Given the tens of thousands of films that have been made over the past 50-odd years, it's surprising how much exposure, fandom, deconstruction and just plain Empire-filling guff gets heaped upon a tiny few of them - as if filmdom in its massive, multivarious entirety doesn't warrant much attention beyond the usual suspects (cf. The Usual Suspects). Hence here's a titchy contribution to the ever-growing pile of bandwidth-clogging guff about those other films - the ones you won't find Mark Kermode introducing on late night Channel Four, although you might find a bored continuity announcer heralding their appearance on mid-afternoon Channel Four if you're lucky. Praising the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick, arguing about where George Lucas went wrong or claiming what a subversive genius Russ Meyer somehow was, for liking big tits a lot - there's enough of that already. But what makes a finely-constructed caper comedy? What's the best British sitcom spin-off film? How great were the glory days of the likes of Felix Aylmer and Marianne Stone? That's the sort of stuff we're interested in. It involves delving into the lost companies of British cinema's Golden Age - the Mancunian Film Corporations, the Benmars, the British and Dominions, who made films seen by millions, or more likely by about two hundred. And there are swathes of '60s and '70s Hollywood that for some reason have fallen into obscurity in the last 20 years, for reasons no-one seems to know. In short, all the stuff we used to watch on screen (silver or telly) which seems to have been written out of cinema history to make way for that all-important Farrelly brothers lifetime achievement award. This doesn't mean we're up for the old "films were better then!" chestnut - well, not in so many words, at least - but we have to say that films were a lot more interesting then, for many, many reasons. Here are a few of them.