Alex's most treasured reviews

Though Pulp Fiction is only Tarantino's second film as writer-director, he creates his own world as confidently and recognisably as Harold Pinter or Joe Orton does or did. He tweaks movie stereotypes into idiosyncratic new shapes. He finds black humour in the darkest devices ...

Recently I've felt Tarantino has been overexposing himself ... risking abbreviating our attention span as fatally as that other ubiquitous opinionator Werner Herzog, who's now dropped out of favour. But then I go back to see a film like Pulp Fiction. All is forgiven ...

Time enough to ask if the man can do anything else but mine the ore in the lower-depths of cine-criminality. The point is, no one else can do it like him. He's picked the lock of a movie genre and made merry with the conventions within, not desecrating them, but redecorating them.

Dirty Pretty Things

Stephen Frears is a director unlike most who work in Britain. He is a film-maker with something to say. Dirty Pretty Things to its credit and our film industry's shame, is almost the only British made movie this year that tells us how our nation is changing.

Not before our eyes, though. The parallel world of illegal immigrants that Steve Knight's screenplay collects is the one most of us who move around London don't see.

It's a thriller that happens within the underclass of desperate people from half a dozen countries attempting to keep on one side of the law, or the other, as day turns into night and back ...

This film will make unsettling viewing for white Anglo-Saxon Brits, seeing "their" metropolis as a sort of illegal "jobs centre" for an underclass ... But here at last is a movie with a social heartbeat that pumps new blood into our anaemic cinema.

2001: A Space Odyssey

It dazzles the eyes; engages the imagination; disturbs the mind. It surpasses any film forecast of things to come that I have ever seen. It is not exactly science-fiction. Nor is it entirely science-fact. I would call it science-detection, for Kubrick and his co-author, Arthur C Clarke, project themselves into the 21st century to hunt for clues among the stars to the riddle of the universe itself - and man's place in it.

A film like 2001 can't be drained of all significance in one viewing. Every image is so rich.... I shall go and see

it again as soon as possible, for one thing is clear. Man has shrunk space, but Kubrick has expanded the cinema.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Like a mighty glacier on the move, a tripartite enterprise of such epic yearnings as Lord of the Rings needs time and patience for its impact to register. First time round, I was a sceptic. Such protracted introductions, so many characters, and what unpronounceable names .... I was not a happy

fan of JRR Tolkien. But after a year's intermission, I emerged a convert from Part Two - shattered, shaken, stirred, even worshipful. It has a grandeur that it's not hyperbole to call Miltonic.

What an eyeful it is.... With The Two Towers,

Tolkien's tapestry of Middle Earth's battle for survival has achieved a majestic proportion, chivalric and quixotic, earthly and magical, an experience that reaches beyond the dimensions of the cinema screen and somehow reflects the unease of the world in the first years of the 21st century.

A Clockwork Orange

What our nightmares have accustomed us to see in dreams, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange shows us in broad daylight. It is one of the most unsettling films in the whole of cinema. After it's gripped you by a bold, violent and clever story that is an allegory of power and corruption couched in the terms of a horror comic, the film expands into an infinity of terrifying implications for us and the times we live in.

The urban landscape of A Clockwork Orange exists in a world that has lost its humanity ... Malcolm McDowell's performance (as Alex) is that of a true star ... he represents a generation that has taken the ultimate leave of its parents. The belief that our children will reproduce us is what has kept the race going, but seeing A Clockwork Orange, one's faith is blasted. From it, one brings away the fear that our children will kill us.

Taxi Driver

It is a vision of an urban hell, a Dante-esque trip to the inner circle of madness and murder, undertaken by a cab-driver (Robert De Niro) whom we watch being overwhelmed by the sheer beastliness of men and events till his reason snaps and he reaches for his gun.

Or rather, his guns. For it is as a human arsenal that De Niro goes into the streets he drove through, only this time on foot, seeking targets. At first he makes for a politician ... Then he turns aside, and blasts flesh and blood aside in his forced entry into a brothel where a 12-year-old whore (Jodie Foster) has touched his gallantry - and his ingrained puritanism.

Foster's alarmingly precocious prostitute in fringed blouse and hot pants, bubble gum and ribaldry on her infant lips, belongs to hell's kindergarten the way an earlier, tougher breed of dead-end kid belonged to Hell's Kitchen.

The dropping age-level merely charts the deeper seams of vice this film plumbs.