Go for the Collector’s Edition DVD with smart 90-min documentary The Making Of Psycho and shower-scene storyboards presented by Saul Bass.

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★

On the terrific Criterion DVD release, the busting “Dossier” of extras (this being an espionage thriller) includes two loaded, erudite chat-tracks and some fascinating production correspondence (letters written by producer David O Selznick and others to Hitchcock during filming).

FILM: ★★★★

DISC: ★★★★

It summed up the baffling, phenomenal nature of Adam Sandler’s entire career. Like it or not, for the past decade, this clowning buffoon has been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He’s one of the few actors who can command $25 million per movie. And, according to the numbers, he’s worth it. In 2007, his movies averaged $9 of gross income for each dollar he got paid. The two movies he put out 2008 – Bedtime Stories and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan – were critically obliterated but raked in more than $200m each at the box-office. They helped Sandler climb to No2 on Forbes’ list of Hollywood’s highest earning stars in 2009. Only Harrison Ford – thanks to Indiana Jones And The Aliens – earned more than Sandler’s $54.9m. Blockbuster heroes Will Smith, Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks can’t touch him.

People love Adam Sandler. The Hollywood producers who greenlight every script he buys. The actors who keep on calling. The Oscar-winning directors desperate to cast him. It’s just that no one knows why. “That’s Adam Sandler, who’s just fucking funny, you know?” shrugs Paul Thomas Anderson. “I don’t know what it is about him and I spent two years with him.”

What’s really incredible is that Sandler has done it all himself. Goon goldmines like Billy Madison, The Waterboy, Happy Gilmore and Zohan are all Sandler’s own character creations. But people don’t turn up to see Madison or Gilmore. They turn up to see Sandler. And each time, he’s the same: an idiotic man-child who learns – usually via slapstick, shouting and scat-gags – to be a better person. It’s a genius combination. Teenage boys (the most powerful demographic at the box-office) like the slap and scat. (Weirdly, this could also be the secret to Sandler’s global success. Like Jerry Lewis – who was loved by the French – he represents, in part, the ugly American.) But more importantly, Mom and Dad like the message. This second part of “The Sandler Effect”, as it’s been dubbed, is the most powerful key to unpacked the secret to his success.

“I like how vulnerable Adam is even when he’s at his craziest,” says Mike Binder, who cast Sandler straight in post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me. “When you get to know Adam, you don’t think, ‘Boy, this guy got lucky’ or ‘This guy’s been smart.’ There’s a humanity to this guy that people are smelling and seeing coming off the film.”

The trick at the heart of stardom is the ability to make an audience feel two things simultaneously about a star: that this person is way out of your reach and yet also your next door neighbour. Like Hanks and James Stewart before him, Sandler is an American everyman. He’s not cleverer than you. His body isn’t better than yours. He never has a better job than you. But neither Hanks, Stewart or perhaps any actor in history has embodied the American Everyman so completely. With his close-cropped hair, smooth skin and crumpled t-shirt, he’s an action-man figure come to life. If K-Mart sold an Average American doll, it would look like Adam Sandler.

ENTER SAND-MAN

Like most people, Sandler wasn’t born rich. His mother was a nursery-school teacher and his father was an electrical engineer. He graduated from watching Caddyshack at home to clowning in class to stand-up in New York to MTV to Saturday Night Live to Hollywood in just over a decade. His movie career began with roles in cult comedies Shakes The Clown and Airheads. But from Billy Madison, which Sander wrote, produced and starred in, The Sandler Effect began. He played the fully grown man attempting to repeat grades 1–12 to earn his father’s respect – and his father’s multi-million-dollar inheritance. It set the template for his career: BAD reviews, BIG box-office.

