=243

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Louise Brooks dazzles as the dangerously appealing seductress in GW Pabst’s classic adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays.

=243

Preston Sturges works his magic in a screwball tale of a film director who goes on the road as a tramp to help write his socially significant screenplay.

=243

Woody Allen’s breakthrough as a ‘serious’ filmmaker is a sublimely funny romantic comedy about an anxious comedian’s relationship with Diane Keaton’s ditzy eccentric.

=243

Commissioned to make propaganda for Stalin’s farm collectivisations, the Soviet cinema’s great visual poet Alexander Dovzhenko instead delivered an impassioned hymn to nature.

=243

Wyatt Earp tames Tombstone in John Ford’s stirring, poetic and visually stunning western.

=243

Robert Bresson’s moving chronicle of 24 hours in the life of a neglected and abused teenage girl.

=243

A dystopian future London is the playground of a teenage gang leader in Stanley Kubrick’s stylish, controversial take on Anthony Burgess’s novel about violence and free will.

=243

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s tale of the mysterious ‘glue man’ is one of their most gently moving films.

=243

James Woods and Debbie Harry star in David Cronenberg’s mind-melting sci-fi about media domination.

=243

Andrzej Zulawski’s out-of-control horror is a bare-souled account of a broken relationship.

=243

A vibrant humanist statement on racism and immigration that remains pertinent today.

=243

Post-war working-class Liverpool life is impressionistically evoked in Terence Davies’ two-part film, by turns lyrical, humorous and horrific.

=243

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Samantha Morton plays the enigmatic title character in Lynne Ramsay’s dreamy and atmospheric road movie.

=243

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=243

=225

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Responding to criticisms of racism for his record-breaking The Birth of a Nation, filmmaking pioneer D.W. Griffith made this epic drama depicting intolerance through the ages.

=225

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Abel Gance’s heroic depiction of the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte is an undisputed cinema landmark.

=225

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Céline Sciamma’s mysterious and delicate exploration of childhood and grief.

=225

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=225

Technology and sexuality meet in head-on collision in David Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of writer J.G. Ballard’s transgressive 1973 novel.

=225

Derek Jarman’s last miracle – an extraordinary reflection on his own imminent death from an AIDS-related illness.

=225

Studio Ghibli’s anti-war masterpiece is a stark but beautifully made classic.

=225

Eric Rohmer’s sublime 1980s classic is a magical summer film about the serendipity of romance.

=211

=211

Classic Marx Brothers comedy of two small countries finding themselves on the brink of war.

=211

Broadway diva Bette Davis tries to fend off her rivals in this Oscar-winning drama.

=211

Turbulent passion and middle-class restraint combine in uniquely English style when a married woman falls for a doctor she meets at a railway station.

=211

Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric gothic nightmare blends operatic violence, disorienting dream logic and hyper-real visuals to create a horror classic.

=211

Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame excel in Nicholas Ray’s tale of murder, love and suspicion in 1950s Hollywood.

=211

Along with Apocalypse Now, Michael Cimino’s brutal but ultimately contemplative war movie is a key American cinematic take on the Vietnam conflict.

=211

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=211

=196

Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesy star in this wondrous British Technicolor classic – one of cinema’s greatest studies of ‘Englishness’.

=196

=196

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s heady romantic masterpiece.

=196

Michelangelo Antonioni’s film charts the hot and cold relationship of a young couple in bustling Rome.

=196

An insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) is seduced into murder and fraud in Billy Wilder’s classic dark thriller, adapted from the novel by James M. Cain.

=196

Peter Sellers plays three separate roles in Stanley Kubrick’s mordant Cold War comedy in which insanity and political manoeuvrings lead to nuclear meltdown.

=196

=196

Cinema’s original vampire movie, this copyright-infringing adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the great classics of German expressionist cinema.

=196

Roberto Rossellini’s ambitious and enormously moving follow-up to his breakthrough Rome, Open City.

=196

Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel returns with a fine adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s existential novel.

