydès, who informs her that her noisy attempts to get pregnant with civil servant husband Edouard Baer have been upsetting the neighbours. However, such everyday prejudice and snooping come to seem petty after Hands is summoned to the Kremlin to ease the suffering of the dictator (André Dussollier), who has recently purged his personal physician for participating in a Zionist plot.

Initially sure she was being taken to the Lubyanka - the headquarters of the NKVD controlled by the sinister Lavrenty Beria (Gilles Gaston-Dreyfus) - Hands is somewhat surprised to be ushered into Dussollier's inner sanctum, where he menacingly reassures her that she has nothing to fear providing she relieves his aches and pains and tells nobody about her mission. Indeed, to that end, he suggests that she divorces Baer, because she cannot possibly be loyal to him while married to another. Speaking in measured tones that fleetingly reveal the man of steel beneath the world-weary affability, Dussollier is pleased with the mystical magnetism of Hands's ministrations and he promises to call her again soon.

Deeply disturbed by both Dussollier's paranoia and the peril in which she now finds herself, Hands returns to her humble apartment and informs Baer that she has taken a lover and wants a divorce. He is crushed, but seems to sense that she is trying to protect him. However, both Baer and her mother (Anne Benoît) and uncle (Gilles Ségal) soon wind up in custody to ensure Hands's continued co-operation, as she treats Dussollier in both the Kremlin and his Georgian dacha. During their meetings, he reminisces about his handling of Hitler, Roosevelt and Truman and justifies the brutal methods he employed to drag his peasant nation into the modern era.

Hands largely remains silent for fear of provoking a rage that will condemn her family. Then, one night in March 1953, she notices a paper on Dussollier's desk denouncing her as a foreign agent. But, it turns out not to be her death warrant.

Making exceptional use of Yves Fournier's forbidding interiors, Dugain and Angelo create a claustrophobic, mausoleum-like atmosphere that increases the tension of Hands's excruciating consultations with the intimidating Dussollier. The performances couldn't be better, with Hands ever watchful for a shift in her patient's mood and Dussollier tempering his vulnerable avuncularity with controlled flashes of cynical cruelty. The sequence in which he torments Hands with details of Baer's torture is particularly disturbing. But the silences Hands endures as Dussollier sleeps on a sofa after each treatment are equally effective in conveying both her dread and the aura of uncertainty that pervades the entire picture.

5) THE NARROW MARGIN Having teamed on Armored Car Robbery (1950), Charles McGraw would reunite with director Richard Fleischer for the even more accomplished noir, The Narrow Margin (1951), a fiendishly twisting noir that takes place largely within the confines of a train bound from Chicago to Los Angeles. Filmed in just 15 days, this was one of the most profitable B movies ever produced by RKO. Moreover, it's infinitely more exciting than Peter Hyams's 1990 remake, which tinkered with the storyline and lost much of its intensity by opening out the action.

LAPD detectives Charles McGraw and Don Beddoe don't expect an easy ride when they're detailed to escort gangster's widow Marie Windsor to a grand jury hearing so she can reveal her husband's pay-off list. But when Beddoe is picked off at Windsor's hideout, McGraw realises the extent of a task that is only made marginally easier by the fact that hitmen Peter Virgo and David Clarke have no idea what their target looks like. Hiding Windsor in his compartment, McGraw scours the train for his pursuers and, in the process, befriends Jacqueline White and her young son, Gordon Gebert. However, his suspicions are aroused by fellow passengers Paul Maxey and Peter Brocco, especially when the latter attempts to bribe him to surrender Windsor.

With telegram messages and unexpected disclosures further complicating McGraw's mission, this is a gripping thriller that should have earned screenwriter Earl Felton the Oscar nomination that went to Jack Leonard and Martin Goldsmith, who penned the unpublished story on which the scenario was based. Fleischer and cinematographer George E. Diskant also merited recognition for their evocative use of the train's tight spaces and reflective surfaces.

The performances are also first rate, with McGraw making a bullet-headed hero and Windsor typically excelling as the hard-boiled brunette who isn't as tough as she seems. However, this wouldn't be the minor classic it is without the contribution of Clem Portman and Francis Sarver, whose sound mix of clacking wheels, creaking rolling stock and wailing whistles is so atmospheric that Fleischer didn't feel the need to commission a score.

4) THE HALFWAY HOUSE The Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti served as associate producer alongside MacPhail and Morgan on the same studio's The Halfway House (1944), a heart-rending tale of second chances that must have seemed incredibly poignant to audiences fully aware that such things were rare in a world of air raids and War Office telegrams. Yet, while this is every bit as propagandist as Went the Day Well?, Basil Dearden's sensitive direction ensures that a gentle aura of supernatural sentimentality permeates proceedings designed to encourage audiences to bear loss with courage and keep the home fires burning.