Adam Sandler had accidentally created his own genre. But what’s even more special about Sandler is that he recognised it – and harnessed it. Forming his own production company Happy Madison, Sandler has written, produced or exec-produced nearly every one of his films since The Waterboy. He’s also backed features by his old SNL alumnus, such as Rob Scheider’s brain-child Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

He could do it because people kept watching. People you wouldn’t even think. While he was editing Magnolia, the masterpiece that would cementing his rep as the cosmic lovechild of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson watched Adam Sandler movies to relax. “I can’t stand any more cancer. I can’t stand any more sadness,” remembers Anderson. “At the time, the chicken-noodle soup to that was Adam’s movies. Just really like, ‘I want a piece of /that/. I want to learn how to do that. I was in a good mood. Feeling happy.”

Anderson wrote Punch-Drunk Love specifically for Sandler, who was subverted and showcased by blue-suited powerkeg Barry Egan. Forcing him deep into his own angsty, angry persona, the movie brought raves for Sandler’s performance. How did Anderson know it was there? What make him think Sandler could actually act? “I think I was just paying attention,” says the There Will Be Blood director. “It’s weird, because part of me wants to be mad that there are those kind of questions, but I can see that other people refer to his movies a different way than I do. I really love them and they shouldn’t be so easily dismissed.”

Both Stewart (via Hitchcock) and Hanks (via Sam Mendes) hinted at the darkness that rages under their happy-apple-pie surfaces. Sandler, in his own clumsy way, has been doing that from day one. “There are two kinds of angry people – explosive and implosive,” explains Jack Nicholson in Anger Management. “Explosive is the type of individual you see screaming at the cashier for not taking his coupon. Implosive is the cashier who remains quiet day after day and then finally shoots everyone in the store. You’re the cashier.” Sandler shakes his head: “No, no, no. I’m the guy in the frozen food section dialing 911. I swear.” Do we believe him? In Punch-Drunk Love, he and Emily Watson pillow talk about how they’d like to chew each other’s eyeballs. In Spanglish, he wants to “set my hair on fire and punch myself in the face.”

Where does Sandler’s buried rage come from? His life looks like a greetings card: happily married to actress Jacqueline Samantha Titone, with two daughters called Sadie and Sunny. But Sandler never really talks in-depth about his own parents and upbringing, despite occasional hints towards a tough father to win over. “I don’t come from a place of where I was tortured and needed to let something out,” he said once. “I came from a very happy home. I liked it the most when my father laughed at my stuff. Going into this business, my mother was very encouraging, but my father was more like, ‘I think you’re going to have to be a funny salesman.’ But my career wasn’t about getting his approval. I was just happy to make some cash and let my father rest.”

Wherever it came from, Hollywood’s hottest filmmakers have all found The Sandler Effect irresistible. Tim Burton tried to cast him as Willy Wonka in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, while Martin Scorsese considered him to play Joey Bishop in his undeveloped Dean Martin biopic Dino. Michael Mann wanted him to take on Tom Cruise in Collateral but Sandler backed out to make Spanglish, allowing Jamie Foxx to pick up an Oscar-nomination. Tarantino wanted Sandler, a lifelong baseball fan, to play Jewish skull-smasher Sgt Donnie Donowitz in Inglourious Basterds, but the comedian was already contracted to Judd Apatow’s Funny People. Sandler walking out of that cave, bat in hand, would have been an infinitely more delirious sight than that of Eli Roth. Fascinating to imagine what might have been.

PLAYING DUMB

It fast became apparent that Sandler wasn’t as dumb as he was acting. But neither did he seem ambitious or energetic or interested. Adam Sandler was clearly best when he wasn’t in Adam Sandler movies – and he did seem to try more serious work after Punch-Drunk Love. Rags-to-riches remake Mr Deeds confirmed his Capra-esque status, but Reign Over Me’s post-9/11 drama and bromance I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry left audiences confused. Why wasn’t he hitting someone with a golf club and yelling, “The price is wrong, bitch!”?

Perhaps Sander had been stuck in arrest development too long. How old was he now? Click (another Capra redux) and 50 First Dates (another phone call from Wedding Singer co-star Drew Barrymore) both teasingly played on Sandler’s spin-cycle career.