=196

=196

Terrence Malick’s magnum opus is a visionary hymn to nature and grace.

=196

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=196

=185

Harry Dean Stanton's finest role came as the near-mute Travis, on a journey across America to reunite his family, in Wim Wenders’ tale of loss and redemption.

=185

Jacques Demy’s follow-up to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a joyous, large-scale tribute to the Hollywood musical.

=185

Birds inexplicably turn against man and begin attacking the small community of Bodega Bay, in Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense classic.

=185

Jean Renoir's intoxicating first colour feature is a lyrical adaptation of Rumer Godden's coming-of-age tale of an adolescent girl living with her English family on the banks of West Bengal.

=185

Yasujirō Ozu’s final film colourfully and emotionally revisits the themes of Late Spring.

=185

=185

Silent cinema’s most famous ‘lost’ film, Erich von Stroheim’s monumental study of three ordinary lives destroyed by avarice was ruinously edited down by the studio.

=185

Made late in his career, the last of Akira Kurosawa’s great historical epics transposes the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear to feudal Japan.

=185

Guru Dutt’s classic, set in post-independence Kolkata (then Calcutta), tells of a young poet’s ambition.

=185

In director Wim Wenders’ most metaphysical work, a guardian angel desires nothing more than to be human.

=185

Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling, intense and multi-layered study of a collection of characters going through varying levels of crisis.

=169

Among the most famous of broken films, Orson Welles’ masterful follow-up to Citizen Kane was taken out of his control and re-edited by the studio.

=169

=169

Max Ophuls brought his trademark flowing camera style and a taste of the old Vienna to Hollywood for this tragic story of unrequited love.

=169

Satyajit Ray’s sublime portrait of a bored housewife living in 19th-century Bengal.

=169

=169

Michelangelo Antonioni's mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman (Richard Harris).

=169

Tensions grow when a group of nuns open a convent in the Himalayas in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s remarkable melodrama.

=169

A complex character study of alienation amid tumultuous social change, from one of Cuba’s greatest filmmakers.

=169

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An alien Scarlett Johansson prowls the streets of Glasgow in Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing, mind-bending mixture of existential science fiction and inner-city realism.

=169

Michael Mann’s virtuoso cat-and-mouse thriller starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

=169

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A scabrous study of desire, the subconscious and anti-clericalism – Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s provocative first film is a classic of Surrealist cinema.

=169

Robert Bresson’s last film turns a Tolstoy novella about a forged banknote into a formidably focused meditation on the supposed root of all evil.

=169

In Alain Resnais’ infamous art-house teaser, from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a male guest at a chateau claims he met a woman there the year before.

=157

Luis Buñuel’s searingly powerful account of the brutalised lives of delinquent Mexico City street kids fuses stark realism with surrealist flourishes.

=157

This study of a terminally ill civil servant seeking meaning in his life is one of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s finest achievements.

=157

=157

Jean-Luc Godard’s fourth feature – his third with wife and muse Anna Karina – charts in 12 tableaux a would-be actress’s descent into prostitution.

=157

Federico Fellini returned for inspiration to his own childhood in 1930s Rimini for this colourful comedy-drama about life in a small seaside town under Fascist rule.

=157

=157

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s third feature abandons the profane in favour of the sacred in a documentary-like retelling of the story of Christ.

=157

=157

Pedro Almodóvar's dazzling study of grief, motherhood and female solidarity.

=157

Hou Hsiao-Hsien breached political taboos in his Golden Lion-winning tale of a Taiwanese family in the mid-1940s.

=157

Tilda Swinton stars in Sally Potter's dazzling interpretation of Virginia Woolf's novel.

=157

=152

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Richard Gere plays a Chicagoan trying to make a new life in the country and finding that love gets in the way.

=152

=152

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mind-scrambling sequel series mounts a cosmic battle between good and evil on its cross-country odyssey back to the town of Twin Peaks and its tragic past.

=146

Roman Polanski’s brilliant thriller stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles, a desert town where water equals power.

=146

Jean Renoir’s pacifist classic is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during WWI, where class kinship is felt across national boundaries.