Fittingly for a saga centred on a hostelry in the mid-Welsh countryside, the action opens in Cardiff, as conductor Esmond Knight is cautioned by doctor John Boxer that he will only live for another three months if he refuses to relinquish his hectic schedule. Meanwhile, in London's Inner Temple, teenager Sally Ann Howes eavesdrops on a meeting between bickering parents Richard Bird and Valerie White and lawyer CV France and hatches a scheme to prevent their divorce.

In Parkmoor Prison, governor Roland Pertwee similarly urges ex-soldier Guy Middleton to make plans for his release and his quandary about whether to rejoin the regiment he was forced to leave in disgrace mirrors the one facing naval captain Tom Walls, who has not returned to sea since being humiliatingly towed back to port. Moreover, he is mourning the loss of his sailor son and despairing over French wife Françoise Rosay's conviction that she can make contact with him through spiritualism.

While the war has brought nothing but pain to some, others like Alfred Drayton have profited from its privations and he is busy setting up a deal for sugar in a West End café when he discovers that fellow racketeer Joss Ambler is a less than honourable crook. Suitably stung, he decides to take a break at the Halfway House just as Philippa Hiatt and her Irish fiancé Pat McGrath board a train at Bristol Temple Meads, with the uniformed Hiatt being less than amused that McGrath sees nothing wrong in accepting a diplomatic post in Berlin because the Irish Free State is neutral.

The pair arrive at the remote station at the same time as Bird and Howes, who has persuaded her father to take her to Wales after overhearing White's weekend destination. Soon, all of the characters have assembled at the cosy premises run by Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis, even though several have heard rumours that it was destroyed in a bombing raid the previous year. Dismissing the realisation that neither host has a shadow or reflection and the discovery that the newspapers and radio broadcasts are 12 months out of date, the guests settle in to consider their futures.

Howes co-opts Walls into staging a near-drowning incident to reconcile Bird and White, but the stunt misfires as dismally as Rosay's attempt to connect with her son. Moreover, Hiatt and McGrath seem to be drifting further apart until the Johns explain what befell them on the day Tobruk fell in June 1942 and how their misfortune offers the visitors a chance to change their destiny. So, when they hear planes overhead, the assembled know exactly what to do - even though they still don't really understand why.

The speeches in which Mervyn Johns convinces McGrath to put the good of humanity above national ideology and Drayton to be a patriot instead of a parasite may sound a touch corny to modern ears. But Gynis Johns's discussions of death and daughterly duty with Knight and Howes remain deeply touching and take the mawkish curse of Walls's apology to Rosay for disrupting her séance. The denouement is equally contrived, but Roy Kellino's final effects shot brings home the picture's message with an affecting simplicity.

Filmed more outdoors than was usual for Ealing wartime dramas, this adaptation of Denis Ogden's play, The Peaceful Inn, nevertheless benefits from the contrasts between Wilkie Cooper's sun-dappled vistas and Michael Relph's atmospheric sets. The performances are equally effective, with the calm acceptance of Glynis and Mervyn Johns being particularly cogent.

3) SZINDBÁD Zoltán Huszárik's Szindbád (1971), which was drawn from the much-loved, but seemingly untranslatable short stories of Gyula Krúdy and was voted the best Hungarian film of all time by domestic audiences. With Zoltán Latinovits inheriting a role that Vittorio De Sica declined because the producers wouldn't hire his son to compose the score, this is a fin de siècle rake's progress that seems to have been designed to cock a snook at the long, stately takes of Miklós Jancsó by showing that potentially contentious symbolism could also be obscured by flashbacking non-linearity and sensual surrealism. However, four decades after its completion, it has lost none of its lustre or its power to enthral and bemuse.

A roué who has devoted himself to seduction and pleasure, Latinovits is coming towards the end of his life. But, while he seems proud of his gift for seducing women without disclosing his feelings for them, he is sufficiently troubled to imagine his decaying carcass being rejected by his past conquests and begins a memorial odyssey in which each fresh reminiscence is triggered by a tiny detail that takes him back to a specific time and place - and the woman who made them special.

Although he enjoyed engaging in florid correspondence with Anna Nagy, Éva Ruttkai, Bella Tanay and Mária Medgyesi were among his favourite old flames. However, Erika Szegedi committed suicide, while Ildikó Bánsági may well have been his own daughter. But if his recollection occasionally fails him, brothel madam Margit Dajka is always there to guide him with her exhaustive diary of his antics.

