The Movie List: Part 3

The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecorvo
If the French army ever had a colonel as lucid and objective as Colonel Mathieu, sent in to quash the OAS after its first bombing campaign, then it was a lucky army. When he dismisses the border controls at the edge of the Kasbah with the remark “If anyone's papers are going to be in order, it will be a terrorist's” you know the guy is smarter than you average flic. The French army were not angels, but neither were the OAS – Pontecorvo makes you realise just how shattering bombing civilians is. Made with the assistance of the people in the Algiers Kasbah and many amateur actors, the film is tight, balanced, cool and manages to get you feeling for both sides. It's still the finest political film ever made.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – Jean-Luc Godard
This is the movie where a lump of sugar dissolving in a cup of coffee becomes the entire universe, each bubble a galaxy against the blackness of space. You have to see it to believe it. The opening has a 360-degree pan round a suburban housing estate: before it's half-way through you don't know if you're going right-to-left or vice-versa or where on earth you are. That's why Godard is a genius. “Her” is Paris, and Juliette Janson, a housewife who has to turn tricks in Paris to earn extra cash to pay the bills in her family's new and more expensive apartment in the suburbs. It's based on an article about such housewives – called “shooting stars”. The film is Godard at his poetic best.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend – Eric Rohmer
This was the film that converted me to Rohmer: it bore a reasonable resemblance to my own love life at the time. The fact that it was set in an Eighties suburban development of Paris also helped, as did the wonderful performance of the central character by Emmanuelle Chaulet and the fact that the two male leads, Eric Viellard and François-Eric Gendron, had a lot of characteristics in common with me as well. The structure is neat, the story moves along, the moments are real and it feels real, as all Rohmer's movies do.

Grand Prix – John Frankenheimer
This remains the best film about motor racing ever made. It's set in the Golden Age of semi-pro Formula One, before the huge budgets, wind-tunnel testing and non-stop circus. There are real motor racing drivers in the background (look out for Graham Hill's moustache), while the climactic ending was to be done for real in the 1967 Monza Grand Prix when Honda won its only race with John Surtees at the wheel. The cars are Formula Three dressed up as Formula One, and the tracks are for real. The on-car filmed racing sequences are still more exciting than the live broadcasts. The scene you will remember for ever is Antonio Sabato picking up Francois Hardy and I'm not going to spoil it for you.

Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse) – BBC
How this Season Two, Episode Two tale got by the BBC censors I will never know: it drips the same insight and contempt for the influential upper-middle classes that comes off the pages of Raymond Chandler. A depressed and morose Morse crosses his own boss, an influential businessman whose daughter has gone missing, exasperates Lewis with his insistence that the girl is dead, gazes at a field of teenage girls in sports kit and interviews a young but buxom Elizabeth Hurley. It's the 1980's and there's an air of money, power and intrusive change – that mechanical digger outside Morse's house is a metaphor. It's the standout episode from a standout series.

The Long Goodbye – Robert Altman
Chandler purists were outraged by this adaption. Elliott Gould shambles through the story the hippest Marlowe there ever was. Today it's a classic and regarded as one of the best Chandler adaptations ever.

Catch Us If You Can – John Boorman
The best Swinging Sixties movie made: it's as sour and refreshing as a lemon, sharply written, the photography is luminous and it doesn't matter that the acting creaks a little.

Duck Soup – Marx Brothers
You haven't seen this? Get the boxed set of the early Marx Brothers from Amazon and do so now. It contains the funniest scene in the history of cinema.