=146

=146

The crew of mining spaceship Nostromo answer an apparent distress signal and find themselves with an unwanted passenger, in Ridley Scott’s breakthrough sci-fi horror.

=146

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film is a founding and defining works of psychological horror cinema.

=146

Acclaimed filmmaker Cheryl Dunye takes centre stage in this ode to love, community and the past.

=136

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s final masterpiece centres on a woman who rejects the compromise of her marriage and retreats into a serene isolation.

=136

Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson star in Douglas Sirk’s influential melodrama.

=136

On a country picnic, a young girl leaves her family for a while and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance in Jean Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside.

=136

Robert Bresson’s hugely influential study of a petty thief in late 1950s Paris is one of his most widely acclaimed films.

=136

During the plague-ravaged middle ages, a knight buys time for himself by playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s much-imitated arthouse classic.

=136

=136

A riveting neorealist testimony to Angola’s anti-colonialist struggle, not screened there until after independence.

=136

A gang of outlaws goes out in a blaze of violence and glory in Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac film about the dying days of the wild west.

=136

Made during the Nazi occupation of France, Marcel Carne’s romantic epic of the 19th-century theatre world is a life-affirming tribute to love, Paris and the stage.

=136

=133

Undervalued on its initial release, this small-town drama has become a Christmas favourite, though its tearful affirmation is laced with darker emotions.

=133

In one of Alfred Hitchcock’s darkest thrillers, a traitor’s daughter is engaged by an American agent to get close to one of her father’s Nazi associates.

=133

An eccentric English officer inspires the Arabs to unite against the Turks during WWI in David Lean’s seven Oscar-winner, an epic in every sense.

=129

Quentin Tarantino’s crackling crime classic still retains its swagger as one of the great American films of the 1990s.

=129

Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, Martin Scorsese’s biopic is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films of the 1980s.

=129

A newspaper editor manipulates all around him for the sake of a scoop in one of the fastest and funniest comedies ever made.

=129

The grand summation of Ingmar Bergman’s career, this epic family drama drew on the director’s own childhood experiences in early 20th century Sweden.

128

=122

Danger, desire, death and a donkey – Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth are flying high in Howard Hawks's peerlessly entertaining tale of aviation in the Andes.

=122

Jacques Demy’s all-sung tale of first love is a ravishing mix of music, romance and fertile cinematic invention.

=122

Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge excel in this fascinatingly strange Nicholas Ray western that takes in both sexual rivalry and xenophobia.

=122

The film that Martin Scorsese compared to ‘opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed’.

=122

The Wachowksi sisters’ virtual-reality science-fiction epic marked a new high for effects-driven action sequences, and eventually launched a trilogy.

=122

This operatic portrait of a diabolical oil baron is a formal tour de force and a compelling portrait of all-American 20th century sociopathy.

=118

Twelve men at an Antarctic research station battle a shape-shifting alien that hides in human form, in John Carpenter’s groundbreaking sci-fi horror.

=118

Unrivalled in its relentless vision of pure terror, Tobe Hooper’s horror masterpiece remains as brutal and horrific as it ever was.

=118

Bernardo Bertolucci’s stylish period thriller stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a repressed bureaucrat in Mussolini’s Italy who is assigned to kill his former professor.

=118

Werner Herzog’s visceral exploration of doomed adventure and savage beauty is one of German cinema’s totemic masterpieces.

=114

Set in off-season Venice, British director Nicolas Roeg’s tragedy combines an acute study of grief with a supernaturally charged thriller plot, to beautiful and devastating effect.

=114

Made to celebrate the bicentennial of American Independence, Robert Altman’s footloose epic blends the lives of 24 characters in the capital of country music.

=114

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Ernst Lubitsch’s audacious farce, satirising ‘the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology’.

=108

=108

The coming of civilisation brings an end to the wildness of the west in John Ford’s elegiac late film teaming John Wayne and James Stewart.

