What is it that makes a great opening sequence? It's a personal thing, of course, but when a film grabs your attention from the opening frame, knocks you out of your seat or even grinds you into it, you tend to remember it fondly, even if the rest of it fails to measure up. It has to be said that this is something modern American movies tend to do very well, though their increasing reliance on formula has resulted in almost every big US release starting with a loud and witless bang, a "please stay with us!" shout to the eventual TV audience and a taste of things to come for the short attention span generation, reassurance that the upcoming ten minutes of talk and character introduction will eventually be replaced by more of the visual shouting of the first scene.

The list below is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive, just a few suggestions from our own list of favourites (not all of which found anything like unanimous agreement), listed in order of alphabet rather than preference and identified by contributor. It's unlikely to be the last, and we willingly include any decent suggestions in future lists.

By 1979 we'd had The Deer Hunter, but it was Coppola's take on the Vietnam war that was getting our particular band of cinema hungry film students excited back in 1979. Working in London as I did during the holidays, I got to see it first and under ideal conditions - whereas provincial cinemas were to get the 35mm print with its closing credits, the ABC Shaftsbury Avenue were screening the 70mm one with no credits and handing out a highly collectable glossy booklet to every patron, a document one of my fellow students stole from me. You think I haven't forgotten about that, you bastard? If I can just work out who it was...

Anyway, knowing a lot about the film's troubled production but nothing about the structure of the film itself, I sat in the dark and watched a static shot of jungle greenery fade up on the screen. From the back of the cinema's very tasty sound system, the slowed-down sound of helicopter blades began and traveled swiftly down one side of the auditorium, turning heads as it did so. As it reached the screen, a large helicopter drifted across the picture and the roter sound continued its journey around the cinema and back to the rear. We were in Vietnam, this was a US military helicopter, images I was expecting to see, but not presented like this, an almost abstract approach to a situation we knew mainly through vérité-style news reports. More helicopters appeared, the opening strains of 'The End' by The Doors kicked in, and at the very moment Jim Morrison warbled that "This is the end..." the forest exploded in napalm. As spinning helicopter blades became rotating ceiling fans and Martin's Sheen's head appeared upside down on one side of the shot, I knew beyond doubt that I was about to see something very, very special. A gorgeous audio-visual marriage from a film that is bursting with them.

Imagine this. You're a young science fiction film fan and all you've been thinking and hearing and reading about for months is the new film from Ridley Scott, a director with at this point only two films under his belt, The Duellists and Alien, both of which you loved. You know a bit about Blade Runner, but not as much as you'd like to. You know Harrison Ford, the guy who played Han Solo, is in it, and that he has a short haircut. You know it's set in the not too distant future and you know it's supposed to have atmosphere oozing from every pore. You heard John Hurt on the radio, when asked about Ridley Scott and the realism of the settings in Alien, laugh and say, "Oh, you wait until you see his new film!" You are going nuts with anticipation, but it won't be out in the UK for something like four months!

Then you open the latest edition of Starburst, and they have the science fiction film equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket - a coupon allowing the holder entry to a free preview screening just three weeks from now. All you have to do is turn up at one of the selected cinemas at some ungodly hour of the morning. We selected the ABC in Shaftsbury Avenue (it's that cinema again) and got there three hours early. There was already a queue halfway round the block. Camus, who I hadn't seen in ages, was close to the front. This was one we both experienced at the same time.

I've never known a buzz like it - 700 or so hard core genre fans crammed into one room, rabid with excitement. The titles were individually cheered (a contingent of girls who knew their Dutch films were whooping for Rutger Hauer, who was new to the rest of us) and then the intriguing prologue detailing the Replicant problem scrolled up, accompanied by as Vangellis's extraordinary melding of sound effects and electronics. The caption 'Los Angeles, 2019' appeared. Then, as the score seemed to explode in a mixture of electronic pianos, cymbals and horns, the huge screen (did I mention we were in the front row?) filled with the most astonishing cityscape I had ever laid eyes on. I had genuinely never imagined anything like it. As spinners flew past, exhaust flames were let loose and the sweep of this view gave way to a massive close-up of a watching eye, my own eyes were wet with tears of disbelief. I've seen it many times since, of course, but I'd give half my DVD collection to experience that again. In the age of CGI, busy cityscapes have become something of a standard, but none have managed to capture Blade Runner's magic - only Mamoru Oshii's animated Innocence has managed to widen my eyes to even half that diameter in recent years.

