The basic joke of the would-be romp Without a Clue is that Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley) is a detecting genius who has had to hide his light under a bushel by hiring an alcoholic ham actor Reginald Kincaid (Michael Caine) to pose as his imaginary alter ego Sherlock Holmes. He is now frustrated because the blundering idiot is hailed as an infallible hero while he is forever being pushed out of the picture. To really work, the film should have cast a leading man who gives the impression that he might make a good serious Holmes, but Caine is all too credible in his idiot act. In one of the best jokes Watson covers up a faux pas by complementing Holmes on his convincing disguise as a drunken lout, and so the laughs that should come in a flow only manage to trickle. The actual plot is about forged bank-notes ruining the Empire but is constructed to allow for the usual excursion by picturesque steam train to a clue-ridden holiday destination and some dirty deeds down by the docks. The leads coast through their routines but the supporting cast has an appropriately rat-like and embittered Inspector Lestrade from Jeffrey Jones, a winsomely duplicitous Victorian heroine from Lysette Anthony and a rather good goateed sadist Professor Moriarty from Paul Freeman. It can't hold a magnifying glass to Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, but as a Holmesian footnote it edges a deerstalker or so ahead of Gene Wilder's The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother. It certainly beats the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore Hound of the Baskervilles and John Cleese in The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It. -Kim Newman.

Lantana teased its subtle way into the minds of cinemagoers in 2002 with a welcome reminder that nothing succeeds like a well-written, hypnotically acted drama that reflects the humanity, complexity and frailty of its audiences right back at them. Lantana is about betrayal, grief beyond recovery and the tenuous threads by which the most superficially ordinary relationships founder or survive. At the same time, it is quietly and profoundly life-affirming. It is, as producer Jan Chapman suggests during the director's commentary, "a film you have to pay attention to". But it rewards that attention. Andrew Bovell's economic, absorbing script is based on his original stage play Speaking in Tongues. A series of coincidences creates a network of links between characters with unsettling and often shattering consequences. Like another Australian classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lantana explores a constantly shifting line between deceit and honesty. It is a psychological mystery in which the land itself claims a life that has nowhere else to go. Director Ray Lawrence draws minutely observed performances from his actors, particularly Anthony LaPaglia as Leon, the Sydney detective in the throes of mid-life crisis, Kerry Armstrong as his wife Sonia and Barbara Hershey as Valerie, the psychologist whose panic finally releases her from an untenable situation. [+]

Lush production design and sparkling special effects make The Haunted Mansion pretty to look at. Terence Stamp, as a malevolent ghost of a butler, provides a suitable air of menace as he dematerialises to and fro. Marsha Thomason is lovely as a real estate agent hired to sell a haunted mansion, but in truth the ghostly owner of the mansion believes she is the reincarnation of his lost love. Wallace Shawn and Dina Waters make a modestly amusing comic pair as a ghostly husband and wife who bustle about. Jennifer Tilly, as a green disembodied head in a crystal ball, glitters appropriately. The movie also features endless clichés, futile attempts at humour, and Eddie Murphy. If you're looking for a movie based on a Disneyland ride, try the very clever Pirates of the Caribbean instead. -Bret Fetzer.

Despite making many other distinguished films in his long, wandering career, Francis Ford Coppola will always be known as the man who directed The Godfather trilogy, a series that has dominated and defined their creator in a way perhaps no other director can understand. Coppola has never been able to leave them alone, whether returning after 15 years to make a trilogy of the diptych, or re-editing the first two films into chronological order for a separate video release as The Godfather Saga. The films are an Italian-American Shakespearian cycle: they tell a tale of a vicious mobster and his extended personal and professional families (once the stuff of righteous moral comeuppance), and they dared to present themselves with an epic sweep and an unapologetically tragic tone. Murder, it turned out, was a serious business. The first film remains a towering achievement, brilliantly cast and conceived. The entry of Michael Corleone into the family business, the transition of power from his father, the ruthless dispatch of his enemies-all this is told with an assurance that is breathtaking to behold. And it turned out to be merely prologue; two years later The Godfather, Part II balanced Michael's ever-greater acquisition of power and influence during the fall of Cuba with the story of his father's own youthful rise from immigrant slums. The stakes were higher, the story's construction more elaborate and the isolated despair at the end wholly earned. (Has there ever been a cinematic performance greater than Al Pacino's Michael, so smart and ambitious, marching through the years into what he knows is his own doom with eyes open and hungry?) The Godfather, Part III was mostly written off as an attempted cash-in but it is a wholly worthy conclusion, less slow than autumnally patient and almost merciless in the way it brings Michael's past sins crashing down around him even as he tries to redeem himself. -Bruce Reid, Amazon. [+]