Meanwhile, comic legend Albert Brooks compared Sandler to cancer in a comedy panel discussion held in Los Angeles. “Let’s do what else America likes!” he exclaimed. “How about cancer? They all seem to get that. Must be good! People keep getting it!” Dumb, lazy, unoriginal, rude, annoying. Sandler infuriates his critics. This, after all, is a millionaire actor whose pet dog Meatball was best man at his wedding - dressed in a tux with a yarmulka on his head.

But the funnyman’s finest hour came six weeks after 9/11. Dressed as an opera singer, he sang the week’s news – throwing in random Italian words – at a historic concert in Madison Square Garden arranged by Sir Paul McCartney and headlined the likes of  David Bowie and Mick Jagger. He sang about New York and about Osama bin Laden shitting in a cave and he made the crowd of emergency workers, survivors, and mourning families laugh – perhaps for the first time since the tragedy. Ben Stiller had refused to host Saturday Night Live that month, claiming it was “impossible to be funny at times like this”. Sandler proved otherwise.

Judd Apatow has known Sandler for years, shared a room with him when they were both struggling stand-ups in LA. He’s still the only filmmaker other than PTA to successfully harness Sandler for deeper means. Having helped “punch up” the dialogue on The Wedding Singer and Happy Gilmore – still Sandler’s two best comedies – Apatow had been recruited to help salvage something from Sandler’s latest creation: Israeli hitman turned New York hairdresser Zohan. Even Hollywood’s reigning comedy kingpin couldn’t do much with it. But, like so many other filmmakers, Apatow found The Sandler Effect impossible to resist. But once again, the role of a jaded former stand-up with terminal illness in Funny People was Sandler essentially playing himself.

Apatow disagrees: “I think Adam is a brave artist. He said to me, ‘I’m going to do whatever you ask me to do and I’m not going to question it. I want you to make the movie you’re going to make.’ And there’s nobody in show business who will do that! That was during the writing process, shooting and editing. He never came into editing and said, ‘Don’t do that – it makes me look like a jerk.’ Adam has shown over and over in his career that he’s willing to commit fully to what he’s doing. I love what he did in Reign Over Me and he has this side to his work that is very vulnerable – and that was what I think was most exciting about working with him.”

…AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU

Sandler isn’t just big – he’s getting bigger. Last year’s Bedtime Stories was Sandler’s first family film (PG, no swearing) and, more significantly, his first under the Walt Disney banner. “Scary Madison” is a new horror genre label under the Happy Madison umbrella, producing thriller The Shortcut next year. Under his deal with studio Sony, he’ll also produce Richard Pryor biopic Is It Something I Said? Written by Bill Condon and starring Marlon Wayans, it will be Happy Madison’s first major dramatic production.

Obviously, despite pushing out in new directions, Sandler is still sticking to what he knows. Like voicing a monkey. But ‘toon comedy Zookeeper just marks time until Grown Ups, a high-school-reunion comedy that reteams him with Sand-men Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and David Spade. Jennifer Aniston will becoming his highest-profile leading lady in rom-com Just Go With It, which will test how far Sandler’s mainstream appeal is stretching.

But there are no more PT Anderson movies on the horizon right now. Unlike Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, Sandler never seems in pursuit of darker, more interesting roles. They just happen. He’s just… happy. “I’m not looking to get away from anything,” says Sandler. “I like what I’ve done, I enjoy working with my friends and I love those movies.” That simple. And really, there’s no obvious reason to doubt him. There’s no career strategy here. No blueprint for his next five movies. “I don’t know any formulas, but I do know that I don’t know,” he says with typically deflective simplicity. “I can’t tell you what works and doesn’t work, but it’s nice to see a crowd of people having an experience like that.”