=108

Orson Welles’ return to Hollywood after ten years working in Europe is a sleazy border tale in which he takes centre stage as gargantuan detective Hank Quinlan.

=108

On a road trip to receive an honorary degree, an elderly academic (Victor Sjöstrom) looks back over his life in Ingmar Bergman’s art-cinema classic.

=108

Whisked by a tornado from Kansas to the colourful Land of Oz, Dorothy soon learns there’s no place like home in MGM’s immortal musical fantasy.

=108

=104

The expansive second part of Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia saga continues the Corleone family story, charting in parallel young Vito’s earlier rise to prominence.

=104

Steven Spielberg laid the template for the modern summer blockbuster with this expert thriller about the hunt for a man-eating great white shark.

=104

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=101

A decade after Red River (1947), Howard Hawks reteamed with John Wayne for this rambling western riffing on the director’s usual themes of friendship and professionalism.

=95

Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad.

=95

This prison-break study is Robert Bresson at his most starkly essential: a man, four walls, his ingenuity and the mysterious inflections of fate.

=95

Buster Keaton’s most lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War.

=95

Ousmane Sembène lifts the mask on France’s racist post-colonial relationship with Senegal in his small yet commanding feature debut.

=95

A work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may be overrated.

=95

A poster film for Black Lives Matter, Jordan Peele’s horror-satire of white vampirism gleefully needles America’s racial malaise.

=90

Like Get Out, Bong Joon Ho’s endlessly twisty, blackly sincere class-war thriller is a pop provocation for our unequal times.

=90

Urban anomie and multi-generational growing pains are given rich, relaxed expression in Edward Yang’s heartfelt Taipei family tapestry.

=90

Kenji Mizoguchi’s bewitching, insinuating Edo-period ghost story renders civil war as a parable of heedless male greed.

=90

Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous epic portrays the fall of 19th-century Sicilian nobility, its decadent displays of wealth tinged with melancholy.

=90

Max Ophuls’ woozy whirligig tracks a pair of unwanted earrings around high-society Paris – until they bear the weight of lost time and passion.

=88

Stanley Kubrick’s much analysed and often spoofed psychological horror spends a chilling and claustrophobic winter at the empty Overlook Hotel.

=88

A sense of wistful, romantic longing joins the two stories in Wong Kar Wai’s freewheeling portmanteau portrait of Hong Kong.

=85

David Lynch’s adult fairytale follows teen sleuth Kyle MacLachlan’s murder inquiry into the surreal, perverse corners of small-town America.

=85

Victor Erice’s exquisite impressionistic distillation of childhood fear and wonder in the ruins of the recently ended Spanish Civil War.

=85

Jean-Luc Godard’s most effervescent escapade, a primary-coloured lovers-on-the-run blow-out heading south with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

=78

The apotheosis of Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental era, this sprawling essay film indicts the 20th century through its most popular medium.

=78

Love is rescued from the jaws of the afterlife in the Archers’ delirious World War II air-pilot fantasia.

=78

Industrial modernity proves mercilessly madcap in Charlie Chaplin’s final (mostly) silent feature, one of the most inspired and ingenious of all his comedies.

=78

Tinseltown’s greatest self-satire, a gothic requiem for big-screen bygones and the highs of screen stardom.

=78

Jacques Rivette’s most playful, innovative frolic, in which his irreverent Parisian heroines dissolve worlds, genres, social codes and boundaries.

=78

Young love and teen delinquency in Taiwan’s early 1960s adolescence, in Edward Yang’s slow-burn, bittersweet epic.

=78

As timely as ever in its grim poeticisation of demagogues and doom, helplessness and hope. If music be the food of death, play on.

=75

Hayao Miyazaki’s rich anime fantasy follows its ten-year-old heroine into the labyrinth of a spirit-world bathhouse, teeming with phantoms and peril.

=75

Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic folk saga of the tribulations of an exiled governor’s family in feudal Japan, tracked with exquisitely moving camerawork.

=75

Douglas Sirk’s melodrama holds a mirror to the hypocrisies of 1950s America with its pairs of mothers and daughters across class and racial divides.

