Your ideal movie mentor is wise, capable of performing impossible feats - and short.

[Taken from Empire magazine, article titled The Top 10 Movie Mentors]

Life is all about obstacles and how best to overcome them. Whether your goal is winning a trophy, getting laid, seeking vengeance or overthrowing your multitudinous robot oppressors, you're going to have to surmount some kind of seemingly insurmountable barrier along the way. And you're going to need help. Which is where the mentor comes in. Through sage advice, harsh words, rigorous training (often handily accelerated via the ever-useful montage) and the occasional, brutal home-truth, movie mentors are the guys who turn Joe Nobodies into Captain Courageous, shunting our heroes up over that all-important character arc while channelling all of the best dialogue along the way.

Your ideal movie mentor is wise (a trait often hidden beneath a mundane or even comical first-impression facade), capable of performing seemingly impossible feats with little effort an, most importantly, short. Great power, it would appear, comes in small packages. Or at least, it's made more impressive when dealt in small packages; there's clearly a certain visual appeal to your typical big, striding hero being talked down to by a shrimp (not literally, of course). Plus, as the wisest of all mentors once said, "Size matters not."

Yes, Yoda - specifically, Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back - is the most glaringly obvious candidate for the mantle of ultimate movie mentor, and that's precisely why he has to be at number one. Not only has he become the blueprint for almost every mentor since, his name has virtually become a synonym for "guru", and the mangled syntax of his words of wisdom have slipped into the modern lexicon. To whit: "Wars not make one great"; "Do. Or do not. There is not try"; "You must unlearn what you have learned".

Yoda's not just any old mentor, either. He's a Jedi master, the mentor's mentor. It's not just Luke Skywalker he's trained: Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu all at one point or another attended Yoda's 12-step program to attain oneness with The Force, or at least basked in his swampy erudition. This guy's a hero factory.