Is that really all these is to earning $25m per movie? “My mother saw Judd do the Re-Do ‘My Head on a Baby’,” he remembers, suddenly. “I was at dinner, going, ‘Ma, check this out’ on the iPhone. And she was looking at it, going: ‘You have a very cute face.’”

Maybe that’s it.

Publication: Total Film

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★

1. The Party At Kitty And Stud’s

“I’d been bounced out of my apartment and had slept four nights in a row at the Port Authority bus terminal, trying to avoid the cops. I owned two shirts, three pairs of underwear, a pair of pants and a jacket – all of which I had on at the same time since I had no place to put them. I mean, I was desperate. I read in a trade paper about this film that was paying $100 a day – for a $100 a day I would wreak havoc. So I showed up and found myself literally standing in the valley of the skanks. There was no real sex involved, just bad imitations and the close proximity of skankalicious skin. After I made Rocky, someone tried to blackmail me with the tape, wanting a million dollars. I said, ‘For a million dollars I’ll remake the film.’ Actually, I hated the process so much that it is pretty obvious by my appendage, which is trying to retreat in my body, seeking safe haven…”

2. Rocky I-VI

“I started writing scripts right after Easy Rider. Before Rocky came along, I had probably written 10 or so. I pretty much barricaded myself in the room and started to pound away, thinking, “What would be an interesting vehicle if I had one shot to perform?” I was influenced by Mean Streets and Marty and I always had an affection for sports. Three and a half days later, I had a shabby 89 pages of a script called Rocky. Of this hand-written script, maybe only 10 percent was usable, but I enjoy rewriting. I know everyone assumes the original Rocky would be my favourite, but I have to say that Rocky Balboa was the most emotional and fulfilling journey of all the Rocky films. Maybe it’s because I learned to appreciate what is really valuable in life, which is the love of others and what is the most terrifying, which is the prospect of a life filled with loneliness.”

3. Nighthawks

“Nighthawks was a very difficult film to make namely because no one believed that urban terrorism would ever happen in New York, thus felt the story was far-fetched. It was a better film before the studio lost faith in it and cut it to pieces. What was in the missing scenes was extraordinary acting by Rutger Hauer and the finale was a blood-fest that rivalled the finale of Taxi Driver. But it was a blood-fest with a purpose. Rutger Hauer is a little demented, so he was fantastic work with. He took a lot of pain on that shoot, especially when a squid placed on his abdomen was flipped backwards and the explosive charge blew right into his flesh. Most guys would have gone to the hospital – he kept working, reeking blood and all. The stunts in the film were pretty extraordinary because they were invented along the way.”

4. Rambo I-IV

“Without a doubt, Rambo is a very, very difficult screenplay because I have to backtrack to a time when character was at the forefront over action. Rambo is the unwanted child of an insensitive military machine. He’s kinda like the Frankenstein monster who didn’t ask to be built and then is pursued to his demise by haunted memories. In James Cameron’s original draft, it took nearly 30-40 pages to have any action initiated and Rambo was partnered with a techie sidekick. So it was more than just politics that were put into the script. There was also a simpler story line. If James Cameron says anything more than that, then he realises he’s now doing the backstroke badly in a pool of lies. Finally, Joe Eszterhas wrote a script that was nearly 400 pages and was more of a novel than a shootable screenplay. A great deal of work was done by myself, along with Norman Jewison, to hammer it into shape. The fellow I really wanted to kill the most (while in character) was Harold Diamond, who was my stick-fighting opponent in Rambo III and truly a legitimate badass. That was, without exception, a brutal scene to shoot.”

5. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot

“The worst film I’ve ever made by far. Maybe one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen. A flatworm could write a better script then Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. In some countries – China, I believe – running Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot once a week on government television has lowered the birth rate to zero. If they ran it twice a week, I believe in 20 years China would be extinct. The best part of the SNL show I did was when I tried to pull a couple of victims from a car, but they would rather die than be saved by the man who made Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Hey, if you don’t laugh at yourself, eventually other people will, and that’s not a good thing. There’s an old saying: ‘To those who think, life is a comedy, to those who feel, life is a tragedy.’”