Yet, while there is clearly an intriguing story to tell, Huszárik is far more interested in the form than the content. Every shade and fold in Nelly Vágó's costumes is lovingly captured by Sándor Sára's camera, which also revels in the period trappings of Tamás Vayer's production design. But the lens alights upon food and flesh with even more reverential finesse and this luxuriance gives the action a tactility that film rarely succeeds in conveying. Even the impressionistic structure achieved by Huszárik and co-editor Mihály Morell seems driven by the sights, sounds and smells in Latinovits's subconscious and this Proustian desultoriness makes the liaisons seem all the more callously romantic.

This need to sharpen the edge of the lothario's charm makes it difficult to imagine De Sica in the role. But Latinovits has a reckless chic that makes him irresistible even as he's being detestable, while his relishing of the beauty laying itself before him somehow takes the chauvinist curse of his cruelty. Sadly, both actor and director would commit suicide while still relatively young men. But they bequeathed a film of intoxicating voluptuousness that is worth catching if only for the ice-skating sequence and the candlelight excursion.

2) THE SET-UP Riffing on the contentious theme at a time of Communist witch-hunting of sticking to one's principles in the face of thuggish intimidation, The Set-Up (1949) is Robert Ryan's finest film. Adapted by former sportswriter Art Cohn from a poem by Joseph Moncure March and meticulously researched in low-rent Los Angeles venues by director Robert Wise, this also ranks among the best boxing movies ever made, as not only is the ring action choreographed by ex-pro Johnny Indrisano bruisingly authentic, but Wise also captures the anticipation, consternation and camaraderie of the locker room before a bout, as well as the ghoulish excitement exhibited by the crowd once the bell rings.

As the punters arrive for a full card at the Paradise City Arena, Ryan's manager George Tobias and cornerman Percy Helton meet in a seedy cafe with Edwin Max, a fixer for gambler Alan Baxter, who wants Ryan to take a dive in the fourth round to help ease prodigy Hal Baylor towards a title shot. Tobias accepts the $50 pay off and gives Helton his cut, but decides against informing Ryan of the deal as the ageing pug is bound to lose anyway.

Defeat, however, is the last thing that Ryan is contemplating in his hotel room across the street. Indeed, he is convinced that a single punch could revive his career at the advanced age of 35, even though loyal wife Audrey Totter has her doubts. She declares that she can't bear to watch him take another beating, but Ryan is convinced she is on her way when he sees their room fall dark from the changing-room window.

Buoyed by the knowledge Totter will be there to support him, Ryan tunes in to the chatter between his fellow pugs and trainer Wallace Ford. Debutant Darryl Hickman can barely control his nerves as he awaits his call, but he returns wreathed in the exuberant smiles of relieved victory. By contrast, David Clarke goes out in a blaze of optimism because his idol won the title on the back of a 21-fight losing streak and is rushed to the hospital with the doctor fearing brain damage.

Black fighter James Edwards is more cautiously upbeat, while Phillip Pine places his faith in his bible and Kenny O'Morrison trusts to luck. But, while they enjoy mixed fortunes, Ryan prefers to rely on his certitude that he will be rewarded for the decency and durability that have enabled him to keep going for nearly two decades. Thus, even though he realises that Totter's seat is empty, Ryan squares up to his much younger opponent with no fear and feels his confidence growing after matching Baylor during the two rounds that the challenger had been advised to take easy to make the contest look fair.

As Baxter's girlfriend (Lynn Millan) makes bets with a fellow in the next row, a man listens avidly to the radio commentary, while John Butler gives blind buddy Archie Leonard a blow by blow account of the action. Elsewhere in the bleachers, glutton Dwight Martin stuffs his face with junk food, while programme seller Frank Richards urges Ryan on and supposedly disapproving housewife Constance Worth jumps to her feet to bellow abuse at the rapidly tiring combatants.

Increasingly concerned that Ryan is going to beat the odds, Tobias informs him before the final round that he has to hit the canvas and he stumbles into the centre of the ring with his pride and determination sapped by a shuddering sense of betrayal. However, the realisation that he is on his own spurs Ryan on and he returns to the locker room with a quiet sense of satisfaction. However, a furious Baxter bursts in thinking that Ryan was aware of the deal with the absconded Tobias and orders him to change so he can be punished for welching. Suddenly afraid, Ryan scurries through the deserted arena and finds a side door into an alley. But he is cornered and Baxter shatters his hand with a brick in retaliation for throwing a punch.

