sight and sound poll

one of the hardest things ever is choosing the best films ever made. Here's my desert island viewing.

Pyaasa - Guru Dutt

La Regle du Jeu -- Jean Renoir

Infernal Affairs -- Andrew Lau and Alan Mak

Closely Observed Trains - Jiri Menzel

The General -- Buster Keaton

Histoire(s) du cinéma - Jean-Luc Godard

Yellow Earth - Chen Kaige

Princess Mononoke -- Hayao Miyazaki

Mothlight -- Stan Brakhage

The Wild Bunch - Sam Peckinpah

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So many others: Les Enfants du Paradis, Scorsese's The Departed, Makaveyev's Swtchboard Operator, Scott's Kingdom of Heaven . . . Cinema at its best has a fundamentally Romantic attitude, as in Goethe or Wordsworth: the effort to reconcile science, perception and the heart that makes it the defining medium of the modern.

The Second Time as Farce

When Thatcher compared herself with Churchill and invaded the Malvinas, it was, as James Maxton said of Ramsey Macdonald, 'a bloody tragedy'. When William Hague compares his faltering party with Lady Finchley over a phantom fuel strike, it's a farce.

The crumbling Church of England already revealed that the vicar's trousers have fallen down. Now all we need is the au pair in the cupboard: at last a role for Sarkozy.