I don’t know why, maybe it’s a former-captain-of-the-school-chess-team thing, but I’ve always enjoyed looking at “best films” lists, even if sometimes it’s only for the pleasure of disagreeing with the selections. The London Spectator recently came up with “50 Essential Films,” an interesting, if maddening, example of the genre made particularly infuriating by the perverse refusal to include The Greatest Film of All Time, a crime compounded by the compiler when he added (scroll down) another 35 films without putting things right. This disgrace was then (implicitly) celebrated by the magazine’s Alex Massie when he threw in his own list still without any hint of Lime. The horror . . .

Glad to see Alex did include The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in his list, however. I tend to be a little cautious about describing movies as “conservative,” but if you want a truly Tory film, the marvelous Colonel Blimp is the one to see.