6. Cliffhanger

“No matter how hard I tried I could not prepare myself mentally. Until we got to the mountains, I was so consumed with acrophobia, the height, I would have to psyche myself up every day. I’d take these long walks: ‘You’ve gotta get to the edge, you’ve gotta get to the edge. Do it. Forget who you are. Try to pretend you’re the character.’ Actually, the director’s cut was met with a lot of disapproval at the screening and received some alarmingly low scores – mainly because the stunts were absurdly overblown. For example, the average man can jump maybe 12ft across a gorge and the stunts had me leaping maybe 300ft or more. Situations like that had to be pared down and still were fairly extreme. So you’re probably better off with this regular cut. I hear they are going to remake it. You know you’ve been around when they start to remake your own movies when you’re still alive.”

7. Judge Dredd

“I think the biggest mistake I ever made was the sloppy handling of Judge Dredd. I think that could have been a fantastic, nihilistic interesting vision of the future – judge, jury and executioner. I think, from what I recall, the whole project was troubled from the beginning. The philosophy of the film was not set in stone. By that I mean, ‘Is this going to be a serious drama or with comic overtones like other science fiction films that were successful?’ So a lot of pieces just didn’t fit smoothly. It was sort of like a feathered fish. Some of the design work on it was fantastic and the sets were incredibly real, even standing two feet away, but there was just no communication. I knew we were in for a long shoot when, for no explainable reason, Danny Cannon, who’s rather diminutive, jumped down from his director’s chair and yelled to everyone within earshot, ‘FEAR me! Everyone should FEAR me!’ Then jumped back up to his chair as if nothing happened. The British crew was taking bets on his life expectancy.”

8. Cop Land

“The people I respect are the ones who take it on the chin every day, the ones who don’t have a lot of money or a lot of muscles or a lot of genetic gifts, but what they have is an abundance of heart. The only film in which I’ve portrayed a person like that is Cop Land. Cop Land was the first film where I completely dispersed with all tricks. That’s why I’m so proud of it and everyone who pushed me into it, because I never would have done it on my own. I loved doing Cop Land for the involvement of being surrounded by so many good actors who expected to annihilate ‘the action guy’ and leave me gasping for breath. Just the opposite occurred. I really enjoyed the ensemble work and knowing that everyone had each other’s back. Make no mistake about it, everyone’s ego arrived to the set 10 minutes before them, but once the camera rolled, it all meshed together. Yes, gaining the weight was very important for me, to understand the sombre nature of the character and change my body mechanics, so the poor, semi-deaf sheriff moved through this world with a sense of burden.”

9. The Expendables

“This is the hardest film I’ve ever worked on. Man, it was seven guys, kicking each other’s ass, one guy tougher than the next. No joke, our stunt guys were begging for mercy. You think I’m joking? We got extras in this movie that could conquer countries. Actually, my fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I’m not joking. I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck. Let’s say we just dug up The Wild Bunch, gave them one more shot. These guys don’t fit in this kind of world; they are the Expendables, that is why they are called that. It’s an ‘80s movie with today’s technology. I just felt that if you are going to do a story about a mercenary, which is always a fascinating character, you try to put him in a situation where he can find certain redemption.”

Publication: Total Film.

Read more in the incredible Sly Stallone mega-interview at Ain’t It Cool News.

There are no size-zero superhotties here, just girls who are freckled and fleshy. The good-looking guys are evil, the good guys are limp and loveable. It’s a world where chicks who don’t want to know you suddenly invite you into bed. A world where you’re the hero.

Final Fantasy? Hell yeah. Cue the plot scroll: having met the girl of his dreams – literally, as an unrecognisably dorked-up Mary Elizabeth Winstead rollerblades through a desert dreamscape – 22-year-old bass guitarist Scott must defeat her seven evil exes to win her heart. Why? No reason. It’s just a cool idea.

