While others may be busy this year marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, it should not be allowed to go unremarked that today happens to be the 20th anniversary of the death of Leslie Halliwell (1929–1989), film critic, movie buyer for the ITV network and fellow Boltonian.

I was introduced to Halliwell's Film Guide (fourth edition) when I was 15 and was instantly captivated and intrigued by his short and often acerbic reviews. Here was someone who clearly loved the old classics and was more often than not less than impressed by the latest Hollywood offerings.

There were 27 cinemas in Bolton when Halliwell was a child, the finest of which, the Odeon, opened in 1937 (I remember the Odeon finally closing in 1984 to, inevitably, make way for a bingo hall). Halliwell would later recall that these splendid new cinemas contrasted oddly with the poverty, unemployment and grime of real life.

Halliwell was educated at the prestigious Bolton School. Some 40 years later, my mother would – on the recommendation of our GP – send me along to take the entrance exams for the same school. I recall sitting in a classroom full of immaculately dressed boys and opening the exam paper and being utterly bewildered at just how difficult the questions were. I failed the exam – rather spectacularly, I recall.

In later books, Halliwell would lovingly recollect going to the movies with his mother and watching classic after classic including Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes:

Real life was fascinating, but untidy and sometimes sad; the kind of life shown on the silver screen had dramatic progression, and its loose ends of plot were always tied up…it gave me things to dream about.

The first edition of his Film Guide appeared in 1977 and boasted some 8,000 movie reviews. By the time of his death 12 years later, the Guide was into its seventh edition and now contained 16,000 reviews.

Halliwell would award a movie a maximum of four stars. To give you an idea just how strict he was about this, it should be noted that the vast majority of the movies he reviewed got no stars whatsoever. In the final edition, only 129 movies (out of 16000 reviewed) received the top four-star rating, with the last one being Bonnie and Clyde from 1967. No movie in the subsequent 20 years received the top rating. In Halliwell's own words:

Four stars, then, indicate a film outstanding in many ways, a milestone in cinema history, remarkable for acting, direction, writing, photography or some other aspect of technique.

To give you a flavour of how scathing he could be, here is what he thought of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange:

A repulsive film in which intellectuals have found acres of social and political meaning; the average judgment is likely to remain that it is pretentious and nasty rubbish for sick minds who do not mind jazzed-up images and incoherent sound.

I do miss Leslie Halliwell and his film guide. And if he was still alive, do you want to know what I would ask him? I would ask him why on earth he withheld that precious fourth star from The Godfather parts one and two.