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Citizen Kane is overrated – but this Orson Welles classic isn’t Orson Welles’s masterpiece was The Magnificent Ambersons, a thoughtful epic about American wealth and the motor car. But there’s a snag… Anne Baxter arm in arm with Tim Holt in a scene from The Magnificent Ambersons Credit: Bettmann I avoid lists of the 100 greatest books, plays, paintings or films because they are inevitably meaningless. People have short memories and so rank the more recent above the antique. If strict criteria exist for evaluating such things (and I doubt they can, except at the extremes of the obvio...

'He had a certain elegance': Hannibal Lecter was inspired by a real killer  In 1963, while on assignment to Topo Chico Penitentiary in Nuevo León, Mexico to interview a murderer, a 23-year-old journalist called Thomas Harris got chatting to the prison doctor. He intended to ask him about saving the life of the killer, a Texan named Dykes Askew Simmons, after he was shot in a botched escape attempt, but instead he found that it was the doctor who did most of the questioning. “Mr. Harris, how did you feel when you looked at Simmons?... Would you say the sunglasses add an element of symmetry...

'A hand-grenade of a film': Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson's If.... Credit: Alamy British director Lindsay Anderson wanted to shoot If…. at his own alma mater, Cheltenham College. “I liked my school,” he later wrote, despite what the 1968 film might suggest. “It was a pleasant, friendly place.” To secure permission from Cheltenham, Anderson submitted to the headmaster what his lifelong friend Gavin Lambert described as “a laundered script”. “They sleight of handed him [with] a script that obviously didn't have a revolution at the end of it with the boys shooting the par...

An 'ordinary bloke': Leonard Rossiter as Reginald Perrin Credit: BBC “Mother rang – she wants to know if we’re going to see her on Sunday.” Cue the image of a hippopotamus trotting through the mud. The best-remembered gag from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is – almost 45 years since it first aired – still very funny. Sure, that hippo trots right into the category of standard Seventies mother-in-law material, but there’s really nothing standard about The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which is now being repeated on BBC Four after being absent from our screens for decade...

The ‘unfathomable’ scandal behind Netflix’s Murder Among the Mormons Car bombings, necromancy and fraud – a new true crime series sheds new light on a case that almost blew up the secretive religion Hofmann pictured after his arrest in 1985 Credit: third hour  “Welcome to Salt Lake City,” runs an old airline pilot joke. “Remember to set your watches back 10 years.”  It’s a tired gag. But it neatly captures the air of fusty eccentricity that most people – if they think about it – associate with Mormonism and their wholesome hometown. Mormons, as everyone knows, are irr...