"What’s the most chilling last line in the cinema? How about “cranial drill”? Followed by an unforgettable sound effect. John Frankenheimer’s nightmarish adaptation of David Ely’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for novel has a weary, middle-aged businessman (John Randolph) buy out of his old life and be transformed into Rock Hudson, only to find that renewed youth isn’t satisfying. A unique, affecting, paranoid science-fiction film noir, with a perfectly cast Hudson doing his best-ever screen acting and the too-seldom-used Salome Jens an extraordinary presence as the girl on the beach."

"Of course taken from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, a short story, and like a lot of his books, it paints a world where technology has vastly outstripped our morality. We can create artificial beings that are every bit as human as we are, to any measurement, and yet we still treat them like a machine. What does that say about how human we are? I think in the age of cloning and bio-medicine that is exploding right now, with every month, it seems there is some new problem that is jeopardising our morality as human beings. It just seems like we should be very careful in the next hundred years. Philip’s very clever in saying this is what is going to happen, if we’re not careful. I also think it’s the best noir that doesn’t have to have gumshoes ever. He’s successfully made a noir in a new setting. One of my favourite things is the flying blimp with the picture of the Asian lady taking the pill in close-up. How perfect is that? We’re seeing those commercials now, where they say the side-effects maybe your hair falling out and so on. How they talked to Coca-Cola about the product placing on that building, I’ll never know. "

"Before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy there was the bleaker, 1960s John le Carré, who wrote the novel upon which this film is based when the cold war was at its coolest. This meditation on spy-craft by Martin Ritt is Brit-noir at its finest. Richard Burton as the alcoholic Alec Leamas oozes arrogance and desperation in equal measure, and with wonderful performances by Claire Bloom and the always interesting Oskar Werner, this is a spy movie Bergman could have made. An unusual saxophone-driven score of terrific atmosphere—I once chased all over London to find it, returning home to find the album disappointingly did not feature the best cues."

"Blade Runner is also one of my favorites. I love film noir movies, and that was just a new way of doing it. Set in the future, made up worlds. It’s just a straight up great movie; everything fell into place, which is just rare for things to happen that way. How everything came together, the artistry that went into it, the design, the music, and how resilient the story is, how you can just keep making new versions of it, and they all still kind of work. [laughs] When you can just keep remaking the same movie with the same footage and just kind of tweak it a little bit…"

"Few films handled Burt Lancaster’s unique brand of ceaseless virility as well as this release from 1957. Lancaster made many wonderful movies but at times almost seemed to be biting the camera lens with his crisp forcefulness. In Sweet Smell of Success, as in pictures like Birdman of Alcatraz, Lancaster sits on his patented intensity and delivers astonishing results. The gleaming, indefatigable J. J. Hunsecker is probably Lancaster’s best acting. Burnished. Terrifying. Add to that the wonderful costar turn by Tony Curtis, the photography of the legendary James Wong Howe, and a screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. Fifties film noir at its best."

"Luchino Visconti never made a mediocre film and his masterpieces reach the heights of cinema. The Damned, at once illustrious and a little forgotten, is definitely one of his greatest and most misunderstood. This strange mash-up of Buddenbrooks and Macbeth is a film noir, deranged and of a profound audacity in its treatment of what burned at the heart of Weimar Germany and the era’s capitalist system. Of an incredible originality and daring for the industry of the time, it paved the way for the entirety of Fassbinder's work and without it Pasolini's Salò (which was heavily inspired by this film) would have been impossible."