In April 1894, the world's first Kinetoscope Parlor opened at 1155 Broadway, in New York City. The Kinetoscope was a peephole machine that showed a short film strip, processed at the Edison Laboratories in New Jersey. The major limitation of the Kinetoscope was that it could be viewed by only one person at a time and it would be another two years before the Lumiere Brothers made the first motion-picture [...]

As Michael Hofmann makes clear in the introduction to his excellent new translation of Ernst Junger's book Storm of Steel (Penguin, £14.99), Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was neither the first memoir of the First World War (it was published in 1929) nor the best. "Ernst Junger's book," wrote Andre Gide in 1942, "is without question the finest book on war that I know."

I [...]

The movie Seabiscuit is for those like me who tend to feel that "they don't make them like that any more" - because clearly, on the evidence of this excellent little film, they can and have done so, and the only wonder is that they don't do it more often. There are no comic-book characters, no big stars to hog the picture under the mistaken assumption that it's them we [...]

Nobody is surprised when a wine costing less than a fiver tastes like paint stripper; but you might have cause for complaint if you had forked out £800 for a bottle of Petrus and it tasted bad. It's just the same with films. More is expected of a film that cost, say, $78m, like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. There are plenty of bad films around. But there haven't been [...]

A river runs through it. Or so the film director John Boorman would have us believe. At the age of 16, after camping overnight on Runnymede, near the river, he awoke to find himself in some sort of communion with the place where Magna Carta was signed. The experience at Runnymede, says Boorman, "sent me searching for images, through cinema, to try and recapture what I knew that day". Clearly, [...]

''I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that . . . Here's looking at you, kid."

This self-sacrificing little speech by Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) to Ilsa Lund Laszlo (Ingrid Bergman) at the climax of Casablanca (1942) is a classic of romantic dialogue [...]

Based on a graphic novel entitled Lone Wolf and Cub, six Japanese films about a samurai assassin and former shogun executioner were released in the early 1970s. The executioner, Ogami Itto, and his infant son Daigoro wander about feudal Nippon beating off attacks from ninja warriors with a katana and a lethally equipped bamboo pram - the Edo equivalent of Bond's Aston Martin DB7. Now something of a cult, these [...]

I have always rather enjoyed Titus Andronicus, and those who doubt its Shakespearean provenance should bear in mind its similarities to King Lear. More black comedy than tragedy, Titus is rightly famous for the bloody horror of its hand-chopping, tongue-cutting and les violeurs en croute; but the eye-gouging in Lear is just as horrifying. Horrible, too, is the end of Marlowe's Edward II, whose protagonist suffers the ultimate high colonic; [...]

I hate "coming of age" movies. Mostly, I suspect, this is because it is almost 30 years since I came of age myself. Whenever I see some undeserving young punk making whoopee with a bewitching nymphet of jail-bait age, an unhappy war widow, or the woman who gives him French lessons, I always get that Shropshire Lad feeling about happy highways where I went and cannot come again. Not that [...]

Years ago, in the days when Clive James was fronting a programme about cinema on ITV, I used to think of the entrance to my local cinema in much the same way that Lucy thought of the wardrobe door in the children's novel by C S Lewis: as the gateway to a magical world of infinite possibility. These days, however, whenever some-one asks me about what's worth seeing at the [...]