Ryan staggers into the main road and collapses. Totter sees him from her window as she heats some soup for his supper and rushes to his side. She has spent a miserable night wandering the streets and realising that it was duty as much as ambition that had kept her husband boxing so long after his peak, as it was the only way he knew of providing for her. But, as she cradles him on the pavement, she reassures him that everything will be okay.

Everything is about this fine film is spot on, right down to the fact that legendary shutterbug Arthur `Weegee' Fellig had an uncredited cameo as the ringside timekeeper. The performances are faultless, with Ryan exuding flinty dignity as the has-been with more heart than ability and Totter touchingly coming to terms with her no-win situation as she resists the unwanted attentions of flashy mashers, laughs at the cries of the sideshows barkers and watches the young lovers milling along the byways around the stadium. But it's the technical mastery underpinning the docudramatic realism that most impresses.

The immediacy of Milton Krasner's photography was achieved during the fight scenes by shooting with three cameras: one for wide shots, one for mediums focusing on the boxers and a handheld one for close-ups. Yet, despite the excellent coverage, Wise was dissatisfied with Roland Gross's editing and he drew on his experience cutting such pictures as 5th Ave Girl and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) to produce some of the most intimate and visceral sporting sequences in screen history.

1) THE ILLUSIONIST Around the time he was making Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati started work on a scenario about the avuncular relationship between a French magician and a young Czech girl who believed he could conjure anything out of thin air. His grandson Richard has suggested that the story reflected the remorse that Tati felt at deserting Helga, the daughter he had fathered in 1943 with music-hall co-star Herta Schiel. But, while Tati completed the script, he shelved it in favour of Play Time (1967) and Trafic (1971) and it remained forgotten until animator Sylvain Chomet sought Tati's second daughter Sophie for permission to use a clip of her father in his debut feature, Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003).

Now, some 50 years after it was written, The Illusionist has finally been filmed and it is not only well worth the wait, but it also benefits enormously from being an animation rather than live-action. While Tati himself would have been able to invest the title role with the gangling innocence he brought to the Monsieur Hulot pictures, it might have been trickier for another actor to forge an attachment to a much younger woman without incurring the wrath of those who insist on seeing something sinister in every cinematic age-gap liaison. So, by basing a cartoon character on Tati's physical appearance and screen persona, Chomet has been able to create a naif, who is as guileless as he is genial and whose motives for befriending a gullible waif are entirely honourable.

Times are tough for Monsieur Tatischeff. Variety is rapidly being overtaken by television and rock`n'roll and he is reduced to playing seedy Parisian venues to make a sou. Willing to accept any booking, he crosses the Channel and takes the train north to entertain the residents of a remote Scottish island that has only recently received electricity. While staying in the local hostelry, Tatischeff makes the acquaintance of Alice, a teenage maid who is so transfixed by his act that she genuinely believes he has the power to perform magic.

Indeed, she is so in thrall after the kindly stranger presents her with a new pair of shoes that she follows Tatischeff to Edinburgh and they take rooms in a hotel populated by a sombre clown, a drunken ventriloquist and an endlessly energetic troupe of trapeze artists. All goes swimmingly for a while, as Tatischeff takes odd jobs to sustain the illusion that the gifts Alice receives have been plucked from the ether. However, when she develops a crush on a boy of her own age, Tatischeff realises that the time has come to say goodbye.

The friendship between Tatischeff and Alice is blamelessly chaste throughout. However, he has considerably more trouble with his tetchy rabbit, who deeply resents being plucked from a hat each evening and has developed a habit of making untimely appearances during tricks. Yet, the creature sleeps happily on Tatischeff's chest, as he hunkers down on the couch to allow Alice to have the only bed.

Resisting the temptation to anthropomorphise in the Disney manner, Chomet also avoids using computer-generated imagery outside the odd scene transition and complex camera move. Consequently, this melancholically comic gem always has a quaintly old-fashioned feel that brings to mind the work of such Gallic masters as Paul Grimault, Jean-François Laguionie and René Laloux.

The recreation of late 1950s Edinburgh manages to be both authentic and nostalgic, while the wealth of small details in every frame recalls Tati's own genius for the mise-en-scène technique of shooting in long takes with an ever-observant camera that allowed audiences to find the gags at their own pace. The watercolour look of the graphics is exquisite, while the use of rhubarbing dialogue, sound effects and silence reinforces the sense that Chomet has not just captured a time and place with deft fidelity, but also the spirit of Jacques Tati himself. Richard Tatischeff Schiel McDonald may feel that Chomet has betrayed the family subtext. But, with its beautiful design and a finesse to match Tati's own, this is simply sublime.