When I was a nipper, I used to go to a Saturday Cinema Club…

My friend and I would buy a Dime bar each (new on the market), jostle our way to a middle-row seat (the Big Kids commandeered the back rows) and settle in for the Matinee line-up. It was all ancient stuff made way before our time. The first slot might be a flickering, miscellaneous episode of Zorro, Flash Gordon or Rawhide, or a funny from the silent era (this was Cornwall, which in cultural terms, then, meant stepping back twenty years compared to almost everywhere else). We pre-teens thought we were televisual sophisticates (Fab! It’s the Seventies!) and would hoot and pelt each other with popcorn all the way through at the very idea of such primitive tosh.

The feature-length forays into a make-believe land of romance and derring-do were much hyped by lurid posters on the way in, but they were invariably scratchy old releases, black and white B-movies like The Thiry-Nine Steps, traditional Westerns, a Harryhausen dinosaur outing, or something soppy starring Hayley Mills. The bill definately catered to the boys. You’d think we girls would be disappointed, but we weren’t. We were transfixed. Today you’d need an I-Max screen and an audience of pre-teens on acid slushies to replicate the awe we felt then as the music started and the titles began to roll. Sophisticates? Not a bit of it, we were rural kids starved of entertainment; we soaked it all up.

I think I’ve been in love with the silver screen ever since. These are some of my all time favourites:

Alien, All About Eve, Bad Timing, The Beguiled, Being John Malkovitch,Black Narcissus, Bladerunner, Blue Velvet, Brokeback Mountain, Cronenberg’s Crash, Dead Men, Donnie Darko, Fargo, 5×2, The Ice Storm, If, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Little Foxes, Metropolis, Mildred Pierce, Now Voyager, Pulp Fiction, Repulsion, The Royal Tennenbaums, She’s Gotta Have It, Sunset Boulevard, The Swimmer, Tetsuo, Trees Lounge, The Wind (Gish), Withnail and I.

Later, I was lucky enough to attend a University with a legendary Film Soc - it had a reputation to maintain - which meant every Friday, Sunday and Wednesday students had the opportunity to see critically acclaimed art-house movies going back to the early days of the industry. We lurched from Battleship Potemkin to Mondo Trasho via Passolini, Bergman and Russ Meyer. The auditorium was always packed, the audience was rowdy (you could take drinks in, mine was usually the punk classic, a pint of Snakebite), but reverent by the time the lights went down. My membership card was throughly punched and, as part of my BA, I was even inspired to take a Minor in The History of the Western, to boot.

Later still, in London, I graduated to the last days of the Scala cinema at King’s Cross, a seedy baroque building redolent of decaying glamour, where art-house fans and the dirty mac brigade gathered under the same roof, seated just a few rows apart. I was anti-censorship - you couldn’t see Clockwork Orange or Last Tango in the UK then - I saw them in Amsterdam - but the Scala sailed as close to the line as it could and ran a risky, themed programme. A George Romero zombie triple all-nighter was a particular low point, the club upstairs (Delirium, early House music) a high.

Film review pages: I suppose what I’m trying to say, through all of this, is that I believe I’ve done some serious screen time. Perhaps I’m a cinematic sophisticate at last? Or, at the very least, a well-tested cultural filter?

But, having arrived at fortywhatever, making time to sit down and watch a two hour movie is a luxury, so the selection here reflects - on the whole - either titles I really wanted to see and argued for, or consensus choices wrought from heated family discussion.

I live with two men and a male dog who watches car chases.

Oh, for some of that carefree old-time atmosphere…

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