In Pocket Cinema, Matthew Sweet looks at how the mobile phone is transforming the way people watch and make movies

1. Best Film of 20th Century

The Kid (1921). Chaplin’s first great feature. It’s a profound study of the relationship between child and (surrogate) parent – made by the star while deep in mourning for his dead son. It’s also zenith of a cinema that was essentially Victorian – unashamedly emotional and fiercely cognisant of lives of the urban poor.

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

Dancer in the Dark (2000). I cheered this film at its premiere in Cannes. Everyone else seemed to be booing. But I’m sticking to my guns. Von Trier’s film is a rich, affecting melodrama that’s as good as anything by Douglas Sirk – and just as intoxicatingly artificial.

3. Earliest Film Memory

Disney’s Fantasia (1940) at the ABC cinema in Hull in 1973: Mickey Mouse, as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, unleashing the forces of darkness in the form of an army of overhelpful broomsticks. The ABC has now been demolished; Disney, of course, is still upright.

4. Scene that changed your life

An atrocity in a rural post office in Went the Day Well? (1942). A nice middle-aged lady discusses her childlessness with the brutish Nazi soldier sitting at her parlour table, then throws pepper in his eyes and kills him with the axe that she keeps by the Aga. A shocking fantasy about what all those stock Ealing characters would have been forced to become in the event of a German invasion. I think of it every few days.

5. Best going to the flicks experience

At a summer film festival in Bologna, where the silent version of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) was projected in the central square as the city orchestra performed Neil Brand’s new score for the movie. The local pickpockets and bagsnatchers loved the event, too – all those distracted foreigners sitting outside and staring at a big screen. Hitchcock would have appreciated that.

6. Best director working today

Michael Haneke, though he seems to hate us all. I’m slightly resentful about nominating him, as his cinema – Funny Games, Code Unknown, The White Ribbon – exists partly to punish the audience for looking to the screen as a source of pleasure and satisfaction. But there’s nobody else who makes such strange and powerful pictures.

7. Best actor working today

Daniel Day-Lewis – who has been filling films with fireworks since I was in the sixth-form. His every performance is an event that it would reckless to ignore.

8. Best actress working today

Lauren Bacall – still the strong poison she was during the Bogey years. I’ve named her in the hope that she will suddenly become ubiquitous, and have a Late Period to rival Picasso’s.

9. Most exciting new film prospect

It’s a prospect that’s still a long way off – Steven Spielberg’s big-screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. It seems a perfect match of subject and director – and fits into what I think is the director’s long-term career goal – to put his mark on the major events of twentieth-century history, and become the American Eisenstein.

10. Most interesting new development in cinema

The cameraphone – not just because it makes everyone with a mobile into a potential film director, but because of the impact it will have on other art-forms. The proliferation of photography and the invention of the box Brownie transformed twentieth century art – surely the movie camera in your pocket will have a similar effect.

11. Will watching movies on mobile phones take off?

I once tried to watch Master and Commander on my i-pod – it was like looking at some ants being swashed about in a glass of water. But there’s no reason why a small subject shouldn’t work on a small screen – or older films shot on pre-cinemascope formats. I’m now imagining a utopia in which young people sit on street corners watching Margaret Rutherford movies on their handsets.

12. Are Hollywood's days numbered?

In the 1970s it was an orthodoxy to say that that Hollywood would reduce its output to one or two big blockbusters a year, that would play to coach party crowds in super-cinemas in large cities. It didn’t happen. What used to constitute Hollywood – big powerful studios that controlled the means of production and distribution – died long ago. But film-making went west mainly for the light – and that’s still there.