Top five films: best of the big screen

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (136 minutes) PG

Alfred Hitchcock gave free rein to his love of nonsense in this superlative 1959 comedy-thriller, with Cary Grant as a boring Manhattan ad-man mistaken for an assassination target and chased halfway across the US, crossing paths with a mysterious blonde (Eva Marie Saint) along the way. Digitally projected. Thornbury Picture House, Sunday, May 19, 1pm.

INLAND EMPIRE (180 minutes) MA

Shot on deliberately murky video and running just on three hours, David Lynch's surreal 2008 thriller is one of the freest films of his career, and one of the most harrowing. Laura Dern pushes past all physical and emotional limits as a onetime Hollywood star whose identity collapses when she tries to make her comeback. Screens in conjunction with the Temptation to Exist exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, with an introduction from curator Sue Cramer. Cinema Nova, Sunday, May 19, 6pm.

CLUELESS (97 minutes) PG

90s minimalism is always coming back around thanks to Clueless.Credit:Alamy

Relocating the plot of Jane Austen's Emma to a Beverly Hills high school, Amy Heckerling's fast, funny, upbeat 1995 teen movie ranks with the classic Hollywood comedies of any era. Alicia Silverstone is irresistible as the ditzy but hardly dim-witted heroine, full of solutions to everyone's problems but her own. Digitally projected. Astor, Saturday, May 18, 7.30pm. Double feature with Mean Girls.

PETERLOO (155 minutes) M

A flashpoint in the history of English class struggle, the 1819 Peterloo massacre could easily have been dramatised as a simple story about courageous workers and wicked oppressors. That's all present in Mike Leigh's remarkable film, but filtered through Leigh's unique sensibility, grounded in an understanding of just how strange so-called ordinary people tend to be. Selected.

JOHN WICK 3: PARABELLUM (130 minutes) MA

At this point, there's no denying the audacious showmanship of the John Wick action saga, set in an imaginary New York peopled solely by assassins. Keanu Reeves has found an ideal use for his talents as the bloody but unbowed hero, now on the run with only a few remaining allies, among them Anjelica Huston and Halle Berry. General.

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