Proving himself a modern culture-mulcher to rival Tarantino, Wright delivers a relentless mash-up of Manga, videogames and comic-books that you’ve never quite seen before on the big-screen. Stat boxes intro new characters (Name, Relationship, Age, Rating). Word-sounds go “KROW” and “THONK”. A pee bar depletes when Scott visits the toilet. Why? See above.

Which is all very cute, but Wright’s movie only starts punching above its weight when Scott does. Ready… Fight! Before you can say, ‘Aaaaaarrrrjuuuken!’, Scott Pilgrim ka-booms with the first in a series of awesome smackdowns that dazzle with speed, style and choreography. Scott knows kung fu. Edgar Wright knows how to shoot action. Since Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz, this guy has levelled up.

Often slashing the frame into jagged split-screens, Wright’s startling visual mojo swoops in direct from Japan (the Mecca of animation and videogames) and the cine-tricks just keep coming in waves. Opponents shatter into a spray of coins. A Donkey Kong hammer appears from nowhere. Final Fantasy summons monsters battle it out in a Guitar Hero duel.

This is sizzle-reel cinema, a movie for Generation ADD that attempts to tell a story using only the cool bits. But that’s what stops it snatching a high score. Scott Pilgrim is the Scott Pilgrim trailer for two hours. Like the coin-op arcades it references so brilliantly, Wright’s gimmicky hyper-flick is too long and too repetitive. Without a compelling plot to provide a pupose, it often feels like a jumble of nudges and winks, from Scott’s Mortal Kombat-stylee final opponent to the green ray that defeats a former son of Krypton.

Breathlessly rushing around with not much to say, Scott Pilgrim is witty and clever but missing a true heart. Scott’s health-bar never really flashes red – even if he dies, you know he can always hit ’Continue’. It’s a game where there’s nothing to lose, to gain or to care about. Then again, pick-up-and-play: that’s part of why it’s such a blast.

Boosted by a terrific cast, the action scores a big power-up from ex-men Chris Evans (Human Torch as an egomani-actor), Brandon Routh (Superman as a vegan rock-god with Dr Manhattan powers) and Kieran Culkin’s aces turn as Pilgrim’s gay housemate. As for Hollywood’s geek-chic king Cera, his shrugging slacker is too much of a drip to really w00t! for, but you couldn’t customise a better on-screen avatar for the nerd-herd.

And they’re the ones who’ll decide if this fun, fizzy beat-’em-up persuades major studios to trust Wright with a lot more pocket money. He’s proved he has the ability to tap the pulse of a major pop-subculture. It might not be a box-office smash – for that, Wright will have to pwn the mainstream (film fans with good haircuts, social lives and beer in the fridge). But if each one of the world’s Pilgrims buys a cinema ticket, he could be a cult Hollywood player who’s hard to beat.

RATING: ★★★

Publication: Total Film

Ignore the coma-inducing restoration chatter on the DVD’s excellent 55-minute doc. There’s a plethora of critics (including director Curtis Hanson, Peter Bogdanovich and Robin Wood) and crew to dig into the film’s thematic payload and production backstories. There’s also a 13-minute interview with screenwriter John Michael Hayes, a hefty stills gallery, promo stuffing and trailers.

FILM: ★★★★★

DVD: ★★★

1. The Legend Of The Drunken Master

Masterpiece. Playing a man who’s unstoppable when he’s had a skinful of booze (you know the feeling), Jackie Chan wallops home an amazing one-two combo of comedy and kung fu. The climactic eight-minute sequence is one of the most thrilling, inventive and outrageous pieces of fight choreography ever filmed. Once you’ve watched Chan crawling through a bed of hot-coals for a few seconds of slapstick fun, you realise why his physical abilities burnt out so fast. Right here, he’s on fire.

