*2024 stock* "Carol Reed’s classic post-war mystery, The Third Man, hardly lacks for admirers. If in 1949 it was merely a well-received thriller, “a bang-up melodrama” as one New York Times reviewer put it, at some indeterminate moment it became a masterpiece – a cherished grandfather-clock in the Academy attic. In 1999, a BFI poll declared it the No. 1 greatest British film of all time. In 2018, Time Out rightly criticised this list’s lack of diversity and ran its own poll on the subject. They …