The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick's terrifying, mesmerising classic both adapts and adds to the Stephen King horror novel.

Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) spend the winter snowed in at the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), has a special gift of telepathy – also known as shining. As isolation takes hold, Jack suffers a mental decline that is only accelerated by supernatural events.

Nicholson is superb in the lead role – both funny and convincingly insane.

The music is incredible. It's hugely atmospheric. The "tricycle" scenes around the lonely corridors are hypnotic. The psychological domestic drama is perfectly blended with a supernatural thriller. It's surreal and impressionistic, but with a strong narrative pull.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Directed by Rob Reiner (adapted from a play by Aaron Sorkin), but not up to his usual standards. 

Tom Cruise plays a military lawyer who has to defend a pair of US marines accused of killing a soldier at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He spends a lot of time fiddling with his baseball bat. Demi Moore plays Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway. Jack Nicholson is a suspicious colonel. Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon also feature. 

It’s a little like a TV movie in places, and the music seems generic. Tom Cruise is exactly like he is in all his other films – cocky, fast-talking and apparently good at everything. Demi Moore struggles with a role that’s not really fleshed out. Only Jack Nicholson holds your attention, and even he isn’t given much to go on. Unless you’re keen on Cruise and his standard range of tics, it’s oddly unfulfilling.

The Departed (2006)

Directed by Martin Scorsese, this remarkable crime thriller is as good as any. 

In Boston. Irish Mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) places Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) as a spy within the police force. Sullivan quickly rises up the ranks, becoming a highly respected detective, and protects Costello by feeding him information. Meanwhile, the police assign undercover agent Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to infiltrate Costello’s criminal gang. And both of them end up dating the same police psychologist (Vera Farmiga as Dr. Madolyn Madden). 

It’s incredibly clever. The plot moves fast enough to make your head spin, but Scorsese’s storytelling gifts are such that it works. 

The all-star cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone and Mark Wahlberg. The soundtrack is terrific, although a repeat use of the intro to “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones in the same scene seems like an error. 

As usual with Scorsese, you get everything – a masterclass in film-making. The characters are richly fleshed out. It’s thrilling. It looks visually stunning. And the script is really sharp.

Heartburn (1986)

Adapted by Nora Ephron from her own novel, this is a slightly disappointing drama about the ups and downs of a relationship. Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson play Rachel and Mark, and the film focuses on the couple's story from first meeting, through marrying, having children and facing up to Mark’s history of infidelity. 

There's some intriguing casting. Stockard Channing seems underused as a friend (she's too charismatic to be given such a minor part). Jeff Daniels is credible as Rachel’s editor. In his first film role, Kevin Spacey plays a thief on the subway.

Split between New York and Washington, D.C., the bittersweet narrative has comic moments but isn’t a comedy as such – despite what’s presented on the DVD box.

Carly Simon provides the theme song in “Coming Around Again”, which also recurs as “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. 

It’s not quite as engaging as you might hope. Streep and Nicholson are always excellent, but it could have been sharper, more poignant and more funny.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Masterpiece directed by Miloš Forman and adapted from Ken Kesey’s novel.

Jack Nicholson stars as McMurphy, who is committed to a mental hospital after faking insanity. There, he disrupts the routine maintained by the controlling Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) and gives the other patients a sense of liberation through his freewheeling attitude and irreverent humour. 

It’s incredibly moving. As a human drama it is heartbreaking. It also tackles themes of power, identity and freedom, but in a subtle and sometimes darkly amusing way.

The in-mates, played by actors including Christopher Lloyd and Danny DeVito, are fully fleshed-out characters in their own right, adding real depth to the drama. Will Sampson has huge presence as the "Chief", who pretends to be deaf and dumb. Brad Dourif is superb playing the frail, stuttering Billy Bibbit, whose fears are exploited with devastating consequences. And Jack Nicholson is almost supernaturally potent in the lead role. You cannot take your eyes off him.

As Good as It Gets (1997)

Superb comedy about a bitter romantic novelist named Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), who insults everyone he meets. He also lives with OCD, avoiding the cracks in the pavements and disposing of soap bars after a single use. When he’s forced to look after a neighbour’s dog, his compassionate side slowly begins to emerge. A lesser film would have made the most of that and gone no further than a simple man-with-pet comedy, but this complex character study evolves into something deeper and goes a lot further into exploring human behaviour. 

