Film Favourites

Here are my lunatic ravings on what I believe are the greatest movies ever made. Beware, these reviews are 100% biased!

My Top Ten Most Memorable Scenes from the 1990s

Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster create an electric atmosphere with their meetings onscreen in this Oscar-winning thriller. The first meeting they share is as tense as they come, with Hopkins' Lector in a high security cell, asking Fosters' Starling to come closer...

Steven Speilberg's first dino-pic can now been seen as a historical benchmark in the history of cinematic special effects: never had such realistic beasts been seen before, and audience's flocked to it around the world. It's knock-on effects are still being felt today as blockbuster after blockbuster uses the same technology to conjure up weird and wonderful things. Sam Neill's first close encounter with a prehistoric creature took the breath away from everyone who first watched it.

This was one of those scenes that suddenly turns everything on its head. Completely out of the blue, the film pulls a totally unexpected twist in the storyline and pushes the film up into completely different territory. Prisoner Tim Robbins miraculously disappears from his cell one night - the officers poke around the room, finally pulling back a Rita Hayworth poster he had put up on his wall years before...

Bond is Back - that's how it was advertised, and the world sighed with relief as the cool British spy returned in style as Pierce Brosnan. The very first scene showed us exactly what we had been missing, with Bond leaping off the top of a Russian dam.

Remarkable alone for the fact that it brings two of the greatest living actors ever on to the screen together for the first time, this scene in Michael Mann's cat and mouse crime thriller was the highlight: the power that surges on screen as they talk casually about their lives, plans and ambitions is enough to power a small city.

One of the most influential moments in the history of the horror genre came in this, the film that spawned two sequels and single-handedly made horror cool again. Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the film geek, lectures his friends at a party about the "rules" one must obey in order to survive a horror movie...

Contact, starring Jodie Foster, was one of the best 90s science-fiction films for me, and the opening shot simply has to be seen - a real jawdropper. A long pullback shot beginning with the planet Earth, then reversing back past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn then onwards out past the solar system, into the galaxy and beyond...

OK, Leo was a prick when he declared himself King of the World onboard the infamous luxury liner, but the sinking itself, with the ship broken in two and the stern thrust into the air at right-angles to the sea, with Leo and Kate at the top, is destined to become a classic scene.

The D-Day Normandy landings in 1941 as realised by Speilberg must go down as the most shocking and nerve-shredding recreation of World War Two combat ever put to film. The first 24 minutes are as terrifying as anything you're likely to see in the cinema, famously forcing real veterans to seek counselling.

One of the most publicised shots was of Heather's apology to her friends' and her own parents in this, arguably the scariest movie of 1999. As the terror of the woods closes in on the three students investigating a local legend, Heather turns the camera on herself for one last time to apologise for the situation they find themselves in...