"This is pretty self-explanatory," said David Lynch, introducing this sequence on a half-hour trip through modern surrealist cinema, as I sat there amazed, confused and so desperate to see the whole film I traveled over 90 miles to catch it at The Lumiere in London, where I was equally bemused. A few months later I saw it for a third time and it all made perfect sense, just as Big Dave have promised.

This is the king of allegorical opening sequences. As the strains of Bobby Vinton's 'Blue Velvet' wash over the soundtrack, the camera tilts down to reveal a blindingly white picket fence and a row of brightly coloured flowers set against a perfect blue sky. A fire engine drifts lazily down the road, which children cross in an orderly and uniform fashion. We are in small town America, where everything is in perfect harmony. At least that's the way it seems. In one yard a middle-aged man in watering his lawn, but the hose is caught on a plant, and in his attempt to free it he suffers a heart attack. As he lies writhing on the ground, his dog playing unknowingly with the still spraying water, the camera drifts across the lawn, down through the grass and beneath. The song gives way to a sinister synthesiser and the exaggerated noise of burrowing insects, whose bodies soon fill the screen. In this one sequence Lynch sets the tone for the entire film, an astonishing exploration of the dark underside of everyday life. Fabulous.

Region 1/2 DVD comparison

Un Chien Andalou (1928 - Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali)

If you are going to assault your audience with an opening scene, then REALLY go for them, and no one did it better than Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali way back in 1928 with this still shocking slice of Buñuel's own nightmare imagery. "Once upon a time..." says the misleading, fairy tale style caption, and as a lively Argentinean tango plays on the soundtrack, a man (actually Buñuel himself) sharpens a straight razor on a strap and tests the blade on his thumbnail, then steps outside onto a balcony and looks up at the moon. Cut (no pun intended) to a close-up of a girl's face looking directly out at the audience. With his left hand, the man holds open her eye and draws the razor across her eyeline. As a cloud passes rapidly in front of the moon, the razor cuts open the eye in horrifying, graphic close-up, and half the audience vomits on the floor. Despite being made 76 years ago, this is still the most shocking opening sequence in film history, and announced the arrival of surrealist cinema with a most decisive bang.

Region 2 DVD review.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milk Bar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening." One of the most iconic, utterly gorgeous opening shots in the history of cinema introduces us to the main characters, the film's Nadsat language, its distinctive interior design and the intentions of Alex and his gang. And it's just a straightforward tracking shot, starting on a close up of Alex's face, made-up and staring malevolently out at the audience, and pulls slowly back to reveal the gang, the bar, other customers and and a white-clad bouncer. It sounds simple, it IS simple, but it's still cinematic perfection.

It's the eve of my seventeenth birthday. I fell over the handle bars of my moped getting to town, totaling the bike in the process. I was first in the cinema queue and the manager (bless you, Steve Utley) said that if more people didn't show up he'd cancel the screening. Cancel it, schmancel it. I took my seat and at eleven pm the curtains opened.

I can remember this experience like it was happening now. White titles on black ("In Association With EMI") accompanied by a music cue that was building to say the least. The director's credit faded away… The music built, a promised crescendo seconds away. As the cue could not get any louder, it did. I braced myself for the most unique opening of a movie I have even seen. Why? Because it was one frame long. A twenty fourth of a second.

Check it out. Close Encounters starts with a frame of white, or a subliminal flash frame. That's class. Steven, wherefore art thou?

What can I say - it's very atmospheric (check out the dead human pilot and the wreckage of his fighter floating past the camera), boasts superb model work that still stands today, and is shot very well (having both the flaming drac craft and the human fighter fly past the camera is one of the highlights). Although it's a little exposition heavy due to Dennis Quaid's narration, this opening certainly sets up the rest of film very well - the feelings of anger and arrogance are made very clear by Will Davidge's (Dennis Quaid) cocky attitude and obsession in shooting down the Drac ship (& highlighted by the to camera medium close-ups of Dennis Quaid), feelings which are ultimately developed into love and compassion for your enemy through the rest of the film.

