I seriously doubt that I could recall 10 films that I would want to see over and over again. There are many, many films that I have seen which I have been happy to have seen. There are a few I might like to see again and maybe one or two that I would definitely like to see again.

I would like to see The Shape Of Water again, really just to see if I really liked it as much as I thought I did. I recently saw The Shawshank Redemption, again, and really liked it as much as I had the first time.

When I was young – back in the olden days for many of you youngsters out there – I’m talking about the 1950s – my sisters and I would go to bed and wait for our mother to go to bed and fall asleep, then get up and go into the living room and watch one or sometimes two, movies. (In the long school holidays in the summer.)

Those secretly seen films were mainly from the 30s and 40s and made a great impression on all of us. I remember watching The Fall of The House of Usher, more than once over those years. Other films I remember were those which featured Our Gang and similar films with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. I think there were some screwball comedies and more than a few noir films as well but the names have disappeared from my memory. And I’ve just remembered a film about a mermaid who came out of the water and pretended to be a woman.

As I got older I occasionally took myself to the Esquire, the movie theatre in our neighbourhood in Cincinnati. I saw Elizabeth II’s coronation film, and a film called Moulin Rouge which was about Toulouse Lautrec – nothing like the film of the same name made in the past few years.

Another memory – and I can’t have been more than five or six – was Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman. All I remembered as a slightly older child was the fire burning Joan; I couldn’t have understood the film and why things were happening at that age and I’ve no idea who took me to see it. It gave me nightmares for a while!*

My sister Judy was a great one for having favourite movies. She fell in love with Gary Cooper in High Noon and must have seen it tens of times over the years. She also fell in love with Peter O’Toole and TE Lawrence when she saw Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema! Slightly later, she added Patrick Mc Goohan and Max von Sydow to those screen lovers. I can’t imagine how many times she saw films with those particular men in them!

I liked the James Bond films when I was younger; I quite liked many of the musicals that I saw – The King and I, Oklahoma, West Side Story, South Pacific – and if they came on tv and I had nothing better to do (or to watch) I wouldn’t mind watching them again.

The last film I saw was Nowhere Special which was really good. I watched that on BBC I-Player for our fortnightly film group which meets on Zoom. My friend, Myrna, chooses the film from i-Player (because not everyone has other channels like Amazon), lets us know what to watch and then on every other Monday evening at six we have our Zoom get-together. We all enjoyed the recent film!

Last fortnight’s film was Florence Foster Jenkins and, not everyone liked it! Me, I like almost every film I watch although I didn’t like The Magnificent Ambersons at all and I refused to watch something that had animals being killed right at the beginning, when I started watching it.

So – I’ve probably listed more than 10 films and I’ve liked most of them but not so much I’d want to see them again. There are so many films I’ve never seen so I might as well see one of those!