Helen Hunt is absolutely superb as the cafe waitress that Nicholson falls in love with but is unable to articulate his feelings towards. Her three-dimensional character seems entirely real. Less convincingly Greg Kinnear plays Melvin’s gay artist neighbour, who Melvin slowly begins to accept and like – despite all his prejudices. 

It’s an intelligent film with no easy answers. It works as a romantic comedy, but it’s the least formulaic example of that genre I can imagine. 

It leaves you with a lot to think about, not least whether the OCD community think it’s a fair portrayal of that condition.

Terms of Endearment (1983)

Melodrama with moments of comedy. 

Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger play a mother and daughter who share an intense connection. We follow the evolution of that relationship, along with their couplings with Jack Nicholson and Jeff Daniels respectively. Then the plot takes a sideways turn and everything becomes a lot more serious. 

What makes this an absolute gem is the quality of the acting. All four leads are remarkable, but MacLaine and Winger are quite extraordinary. They convey such a strong sense of personality for their complex, fully rounded characters that it’s difficult to imagine they aren’t real people.

Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Silly but amiable rom-com directed by Nancy Meyers. 

Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) is a womaniser in his sixties who only dates women half his age. Then he meets his girlfriend’s mother, the successful playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), and discovers a deeper connection that surprises him. 

Keanu Reeves is passable but underdeveloped as the doctor who also falls for Keaton. Frances McDormand is oddly underused as Keaton’s sister. And Amanda Peet is the weak link as Keaton’s daughter, with a narrative arc that’s all over the place. For example, she’s distraught to learn that her father (Paul Michael Glaser) intends to remarry, but then this is never mentioned again. Indeed, Glaser’s character seems to have been pretty much edited out of the film – or never written into it in the first place. 

In some ways it’s as formulaic as its title, with daft slapstick and several improbable moments. But Nicholson and Keaton are such pros at this kind of thing that they make the most of the flimsy material and it ends up being highly watchable.

About Schmidt (2002)

Bleak black comedy about a man in Omaha, Nebraska who leaves an insurance company to enjoy his retirement, only to find that his wife dies soon after. Suddenly he has no shortage of free time, but he has no one to spend it with. Struggling to find meaning in his life, he begins to sponsor a child in Tanzania (his letters to the boy form the film’s narration), travelling around in his huge new Winnebago, and trying to persuade his daughter not to marry her waterbed salesman fiancé. 

Jack Nicholson is as fascinating to watch as always, and expertly portrays the bemused, slightly shell-shocked widower. Kathy Bates is excellent as the rather scary mother of his future son-in-law. 

It’s a fairly depressing film, and deliberately so. It’s to be respected for not offering any trite or easy resolutions to this lonely 66-year-old’s predicament in the way that a more obvious narrative might have done. But a few more laughs would have helped since a lot of it is genuinely painful to sit through.

Chinatown (1974)

Highly watchable Roman Polanski crime thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. The former plays Jake Gittes, a private investigator. The latter plays Evelyn Mulwray, who is suspected of killing her husband.

The plot unfolds slowly and luxuriously. The L.A. locations look stunning, and it’s one of those films that can be paused at any moment to reveal an image striking enough to work as a poster. There’s a spacious quality to the pace and style of the storytelling that’s missing from so much modern cinema. It’s a film you want to live in.

And Nicholson – one of the most charismatic people to ever walk the Earth – is transfixing.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Superb drama. Robert Dupea is a moody, troubled drifter who runs away from commitment. When he learns that his father is unwell he travels back to his family home where he’s presented with truths about himself and his relationships that he has been trying to evade all his life.

This film is perfectly cast. Jack Nicholson is mesmerising in the main role. Karen Black is brilliant as Rayette, his waitress girlfriend – a Tammy Wynette fan he’s embarrassed by because she’s of a lower class than his musically gifted, well-educated family. Particularly strong is Lois Smith as Robert’s pianist sister Partita.

Issues of social status and identity slowly unfold, but there are moments of humour too. There’s a wonderful scene in which Robert picks up two hitchhikers. One of them (played by Helena Kallianiotes) is obsessed by dirt and talks about nothing else. The other, her friend, is played by a young Toni Basil. This has nothing to do with the plot but adds so much in terms of character. I love the fact that films of this era had the freedom to develop their writing in this way. Likewise, the climactic father-and-son scene offers no simple solutions or resolutions as it would if Five Easy Pieces had been made today.

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.