OK, this is a definite case of a director trying to grab our attention at the start of the film, but this is without doubt an example of the technique as its classiest. To really understand its impact you have to nip back to 1978 and the film's first cinema screenings - this was before Friday the 13th and the endless parade of crappy stalk-and-slash cheapo horrors that followed in its wake, and before the Steadicam became common enough to be used on everything from sporting events to Saturday morning TV.

At the end of the kiddie chant that follows the titles, the camera glides out from behind a tree, sneaks up to the house, peers in at young Judith Myers and her boyfriend horsing around, then when the two nip upstairs for one of the fastest fucks in history, drifts indoors, watches whoever this vision belongs to grab a knife, wait for the boyfriend to leave and stab the girl to death. Only when the camera floats back outside and the girl's parents arrive do we cut away to reveal, in an outlandish crane out, that the killer was the girl's own six-year-old brother Michael. The shot lasts seven minutes (it actually has two cuts executed to speed up the pace) and it remains one of the great horror movie openings, topped only by one a few boxes below...

We open on the view from a security camera in a busy mid-town bank. People come and go. There is a sense of impending violence but that's mainly suggested by the grim 80s synth played as the titles roll. After nearly a minute a rain-coated man with glasses enters the frame at the bottom right and stands still, waiting. A security guard passes him and nods hello. He stands there, seemingly lost, until 3 more security guards carrying money bags enter from the rear from the bank. As they get close to him he pulls out a shotgun from his coat and calmly shoots them one by one then walks over and picks up the bags, shooting another security guard on the way. As he goes to leave the bank he notices he is on camera and walks towards us for a closer look. He flashes us a big habitual grin and shoots the camera. Cut to snow, (remember that?? This is an 80s movie remember), then cut to the exterior of the bank as our 'perp' (Chris Mulkey) shoots one of the injured guards again, gets in his black Ferrari and speeds off. The ensuing high speed chase lasts for six minutes.

Watching this opening as a teenager was absolutely fantastic. I remember sitting on the edge of my seat, open mouthed. I couldn't believe the balls on this guy, and this was no Arnold Schwarzenneger clone, this guy looked like an office worker, and a nice guy. After getting in the Ferrari our boy floors the pedal, goes wherever he pleases and does anything he likes in order to shake off the cops and got away with the cash - and he has fun doing it. He rams cars off the road, tears through the park slamming into a guy in a wheelchair, plows through some roadworks and encounters the obligatory 'two men carrying a sheet of glass'. The scene - although played to a certain extent for laughs - was quite shocking at the time as it seems nothing is going to stop this guy. Having said that, you know he's going down because he's not the star of the movie and you have an idea of the plot, and you WANT the cops to get him because he's the bad guy. For about the first 6 times I saw this movie I wanted the cops to catch him but then…… three years ago a game came out called Grand Theft Auto III. You all know it so I won't bother describing it, but if you haven't seen the hidden in the last three years I urge you to pick it up (play.com £14.99) and see if you can watch the intro without having to fight the urge to run out into the street, flag down the first half decent car you see, car-jack it and go on a bloody rampage that ends with you having the shit shot out of you.

So...Tony Scott eh? Brother of Ridley… Makes movies for geezers… The guy directs with his dick right? Well he has been responsible for some awful movies… Top Gun, Days of Thunder anyone? But to be fair those movies had Don Simpson's macho stench all over them. I actually like Tony Scott as a director and The Last Boy Scout is a lot of fun, but back to the intro: Rather unusually this movie actually has a proper title sequence, and it's a cracker too. The movie is based in the world of American football so the title sequence is done in the style of a 'Monday night football' style TV show - complete with 4:3 ratio, rounded off screen edges and scan-lines. The titles are great; Bill Medley singing in front of the gorgeous Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders is intercut with glossily shot footage of American Football. The titles fly in and spin out and there are more american flags than you can wave an AK-47 at. It's hilariously nauseating stuff… and yet I can't help loving it for it's bare-faced cheek. When something is THIS over the top I can kid myself that it surely MUST have been done as a bit of a joke by the English director, Scott. It probably wasn't and may not even have been filmed by Scott but I love it nonetheless, but I'm a sucker for title sequences.