=72

Michelangelo Antonioni’s high-modernist breakthrough sends Monica Vitti in search less of her disappeared friend than her own self, via images to get lost in.

=72

Roberto Rossellini’s plaintively simple portrait of a marriage on the rocks, imprinted with the ghosts of love, cultures and civilisations.

=72

The storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences.

=67

The feverish Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so renowned are as spellbinding as they are disturbing.

=67

Fritz Lang’s bombastic, stylised depiction of a future of profound inequality has influenced generations of genre filmmakers.

=67

Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of a medieval artist may be the most wrenching depiction of belief, creativity and the search for meaning ever filmed.

=67

The rare short film in this list, Marker’s dazzling photo montage ruminates on memory from beyond the apocalypse.

=67

Agnès Varda’s essay portrait of society ’s scavenger-recyclers – herself included – is both free-radical and infectious.

66

A restless young couple dream of escaping Senegal for Paris in Djibril Diop Mambéty ’s stylish, poetic, irreverent expression of post-colonial fantasies.

=63

Joseph Cotten chases Orson Welles’s agent of corruption through the ruins of divided post-war Vienna in this evocative classic thriller.

=63

The dizzying story of wiseguy Henry Hill, from his seduction into a life of crime to his paranoid, cocaine-fuelled departure.

=63

Ingrid Bergman rallies Humphrey Bogart’s embittered cynic to the anti-Nazi cause in this classic romance.

=60

Julie Dash’s visionary visual marriage between Afrocentric aesthetics and the rich emotional depth of Black womanhood is a cinematic triumph.

=60

Federico Fellini’s ode to Rome presents a lush, vibrant exterior to the swinging city, before revealing its rotting moral core.

=60

Instantly heralded as a modern masterpiece, Barry Jenkins’ stunning three-part story of queer identity is both a technical and an emotional marvel.

59

Chris Marker’s speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland.

=54

Billy Wilder’s then-risqué romcom, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine finding love amid corporate New York’s sea of sexual deception.

=54

Buster Keaton’s would-be sleuth dreams himself into movie-heroic mastery in this dazzling, evergreen, meta masterpiece of silent comedy.

=54

Disillusion in love and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production, with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri.

=54

Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned agit-drama of proto-revolutionary mutiny and repression, often quoted but still powerful in its montage effects.

=54

Iconic neo-noir in a befouled sci-fi Los Angeles where humans and their machine replicas vie to be predators rather than prey.

=52

Chantal Akerman’s epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother.

=52

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama of a doomed romance across racial and age divides probes social hypocrisy with feeling.

=50

This virtuoso drama of a mute woman’s and her daughter’s silent defiance of patriarchy in 19th-century New Zealand still has searing emotional heft.

=50

François Truffaut’s free-wheeling debut, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his rebel-schoolboy surrogate, is still a banner film for nouvelle vague lyric realism.

=48

An austere parable on the power of faith, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s penultimate film culminates in a transcendent resurrection scene.

=48

Barbara Loden’s tough, unsentimental portrait of a woman adrift in the industrial heartlands of the north-eastern United States.

=45

Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously designed epic recounts the picaresque exploits of an 18th-century Irish adventurer.

=45

Insouciant big-screen thrill-games from the Master of Suspense, hounding Cary Grant’s smug adman across a continent’s span of peerless set pieces.

=45

A window on Algeria’s wider liberation war, recreating a violent phase of guerrilla struggle and suppression in powerful free-documentary style.

=43

Two men recruit a guide to take them into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious realm where one’s innermost wishes come true, in this metaphysical sci-fi epic.

=43

Charles Burnett’s tender and witty tale of a disillusioned slaughterhouse worker and the solace to be found in the simplest moments of life.

=41

The film that brought Japanese cinema to the world, this 88-minute firecracker proved a seminal assault on the notion of objectivity.

=41

The film that topped Sight and Sound’s inaugural Greatest Films of All Time poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s indelible neorealist parable offers a sharp-eyed portrait of Italy’s post-war privations.

