THE FIVE BEST FILMS

Election (15)

Fired by a stinging script and forceful playing (from Reece Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick), Election paints a blackly amusing portrait of student politics, Nebraska-style. It gets our vote.

Buena Vista Social Club (U)

Wim Wenders's affectionate salute to the Cuba-son musicians of old Havana. The men are gnarled, snow-haired octogenarians; the music as active and buoyant as a three-year-old.

All About My Mother (15)

Almodovar at his quirky, curious best. All About My Mother offers a nostalgic salute to mums everywhere, not to mention a nostalgic sayonara to the good old days of transvestite junkie prostitution.

Analyze This (15)

Robert De Niro's angst-ridden mobster enlivens this lightweight movie sitcom from director Harold Ramis. File it alongside TV's The Sopranos in its spry mix of mobsterism and psychiatry.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (15)

America's beauty pageant circuit goes under the gun in this ill- disciplined but energetic black comedy. Denise Richards and Kirsten Dunst play chalk and cheese rivals for the tinselly crown.

THE FIVE BEST REVIVALS

The Night of the Hunter (Sunday, 2.40pm, Lux)

Conceived by creator Charles Laughton as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose" tale, Night of the Hunter trips through a Bible Belt South in the company of Robert Mitchum's murderous preacher man.

The Birds (Wednesday, 9.00pm, NFT)

Tippi Hedren tackles a fluttery menace in Hitchcock's playful apocalyptic thriller. Released in 1963, The Birds spawned a crop of copycats. None, naturally, came close to equalling its energy and abandon.

Pulp Fiction (Wednesday, 6.00pm, NFT)

Tarantino's giddy homage to the crime genre is less dimestore fiction than a kind of jivey cinematic jukebox, as a mix of vibrant interlinked plotlines chase John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson through underworld LA.

eXistenZ (Wednesday, 7.00pm, Lux)

Faintly undervalued on its release earlier this year, David Cronenberg's demonically clever computer-game thriller is still well worth plugging into.

L'Argent (Monday, 6.30pm, Cine Lumiere)

Robert Bresson signed off from movie-making with this harsh and brooding fable from 1983, charting the corrupting course of a forged banknote.