2. Ong-Bak

Elbow, knees and blows. Unquestionably the most exciting martial-arts star alive, Muay Thai superhuman Tony Jaa arrived like a flying elbow-smash to skull – everyone else suddenly looked like lumpen pub brawlers. Ong-Bak is still his top trump: a teeth-rattling genre actioner that ditches wire-fu, CG and personal safety for full-contact ultraviolence and gravity-defying gymnastic balleticism. The only thing that comes close to watching Jaa fight is watching him flee: through barbed-wire coils, between sheet glass corridors, over shambling cyclists and under moving trucks…

3. Fist Of Legend

With this hi-octane remake of Bruce Lee’s Fist Of Fury, Hong Kong superstar Jet Li finally became an icon. Executed with concussive agility and electric speed by Li, each kinetic mega-fight carries bone-snapping force in this classic story of Chinese versus Japanese combat. Master action-choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s incredible work here won him gigs with The Wachowskis, Tarantino and Ang Lee. Nothing they did ever matched this.

4. Enter The Dragon

Although Way Of The Dragonpacks Bruce Lee’s epic showdown with hairy Chuck Norris, this remains his most legendary fight film. Choreographing the carnage himself, Lee smashes through an island of martial-arts stars to revolutionise Hollywood action scenes forever. Wait for the bit where Lee accidentally breaks actor Bob Walls’ sternum with a running thrust-kick. Ouch.

5. SPL (aka Kill Zone)

Hong Kong police thriller turns ruthless all-star brawl-‘em-up, as Sammo Hung (kung fu legend), Wu Jing (wushu champ touted as the next Jet Li) and Donnie Yen (MMA innovator) go head-to-head in some sensationally fast, furious unarmed combat. Don’t miss Yen’s Flash Point, either: it climaxes with the greatest Mixed Martial Arts duel ever put on the big-screen.

6. Bloodsport

There must be JCVD – and Bloodsport is his fightiest. Breaking out as a wonky-accented American (real-life US fighter Frank Dux) competing in an underground Hong Kong battle royale, Jean-Claude Van Damme showcases a groundbreaking variety of fighting styles from around the world. Highlight? Split-kicking Van Damme goes zen warrior after being blinded by enormous nutter Chong Li.

7. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky

Oh Riki… The most mad-crazy cult fight movie of all time. Sent to prison after avenging his girlfriend’s death, a young man with superhuman strength must fight for his life against the corrupt warden and his henchmen. Result? The most hilariously gory fist-fights in cinema history. Jawbones evaporate in a puddle-splash of blood. Eyeballs pop out. Ricky is strangled with someone’s intestines. Seek it out.

8. Hard Times

Speaking barely 500 words in the entire film, Charles Bronson (the man director John Huston once summed up as “a grenade with the pin pulled”) lets his fists do the talking. Ol’ stone face gives one of his most iconic performances here, as a Depression-era streetfighter slugging it out in illegal bare-knuckle brawls. This bruising, brutal film (the debut of The Warriorsdirector Walter Hill) makes you feel every grubby, stinging, sweaty punch.

9. The Karate Kid 

It didn’t matter that there’s actually no such thing as the ‘Crane Technique’. Back in the ‘80s, kids everywhere went running to the nearest dojo and painting Asian people’s fences when Mr Miyagi (Oscar-nommed Pat Morita, who beat Toshiro Mifune to the rule) taught Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio) to wax on/wax off the bullies at Cobra Kai. Three decades on, this kick-ass coming-of-age tale – directed by Rocky helmer John G Avildsen – is daft, dated and impossible not to love.

10. 300

This. Is. SPARTA! Watchmendirector Zack Snyder’s abs-and-stabs actioner is one long cascade of blood-drunk fighting, as Gerard Butler’s 300 born-to-fight Spartans use brain and brawn to tear through videogame levels of invading marauders. Shot in stylised, swooping slo-mo against greenscreen, the 360-degree scraps have rarely been matched for ferocity and choreography.

Publication: MSN Movies.

