1950s

The decade of enormous cars, leather jackets and DAs, the 1950s is just about Mark Kermode's favourite period in history.

A measure of how badly Forrest Gump with A-levels failed was that not even Brad Pitt looking fabulous - on a motorbike like Marlon Brando and James Dean - could save the film.

By the time Revolutionary Road came out - as Roger Ebert pointed out, effectively the sequel to Titanic - Mark was fed up with films that said the lives of people in the 1950s were rubbish, when in fact to his mind everything looked fantastic ("great suits and ties") and he'd be perfectly happy to deal with the psychological madness if he could just drive the cars:

"The really radical thing right now would be to see a drama set in the 1950s in which housewives were having an absolutely great time. They think it's fantastic - "look at this, my husband's off at work, I haven't got anything to do, I'm going to have another gin and smoke 20 cigarettes a day because we haven't discovered that they give you cancer yet". That would actually be more edgy."