“The gaunt, puppy-eyed protagonist of Nightcrawler (2014) is no more than a content purveyor of TV news, a regular guy descending to ever ghastlier depths, not at the behest of conventional incentives such as love, revenge, or fear, but of modern hustle culture. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom works as a ’stringer’, or freelance cameraman, hunting down the grisliest crime scenes in LA to shoot, sell, and even, perhaps, stage.”

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail teased out a persistent sense of homegrown, wilful eccentricity from its parodic portrayal of British lives ancient and modern, a sense which seems to have grown only more potent in intervening decades.”

“The film’s ambiguous examination of the woman as victim- as the physical prey of men, and as a prisoner of her social and narrative context- demonstrates how Kurosawa’s psychological elements continue to resurface in unexpectedly familiar ways.”

The enduring cultural sway of The Princess Bride stems in a large part from its endless quotability - its torrent of snappy, adaptable comments on everything from “true wuv” to “land wars in Asia”.

“Rather than punching down in the spirit of the era - as Craig Ferguson observed of Britney’s treatment, as a Platonic ideal of the White Chick - the Wayans brothers poke at broad swathes of aughts society for a dose of goofy nostalgia without the guilt.”

“Making use of the grand cultural forces at his disposal- from chart-topping popular song to Hollywood icons- Hitchcock’s transatlantic remake pokes at the darkness beneath the external Technicolour sunshine of the post-war nuclear family, and wider society.”

“The decade after Ratatouille’s release saw the explosion of viral internet cooking channels, from Buzzfeed Tasty to Mob Kitchen, offering easy, comforting meals that promised emotional and physical sustenance for the harrowed millennial entering the rat race. The pandemic has only clarified the increasing significance of the film’s central themes - food, creativity, and democracy - to notions of humanity.”

“Overshadowed in the year of its release by another anti-war satire, M*A*S*H, Catch-22 offers a more sober statement of the message that defines America not by the glory of war, but by discomfort in it.”