Monique Roffey, author Robin Hood: Prince of Thievesīrian Blessed shouting his head off on a horse. Star-crossed lovers with a funny kid thrown in and a hilarious, camp Richard III that gets Dreyfuss sacked.
The “panties on the line” scene in the bathroom is a cinematic classic. He sublets their apartment to an eccentric but likable actor who lets them stay on in the flat. Basic plot: single mother and her precocious but lovable daughter get shafted by Mum’s ex. My favourite all-time comfort film is the romcom The Goodbye Girl, with Richard Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason and child actor Quinn Cummings. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia The Goodbye Girl Desiree Akhavan, directorĮthan Stiefel, Amanda Schull and Sascha Radetsky in Center Stage.
There’s something for everyone to hate – the whitest, most inconsequential love triangle committed to film, an angry black girl who’s tamed into obedience, a “fat” girl who’s never not shoving food down her gullet – and yet every time I see Jody whip her head up in that way-too-close-to-cornrows hairdo that miraculously materialises out of nowhere, mid-performance, I get chills. But I’m trash, and Center Stage is a trash film. David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count is published on Thursday Center Stage Proust would have been proud, but that moment can bring us all, I think, for a second, back to childhood. And it contains the beautiful beat when cynical super-critic Antoine Ego is returned to innocence by tasting his first mouthful of Remy the rat’s ratatouille. It may be that so much of it takes place in a kitchen I always feel you can smell the food. I’ve said often that the greatest art in cinema now happens in animation, but there is also something deeply blanketing to the soul about Ratatouille. Jess Cartner-Morley, Guardian associate editor, fashion A gum-snapping, popcorny movie with hidden depths as well as heavenly outfits. Jane Austen invented the female gaze 200 years ago (like, duh!) and her Emma, a prototype millennial feminist, is reborn in Alicia Silverstone for 1990s Beverly Hills. Everything useful I know about life I learned from this film. One hundred golden minutes of pithy wisdom on all life’s thorniest subjects: boys, friendship, sex, drugs, accessorising, parking. Alexander McQuiggan, Glasgow CluelessĬlueless is a romcom that never gets syrupy a stone-cold satire with a heart of gold. As he left to go home that weekend, he said: “As you wish.” I can’t wait to share it in future with my newborn daughter. I recently watched it with my 12-year-old nephew, who is interested only in Minecraft and YouTube. It’s action-packed, romantic and unbelievably funny, but perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it still works for all ages. I loved this film from the moment I saw the cardboard cutouts promoting it in my local cinema. Xan Brooks, Guardian film writer The Princess Bride It’s an invitation to sit on the porch and watch the sun slowly sink over 1900s Texas. Malick’s whisk of painterly fields and whispering grass has become a kind of refuge from the din of the house and the clamour of the news. But I’ve just rewatched it twice in the space of a week, and it’s all I can do not to put it on again. It climaxes with an apocalyptic plague of locusts. It’s about a family of itinerant workers who prey on a dying farmer. I had never previously considered Terrence Malick’s period drama as a comfort blanket. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Days of Heaven Frances McDormand voices Chantal DuBois, the animal catcher on a single-minded, vivacious self-destruct, culminating in a rendition of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien that is more poignant (seriously) than Édith Piaf’s. It’s true of Die Hard, it’s not true of the Madagascar franchise, which goes from a playful fish-out-of-water romp in the first film, through some coming-of-age and communitarian sagas in the second, to the third, which has one of the best villains in cinema history. It is a rude supposition among people who haven’t seen enough animated films to think there’s a diminishing-returns principle, each sequel the same as the last, only less good. Then they go back in time to save the ghost children from a fire – and they become the ghosts! Amazing! Jon Ronson, writer and broadcaster Madagascar 3 Two children, exiled to a country house, become friends with ghost children of their own age. It’s basically The Railway Children, but with ghosts. Lionel Jeffries made this adorable film in 1972 as a kind of follow-up to The Railway Children, but it has practically vanished from history. Photograph: Allstar/Hemdale The Amazing Mr Blunden