Like Rope (one apartment, no cuts) and Rear Window (one apartment, no legs), it’s one of the fatman’s most memorable experiments in phonebox cinema: the survivors of a sunk luxury-liner trapped on row-boat in the Atlantic with the German U-Boat Captain (Walter Slezak) who torpedoed them.

Lifeboat sank at the box-office and the script (snubbed by Hemmingway, started by John Steinbeck, finished by Ben Hecht) foghorns rudely with in-yer-face propaganda. But there’s enough novelty and nasty to keep the drama afloat as the cast – bossed by diva Tallulah Bankhead’s spoilt fashion-writer – bitch and bait each other with deadly consequences. During shooting, Bankhead caught pneumonia in the cold water. Hitchcock gave her a puppy – named Hitchcock.

More great behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the film’s troubled production surface on critic Drew Caspar’s scholarly commentary and this two-disc Special Edition’s 20-min doc The Making of Lifeboat, which also pulls in contributions from Hitch’s daughter Patricia. Best of all is the vintage 49-minute interview A Talk With Hitchcock, which sees the director discussing his films, his shooting style and his drives with malicious gentility. Look out for Hitch’s favourite cameo: a newspaper ad for a fictional diet aid called ‘Reduco’, featuring before-and-after snaps of the bulbous director.

RATING: ★★★

DISC: ★★★

Publication: Total Film

Continually multi-referencing itself and Lynch’s entire career, it pivots on the kind of naked, fearless performance he has a genius for extracting – from Isabella Rossellini and John Hurt, to Richard Farnsworth and Naomi Watts. Laura Dern is in almost every scene, her face contorting like a melting waxwork in Lynch’s trembling close-ups. No wonder the director recently parked himself (and a live cow) at an LA intersection to tout her for Oscar: like all great actors, Dern simply disappears into her character.

Dern plays faded actress Nikki Grace. Nikki plays Sue, opposite bad-boy Justin Theroux, in a film about two people embarking on a dangerous affair. The script, based on a Polish gypsy curse, is in fact a remake of a film that was never completed. The original stars were brutally murdered because “they discovered something inside the story”. At which point, the ‘plot’ and Dern’s terrified character splinter forever.

Is she on camera or off? Is she speaking? Or reading lines from the script? Is she Nikki playing Sue? Or is she Sue? Then the sinister Poles turn up, “looking for a way in”. Screwdriver stabbings. A young woman staring sadly into a TV screen. Hookers singing ‘The Loco-Motion’. Humanoid rabbits (voiced by Mulholland Drive stars Watts and Laura Harring) doing the ironing on a TV sitcom set.

Grotesque, funny, intense scenes add up with thrilling intent – only to shatter again minutes later. Rabbit holes inside rabbit holes, movies within movies, identities blurring throughout. As Lynch punctures layer after layer of realities, Dern/Nikki/Sue becomes both audience and protagonist. “I don’t know what happened first,” she whispers, speaking the audience’s mind as Lynch’s leads always do. “And it’s kind of laid a mind-fuck on me.” Well said. It’s Lynch reminding us that time and space are cinema’s most untrustworthy variables – portals between the real and imaginary, constantly flickering open and closed, taking us from the wintery streets of Lodz to LA’s Walk of Fame.

Shot with a high-street digital camera, Lynch’s usual plush, beautiful moviescape has fuzzed into a murky, threatening DV world. By stepping outside the Hollywood dream-factory (INLAND EMPIRE struggled to pick up distribution in the US), the director unlocks a cinematic haunted house full of dark corners and secrets glimpsed just beneath the surface.

Even after three hours, the symbolic echoes and narrative non-sequiturs are impossible and irresistible. Do all the pieces fit? Well, yes, no and that’s not the point. Lynch’s obsessions simultaneously demand and defy interpretation. A captivating, baffling nightmare-puzzle. Whatever the hell those rabbits mean.

Publication: Total Film

RATING: ★★★★