Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Dir.: Buster Keaton
Plot: An amateur detective falls asleep at his job as a projectionist and dreams himself into the movie, as the great Sherlock Jr.


To be honest, after seeing a couple of his movies I didn't think Buster Keaton was for me, but this absolute gem has changed my mind. I couldn't have felt more differently than I did when I watched The General (bored and drifting into a coma. An undercranked man running up and down a train for an hour, for Gawd's sake...). Anyway, for those yet to see it, Buster plays a detective-obsessed cinema projectionist who gets framed for pilfering his girlfriend's father's timepiece (it was really his rotten, moustachioed rival, of course). Too shy to properly defend himself and deeply depressed, he drifts off in his projection booth and, in a groundbreaking moment in cinema history, his dream self emerges from the sleeping body and takes a running leap into the movie screen. Inside the film, he scrambles to solve a missing jewellery case not dissimilar to his own - but this time as suave, canny detective 'Sherlock Jr.'.

Mean Streets (1973)

Dir.: Martin Scorsese
Plot: A young man in Little Italy tries to keep his head above water whilst protecting his unpredictable friend from loan sharks.

For me, Scorsese is a director who, bafflingly, reached his peak before he’d even really got started. Mean Streets is a mesmerising exhibition piece which vividly highlights every quality which has since made Scorsese a legend. Shot through with both pathos and humour (the whole 'mook' sequence still gets me), it's an intensely personal but unromanticised look at life in Little Italy.

Winchester '73 (1950)

Dir.: Anthony Mann
Plot: A tough sharpshooter scours the plains in search of the man who killed his father, with a seemingly random assortment of characters slowly dragged into the quest.

Jimmy Stewart ditches his ever-comforting impersonation of warm molasses to play hard-bitten avenger Lin McAdam, on the trail of Dutch Henry Brown, the man who killed his father. On paper, it sounds like it's been done a hundred times before. However, this is a uniquely clever revenge western, revolving not around a simple pursuit, but rather around the titular rifle. Won in the opening scenes by Lin, stolen by Dutch and passed through a succession of people, all of whom contribute in some way to the bigger picture of Lin's quest, it ties the story together with peerless elegance. Everyone who comes into possession of the rifle seems almost supernaturally to become embroiled in the story as it unfolds.