1. Best Film of 20th Century

The traditional answer is Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is fantastically ambitious and influential. My personal favourite movie is Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View (1974), because it perfectly captures the atmosphere of America in the second half of the 20th century, shadowed by assassinations and wars. But I increasingly feel that the single work from which people can learn most about how to write, direct and watch a movie is Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975.) The shark would be more physically convincing if you re-made it now but the economy of the storytelling and control of tension and the audience's terror out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock.

2. Best Film of 21st Century so far...

Hidden (Cache) by Michael Haneke. A magnificently tense and satisyingly ambiguous thriller which turns on three of the dominant modern themes: secrecy, surveillance and national guilt.

3. Earliest Film Memory

The moment of the intermission - yes, long films had intervals in those days - in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with the car dangling over the cliff, in Leeds in 1968, when I was six.

4. Scene that changed your life

I decided to become a journalist because of Alan J Pakula's All The President's Men (1976) and specifically the scene in which Woodward and Bernstein meet Deep Throat in the underground car park.

5. Best going to the flicks experience

Seeing Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge, before it opened in the UK, at a public matinee screening in New York and the audience standing at the end and applauding, which is a very rare reaction but well deserved for the second-best movie of the 21st century.

6. Best director working today

I'm going to go for Mike Leigh on the grounds that he is the only director I can think of to have created more than 20 considerable films out of his own head and those of his actors, without ever adapting a novel or relying on a screenplay by someone else. Even many great directors could only have made Vera Drake or Secrets and Lies or Naked if someone had written them as a novel first.

7. Best actor working today

At his absolute best - Chinatown, The Shining, As Good As It Gets, About Schmidt - Jack Nicholson has an unmatchable power and charisma on screen.

8. Best actress working today

Meryl Streep has proved that she can do anything at all: tragedy, comedy, musicals.

9. Most exciting new film prospect

Tom Hooper - The Damned United, The King's Speech - is potentially one of the great directors of the future.

10. Most interesting new development in cinema

The increasing perfection of digital special effects: for example, the use of one actor to play identical twins in The Social Network without, as Eric Morecambe used to say, being able to see the join.

11. Will watching movies on mobile phones take off?

For specially-made short films and sample scenes and trailers, yes. But, at a time when home entertainment is moving towards bigger and bigger screens, it seems unlikely to me that postage-stamp cinema can appeal. We watch movies in the back of the seat in front on airlines but still want the real film experience, either in cinemas or at home.

12. Are Hollywood's days numbered?

Depends what you mean by ''Hollywood''. For me, it's shorthand for American cinema, which has increasingly spread from the classic major studios into independent production companies. And I expect American cinema to continue to dominate cinema.