My father always said swearing was a sign of inarticulacy, but I just never fucking listened. In my eyes, expletives are one of the pillars on which true cinema is founded, the other three being cigarettes, gelled quiffs and cute French girls. Whether it's uttered in surprise, anger or just with rock'n'roll nonchalance, a burst of profanity signals breakdown on the highway of language, where the handy screenwriter and the, er, wheeljack of character development really come into their own. As for the other pillars: smoking is now verboten in the western world; the gelled quiff has been hunted into near-extinction, the last surviving one seen fleetingly on The Culture Show; luckily, cute French girls have not yet been legislated against. And swearing? It's getting its own documentaries, and even the once-peerless c-word has lost much of its power. Swearing's going legit, in other words. Have they managed to take the fun out of that, too? Is nothing unsacred? We need a new curse for a new age; start the Facebook group now.

1) It's nice that (probably) the first "fuck" in feature-film history is uttered by a woman – during Molly Bloom's climactic monologue (9min 57sec) in Joseph Strick's 1967 version of Ulysses. And unlike the mountain ranges of f-words that loom up afterwards, it's said with no malice; pretty much meant literally.

2) "I'm a mushroom cloud-laying motherfucker, motherfucker!" Extra points for brilliantly stunted vocabulary from Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary in Pulp Fiction (8min 50sec) – showcasing the delicate, twin nuances of a great American insult and perfectly befitting Jules Winnfield's line in leather goods.



3) Hollywood's not properly exploited the possibilities of cussing in foreign tongues – though digital windbag the Merovingian has some opinions on the use of French (1min 58sec) for such matters in The Matrix Reloaded.



4) "You mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries." There is indeed something to be learned from the French, and perhaps my dad was right, after all: the true lords of offence-giving, like the castle-dwellers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, don't even need bad language to stick it up 'em.

5) "How very interesting. You're a true vulgarian, aren't you?" "You're the vulgarian, you fuck." Though it has to be said, after all that, the Yanks are pretty good at trash-talking – it's Cleesian snide vs Klinian bludgeoning (3min 12sec) in A Fish Called Wanda.

For anyone new to Clip Joint, we'd love it if you posted your own suggestions – ideally with a video link – in the comments section below. The best one gets to be guardian.co.uk/film king for a day (or maybe just wins an excellent film-related prize). Interesting suggestions backed up with a specific clip from the work in question, illustrating the theme most clearly, will always stand the best chance of winning; it's not always possible to find that key scene online, so posting the trailer is the next best option.

Thanks to everyone who found themselves into a tight spot for last week's claustrophobic Clip Joint. These were our close encounters:

1) Live and Let Die's voodoo festivities are like an afternoon at a Caribbean creche compared with the live burial in Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow.

2) I knew the stuck-in-a-tunnel scene (3min 18sec) in Brazilian prison drama Carandiru had been nicked from somewhere. Bet AA Milne never thought about subjecting Winnie the Pooh to an "ass-stabbing".

3) "The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened." Caught in a pothole in Neil Marshall's The Descent, another one for the file marked Things Never To Utter Under Any Circumstances In A Film.

4) "Come on in girls, and leave all hope behind." Groucho Marx is one of those claustrophiles I was talking about – it's all (and I mean all) back to his hotel room in A Night at the Opera.

5) And this week's winner is … MsSauerkraut, for suggesting the cupboard scene from Carrie. Most of this week's examples touched on physical or psychological torment, or sometimes both together. But this is claustrophobia in 3-D: bodily confinement steeped by religious brainwashing, with – in the close resemblance between Sissy Spacey and Laurie Piper – an air of inescapable genetic suffocation, too. Enough to release latent telekinetic powers in anyone. MsSauerkraut, don't forget to email catherine.shoard@guardian.co.uk to claim your prize.

Thanks to MrWormold, AJBee, daredavid and nilpferd for the rest of this week's picks