"Mitchum was film noir," Martin Scorsese once said of a certain sleepy-eyed leading man. But for other fans of the genre, the star has competition from a namesake: Robert Siodmak, the director who devoted most of the '40s to making vividly-shot, expressionistic crime flicks. When they worked - like The Killers, Cry of the City and Criss Cross - they were simply extraordinary. And when they didn't quite, they still had their compensations: like seeing Gene Kelly as a murderer…

"Count your fuckin' knuckles."
"All of 'em?"
"Count as many as you want. As many as you got, I got four more."

So goes my favourite exchange in this uniquely flavourful, downbeat crime classic, which topped my "to see" list for a good five years from 2003 onwards, and even then exceeded my expectations when a copy dropped in my lap. Second time around - and on Criterion! - it's even better.

Bob Mitchum, that cobra-lidded titan of the screen,…

Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding…

A blind showgirl and the undercover agent sent to catch her run away together, pursued by scores of soldiers AND OH MY WORD, WILL YOU LOOK AT THOSE COLOURS, I THINK MY EYES HAVE AN ERECTION. Zhang Yimou's stunning, vivid, extremely green contribution to the wuxia genre is like opium for your optics: beautifully designed and filmed in colours both bold and gentle, vibrant but never garish, its vast widescreen frame filled with an abundance of detail: drums, trees and…