Although not strictly speaking autobiography, William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novella Queer is clearly derived from personal experiences. Hence the decision in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation to have Daniel Craig play the protagonist “William Lee” as a Burroughs impersonation, a performance so mannered that it is scarcely a recognizable human being. The film assumes that the audience is sufficiently familiar with Burroughs' persona to applaud Craig’s impression, but doesn’t seem interested in making us care about his romantic misfortunes. I don’t normally…

Until relatively recently, Mississippi Burning (1988) got mangled in my mind with In the Heat of the Night (1967), yet the twenty years that separate them saw a Hollywood sea-change in representations of the African-American experience. By the time Alan Parker’s film was released, you had bona fide black superstars whose roles, unlike those of Sidney Poitier, were not simply projections of what white America wanted black people to be. Yet the biggest criticism that can be levelled at Mississippi…

As a child of the 80s, my first taste of the franchise was James Cameron's Aliens (1986), after which Alien seemed a comparatively slow-burn. As an adult, however, Ridley Scott's original is a more satisfyingly psychological film. A visceral piece of horror sci-fi to rival John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), its power for me is less in the jump scares than the nauseating implications of the premise. In this sense the film peaks rather early for me: nothing quite matches…

The Thing is comfortably my favourite John Carpenter film, and it hasn’t lost its tension or claustrophobic power. It has been interesting to learn about the film’s troubled production, and how much was finally cut from The Thing to pare it down to its essentials. Particular credit must go to Rob Bottin's practical effects, which he not only realized but designed himself. Many of the film’s most memorable moments and images thus come largely from his imagination, and he almost…