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20 Velvet Goldmine
Todd Haynes, 1998

Using a Citizen Kane-style flashback frame, Haynes harks back to the pan-sexual subversions of Bowie, Iggy and the early1970s glam-rock era. By the end he seems to have run out of money.

What’s supposed to be 1984 New York looks like Birmingham on a bleak Monday; Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale share an unconvincing memory of their gay rooftop romp – and the Bowie figure is reinvented as Swiss Toni.
JAMES JACKSON

19 Cast Away
Robert Zemeckis, 2000

Being stuck alone with Tom Hanks on a desert island for 90 minutes is itself a test of patience, but at least there is the whole “will-he-escape?” question. He does . . . but things don’t stop there. In a turgidly anticlimactic homecoming, he discovers that his girlfriend is married to their dentist. He looks sad. Time passes. Just when things threaten never to end he finds himself standing at a crossroads. Like we don’t get it.
JJ

18 Planet of the Apes
Tim Burton, 2001

The special effects in Burton’s remake are certainly superior to those of the original, and Helena Bonham Carter, even wearing her prosthetic monkey snout, gives a nuanced performance. But the ending is nonsensical: Mark Whalberg returns from the ape-ruled future to 2029 to discover that the Lincoln Memorial now honours the ape ruler General Thade – which would mean that the Thade he met in the future was more than 2,500 years old.
WENDY IDE

17 Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
Richard Marquand, 1983

It’s not the sickly ending, where Leia and Luke Skywalker find out they are siblings. It’s not the unlikely rehabilitation of Darth Vader, or even the way that George Lucas keeps digitally embellishing it with every rerelease. No, it’s those bloody dancing teddy bears. We fought an intergalactic war for this? Read the Times review
NIGEL KENDALL

16 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975

They changed the face of modern humour, but the Python boys, moving away from standard sketch construction, often left themselves with no punchlines. In a half-hour TV show, that’s acceptable. But on the big screen, after some of the most hysterical comedy moments in cinema history, to have King Arthur and his knights arrested by contemporary policemen is, literally, a cop-out. Read the Times review
NK

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