Prizzi's Honor (1985)

The blackest black comedy about the Mafia isn’t really funny enough. It’s very slow, too. Although Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Anjelica Huston are all charismatic, they don’t have the material to work with. I found it tiresome to watch and it lacked the thrills of a good gangster drama as well as the laughs of a wittier film. Some of the motivations were unclear, too: what was in it for Kathleen Turner’s character? She didn’t marry Jack Nicholson for the money (she was already rich) and she didn’t love him either (she tried to kill him).

It was densely plotted and confusingly signposted, so I lost the thread a few times.

The pale and frail Mafia don played by William Hickey was a ludicrous character, neither funny nor scary. You never knew how you were meant to feel about him, which may have been the point.

This film gained strong reviews and is generally regarded as a classic. I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

Licence to Kill (1989)

The second and final Timothy Dalton Bond film is surprisingly good – almost a proper thriller. Unusually, the plot has an arc that you can actually follow: Bond chases a drug baron, Sanchez, who injured his CIA pal Felix Leiter (David Hedison) and murdered Felix's wife. Bond has his licence revoked, but – seeking revenge – goes rogue with the sexy CIA agent Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell). In fact, Bouvier could be the strongest female lead in a Bond film since Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) – a three-dimensional character for a change. Only the extended presence of the ancient Desmond Llewelyn as Q in “field operative” mode tips this over into ludicrous territory, although Llewelyn is always enjoyable to watch.

Timothy Dalton seemed unloved as Bond, but he has a certain charm that makes him watchable. And unlike Pierce Brosnan, who acts with his hair, he actually gets his lines out in a convincing manner.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

On Valentine’s Day, 1900, a bunch of girls from an Australian boarding school go on a day out to the ominous Hanging Rock. It soon becomes clear that there’s an essential wrongness about the place. Clocks stop at midday and, amid the heat, the girls enter a kind of disorientated enchantment. Seemingly bewitched and in a trance, three of them disappear (plus one of their teachers, played by Vivean Gray – Mrs. Mangel from Neighbours). I last saw this film at least 30 years ago but the utterly haunting image of the girls in their white dresses – walking, somehow mesmerised, towards a fate that is brilliantly never explained – has stayed with me ever since.

Like all of the world’s most terrifying stories, this adaptation of the Joan Lindsay novel understands that the less you explain the more scary it becomes. The film works on multiple levels. It’s a supernatural thriller but also a historical drama that takes on issues of class division, female repression and sexuality, and social control inside and outside of institutions.

The music by Gheorghe Zamfir (panpipe) and Marcel Cellier (organ) is especially effective and goes a long way towards building the atmosphere. Sophia Coppola's film The Virgin Suicides, which covers similar themes, had an oddly similar kind of soundtrack (by Air), so was presumably influenced by this film.

Peter Weir’s direction is stunning: it’s shot in a way that really enhances the sense of dazed, ethereal bewitchment.

A masterpiece.