The titles build to a fantastic crescendo with two football helmets slamming together and exploding and we cut to the crowd at a real football game. It's a sea of umbrellas on a black, wet night. The football being played is wet rough and heavy, a stark contrast to the gleaming grace of the opening credits. We cut to the locker room and spaced out star quarterback 'Billy Cole'. Obviously high on drugs and terrified out of his mind he takes a call from a slimy gangster type telling him he better start scoring touchdowns… "just do whatever it takes to win.. or else you're history." Cole pops a couple of steroids and goes out on the pitch. On the second 'down' he is passed the ball and runs with it. He gets past 3 of the opposing team but we can see a huge linebacker just waiting to take him down. We cut back and forth between Billy Cole and the huge defender. As they are about to meet, Cole pulls a gun and shoots the linebacker in the face. He clips another player in the shoulder and yet another in the kneecap before coming to a stop in the end-zone. The players all crowd round - at road accident gawking distance - to see Cole take off his helmet and drop to one knee (in a quite beautiful shot.) "Ain't life a bitch" he says and blows his own brains out. Apart from being a nice little narrative in itself it really sets up the movie… you're about to watch a violent film about corruption in the NFL, but it's got a bit of a sense of humour.

What's also great about the opening scene is the late Michel Kamen's wonderfully militaristic score. It's essentially a series of tense cues rubbing against each other and seems to have been composed to compliment the sound of rain falling in the background. It builds and builds into a beautifully soft climax reminiscent of a playground roundabout slowing to a stop. I honestly believe Kamen's scores are the main reason a lot of the film and television projects he worked on in the eighties still hold up remarkably well today… His score for The Dead Zone is my favourite of all time, but now I'm rambling… Watch The Last Boy Scout and revel in it's unashamed glossy eighties violence, Shane Black's punchy script, and Tony Scott directing very well with his dick.

Picture the scene. I'm in an editing suite in Amsterdam. Every Wednesday night at the City theatre they have a sneak preview. In Dutch this is called a 'Sneak Preview'. Sorry. Couldn't resist. A friend of mine, Jochem, inexplicably, is following Captain Janeway's adventures in Star Trek Voyager. We crack open a bottle of vodka and imbibe three VHS episodes and more than three glassfuls. It's 1999 and the Phantom Menace trailer has Jochem salivating. He's a child of Lucas's trilogy and is about to be sorely disabused by the prequels. But there's a sneak preview tonight and despite the last one I saw being a lame American comedy I agree enthusiastically to accompany my friend. We are physically capable but perhaps mentally scrambled. I don't care. I'm in that foggy half-world of slightly pissed and very, very happy. Four rows from the front of a massive cinema screen, we park our asses and watch a curtain part. My good friend Slarek once told me that he had no expectations in the cinema and if anything appeared on the screen he was happy. Sensing that was exactly the way to approach a sneak preview (or a 'Sneak Preview' in Dutch), my friend and I got comfortable. We hunkered down and I don't even know what 'hunkered' means.

I can't remember if there was popcorn. It may have even been the days when you could take vodka and oranges into the cinema (oh, how civilised a country Holland is/was). We both stared at the screen - green with digital numbers coming at us…

By the time Trinity had disappeared up a phone line, we had foodstuffs dribbling from our weak hinged open jaws. We had just seen cinematic nectar and were so much in the directors' hands it was obscene. A shame about the sequels but the original, drunk in Holland, was a wonder to behold…

I had no idea what Clive Barker was capable of with a decent budget (I had seen his debut Hellraiser which I adored). I also had no idea that a man who could not technically write music (at least on the five lines of a music sheet) was capable of. But then Danny Elfman always seemed to be able to pull a score out of nowhere. I can't remember the titles. But I do remember the opening scene.

A fist of music (the best strike the Odeon Leicester Square could muster) smacked me squarely on the jaw and the images were swift and absolutely riveting. It was a zephyr of an opening that had myself and my friend gawping with astonishment. These creatures had to make it to the graveyard before sunrise and I was cheering them on.

That beautiful woman with spines like an armadillo, snarling into camera; the crescent headed mutant sprinting as if hell itself were chasing him. What a tremendous way to open a film. Who are these people? Why are they so desperate?

Start a movie like that and you have me. I'm yours. Dance away.

