Not only one of Hollywood’s most iconic film stars, Clint Eastwood is also one of tinseltown’s finest directors. Rodney Twelftree looks at his ten best films as director.

The vampire: that harbinger of everlasting life and eternal damnation. From the cloaked gothic majesty of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to the down and dirty night-crawlers of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”, vampire’s have formed the basis for more literary and cinematic horror than any other fictional creature.
Early cinematic incarnations of the blood-sucking sun-haters were based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Infamously, Friedrich Murnau made “Nosferatu” in Germany without acquiring the rights to film the novel. After a lawsuit, all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed. The film …

“Are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean”: The Magic of Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis was once asked if television was a bad influence on children. He answered, emphatically, “television isn’t an education, but I see no reason to turn it off.” What would so many television-starved children give for Zemeckis as a babysitter, or indeed a father: ‘Can I pur-lease watch more TV?’/’Of course you can!’ He was a product of the television generation – this new visual medium that found its way into most …

Clint Eastwood may be to many casual filmgoers the gun-toting authoritarian Harry Callahan from the “Dirty Harry” movies, or perhaps the man with no name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, or more recently Frankie Dunn in “Million Dollar Baby. He’s an iconic Hollywood figure who has embodied some of the world’s most recognisable characters in many of the most prominent films of the last fifty years. But he’s also as accomplished behind the camera as he is in front of it, directing such classics as “Play Misty For Me”, “The …

MICHAEL MANN’S TOP 10 FILMS
1. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
2. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963)
5. Faust (Murnau, 1926)
6. Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
7. My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)
8. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
9. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
10. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)

JOE DANTE’S TOP 10 FILMS
1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
2. City Lights (Chaplin)
3. 8 1/2 (Fellini)
4. Les Enfants du paradis (Carné)
5. The Dead (Brakhage)
6. Rashomon (Kurosawa)
7. Psycho (Hitchcock)
8. Raging Bull (Scorsese)
9. The Searchers (Ford)
10. Once upon a Time in the West (Leone)

1. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
2. Sansho Dayu (Mizoguchi, 1954)
3. Germany, Year Zero (Rossellini, 1947)
4. A Bout de Souffle (Godard, 1959)
5. Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
6. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
7. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
8. Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964)
9. Accattone (Pasolini, 1961)
10. Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)

If Top 10 lists tell us more about the person or persons making them than the films themselves, Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movies confirms he is the true nerd of modern cinema. He loves cult films that operate away from the mainstream and generally below the sort of critical appreciation offered by his contemporaries, and prefers niche genre tactics over classical Hollywood narrative (apart from his inclusion of “His Girl Friday”).
John Walker, who compiled a list of the greatest 1000 movies ever made, said of Tarantino’s choices, “he lives up to …