Shadows and Fog (1991)

Woody Allen's star-studded comedy (even Madonna appears), filmed in black and white and filled with visuals recalling Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, had critics calling it an homage to German Expressionist cinema, but to what end is not clear: when John Cusack's brothel patron sighs, with Nietzschean bleakness, "There's no point to anything," he seems less to be musing on existence than reviewing the film itself, especially after so much of the comedy proves only intermittently amusing and the plot - in which Allen's Kleinman is enlisted, Kafkaesque-style, into a disorganised vigilante street gang hunting a serial killer - feels like just another Woody Allen contrivance; the late turn to weighty talk of God and man and his volitional and unvolitional or natural and unnatural impulses lands as a sudden lofty flourish atop prolonged tedium.

★★☆☆☆

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Rosemary's Baby (1968)

For me, it's not a big leap from childbirth to otherworldly gothic horror, and so when director Roman Polanski brings Ira Levin's macabre suspense novel to hideous life, it is just a question of how far he is going to ratchet up the terror as an angelic Mia Farrow experiences a troubled pregnancy and all around her in her and her husband's new New York apartment block, the behaviour of the residents is getting decidedly more odd and more and more in Rosemary's face.

★★★★★

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Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile (1978)

Agatha Christie wrote Death On The Nile while staying in Aswan, Egypt at the Old Cataract Hotel overlooking the Nile, in the 30s, so watching this film version of her book with its rich period detail - cream linen suits, cloche hats, pearls, pith helmets, cravats, stockings, against the dust and dry of Egyptian ruins or in the colonial opulence of saloon bars and cigar lounges - it is easy to imagine Christie is in it or that the film depicts a moment in her life, and beneath the stiff social propriety of the British characters aboard The Karnak, a river paddle boat to Cairo, runs a terrific thread of suspense as someone kills off several of those aboard; it is up to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot to determine who the murderer is among characters played by the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury.

★★★★☆

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Husbands and Wives (1992)

From their apartments to their workplaces, and in cafes and at parties, a foursome of New Yorkers talk neurotically about sex, fidelity and marriage, men and women, but this is not Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, but Gabe and Judy, Sally and Jack, two couples in Woody Allen's hilarious 1992 comedy, who are all rocked by the latter pair's decision to separate.

★★★★★

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