One of the longest, most complex and funniest pre-credits sequences ever, this lightning trip through the back-story of the two main characters is mini-movie in itself, crammed with character and story detail, which is often delivered with staggering economy and always with breathtaking wit and imagination. In many ways this is the Coen Brothers at their most inventive and hilarious, really showcasing their their ability to tell a story through canny camera placement and editing, perfectly counterpointed by Nicholas Cage's deadpan voice-over and Holly Hunter's animated performance. "Turn to the Right!"

If you're one of those people who get very blasé about Tobe Hooper's horror masterpiece, then you know bugger all about what makes a great horror movie and clearly were not there when the film was released, when it was banned by virtually every council in the country, when you had to pull off the deception of your life to sneak in to see it under age and when you sat in the cinema and nearly puked with terror at Hooper's relentless assault on even the most hardened of sensibilities. By the time most of us got to see it, we had already built up out fears and expectations to such a degree that even the hint of something nasty had us jumping, but Hooper didn't wait to establish the main characters before turning the screws on the audience.

A black screen is accompanied by the breathless sounds sounds of digging and something wooden being torn open, and an almost random collection of musical sounds and rattling cymbals. Then, intermittently, a flashgun goes of, accompanied by a creepy, up-twisting instrumental whine. At first we cannot make out just what we are seeing in these moments, but it's clearly something bad, something decaying. Was that a hand? A jaw? An eye? Finally, as a news report telling of "grave robbing in Texas" slides onto the soundtrack, we are treated to a broad daylight close-up of a rotted skeletal face, which a pull-out reveals to belong to what that broadcast describes as "a grisly work of art," created by attaching body parts from a number of graves to a tombstone. The camera holds on this as the sound of the report gives way to a thunderous rumble and a credits sequence involving solar flares begins, and this curious, under-age horror fan began planning how he could run out of the cinema without screaming like a girl and wetting his pants.

Unquestionably the most marvelous, intoxicating opening shot in cinema history. Starting on a close-up of a time-bomb being set and planted, the camera cranes up and travels halfway across a small but lively town, then drops down to settle on the bustling activity of the border crossing, finally coming to an end when the car-bomb explodes and we cut not to the explosion itself, but its immediate aftermath. On the way we have been introduced to the locale, the main plot and two of the lead characters. It's still a dazzler today, and sorry, but the 'director's cut' assembled recently from Welles' own notes, actually lacks the wallop of the original, stripped as it is of with Henry Mancini's blary but intoxicating jazz score.

The Way of the Gun (2000 - Christopher McQuarry)

It starts quite casually - The Rolling Stones' Rip This Joint on the soundtrack, a leisurely crane shot as our two antagonists walk past and we end up focusing on a ginger-afro guy and his potty-mouth girlfriend. "What's so special about this?" I hear you cry. Well I tell you - the next 3 minutes were the most morally shocking I witnessed in the year 2000 at the cinema (Maybe I should watch more movies). Check out the effective cussing ('Fucksuck', 'Fuckstart') that comes predominately out of a woman's mouth….. The infamous line delivery by Ryan Philippe of "Shut that Cunt's mouth or I'll come over and Fuckstart her head." (Swearing normally never shocks me, but when I heard this I burst out laughing, not only because it was very funny but also how outrageous it was to hear in a Hollywood film.) The ensuing chaos where by Ryan (Parker) starts the 'man dance', by repeatedly punching in a woman's face. Benicio Del Toro (Longbaugh) helps out by stamping on other lady's unprotected toes. The fact that Parker is laughing through blood stained eyes as the brawling continues. (As I was through tear-stained eyes.)

We end the scene from above, as deadpan delivery introduces "For the record I will be known as Mr Parker and my associate as Mr Longbaugh." Name another film that begins not only with a cinematic/historic in-joke (Parker and Longbaugh were the real last names of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid), but a statement of intent from a director whose sole purpose in this scene is to violate every rule of sympathetic screen protagonists - indeed they are every bit true ANTgonists. I can't remember a realised opening scene that not only portrays its characters in such dark humorous light but sets the scene and tone for the rest of the film - I challenge anyone who has not seen this film to guess from the opening scene what type of movie this going to be - black comedy? Western? Thriller? Critique of the Genre? That's the secret of a good movie opening. (For the record, according to Christopher McQuarrie's DVD commentary, this brawl was based on a true-life incident involving Frisbee players in a dog-park and his decision to (if necessary) hit the women in order to "steal their victory.")