=38

The Master of Suspense ratchets up the tension while dishing out insights into obsession, urban living and the dangers of the gaze.

=38

Jean-Luc Godard’s cock-of-the-walk calling card, mixing pulp pastiche and upstart rebellion with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s footloose Parisian delinquent.

=38

Billy Wilder’s supreme gender-bending comedy has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as female-posing musicians on the lam, and many knickers in a twist.

=36

Fritz Lang’s rack-taut first talkie, with a searing, animalistic Peter Lorre as a serial child-murderer turned manhunt target.

=36

A purely beautiful outing from the Tramp, this delightful urban romance features one of cinema’s most heartbreaking smiles.

35

All the mischief, discoveries, joys and tragedies of life are given endlessly lyrical expression in Satyajit Ray’s debut, the first entry in ‘The Apu Trilogy’.

34

Jean Vigo’s headily poetic portrait of young newlyweds on – and off – Michel Simon’s barge on the Seine.

=31

Federico Fellini’s portrait of the film director as harried ringmaster and unreliable dreamer, spinning gold from his memories and fantasies.

=31

Alfred Hitchcock’s unsparing wrong-motel shocker starring Janet Leigh is a watershed for mainstream horror and still seminal in its suspense games.

=31

Cinema scaled new heights of visual poetry in this deeply personal, elliptical film by the master of ‘sculpting in time’.

30

Portrait of a Lady on Fire demonstrates Céline Sciamma’s ability to make a timelessly beautiful film that also crystallises the gender politics of her era.

29

Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s high-art vigilante movie for fallen times, with a coiled Robert De Niro as psycho-saviour of an infernal NYC.

28

This feminist milestone is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as exuberant as the film’s two protagonists.

27

To make sense of the 20th century’s most horrific atrocity, Claude Lanzmann reinvented documentary itself, giving the form colossal new significance.

=25

Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as director, starring Robert Mitchum as an implacable child-hunting preacher, still leaves an indelible mark.

=25

Robert Bresson gave us a typically stark vision of humanity as experienced by a put-upon, maltreated beast of burden that passes from owner to owner.

24

Racial tensions reach boiling point in Spike Lee’s incandescent portrait of a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the hottest day of the year.

23

Jacques Tati’s most painstaking accomplishment blends deft slapstick, endless visual ingenuity and sonic comedy in a stupendous modern satire.

=21

The first of Yasujirō Ozu’s great cycle of dramas that place the joys and sadnesses of family life in the context of a Japan disrupted by modernity.

=21

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s rapturous silent masterpiece, with soulful close-ups of Renée Jeanne “Maria” Falconetti’s tremulous martyr, transcending tyranny and temporality.

20

Akira Kurosawa’s monumental, scintillating tale of hired samurai protecting a peasant village: period thriller and moral/political fable in one.

19

Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War blowout, a hell-trip through the smoke and dazzle of imperial America’s most grandstanding rogue show.

18

Any sense of a conventional psychodrama is constantly disrupted by the experimental, improvisatory filmmaking.

17

The more ‘information’ we’re offered about the case, the more we come to realise that there are no easy answers to any of the questions being raised.

16

Had Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the sharply etched dreamworld of Meshes of the Afternoon?

15

This poll’s last western standing, John Ford’s sweeping, stirring rescue-or-revenge quest remains a film of magnificent mystery and poetry.

14

In real time, Cléo becomes more real, more subject than object. She discards her whipped-cream wig and polka dots for a simple black shift. She performs less and feels more.

13

Huge-spirited and sharp-eyed, Jean Renoir’s French-society fresco gathers high classes and low for a weekend of country-house fallout.

12

The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.

11

The first American film by one of German expressionism’s leading exponents, this lush, atmospheric silent drama is replete with groundbreaking cinematography.

10

Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.

9

Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.

8

Hollywood is dark and dangerous, yet alluring, in David Lynch’s acclaimed thriller.

7

Claire Denis’s great gift is to evoke emotion with gesture and juxtaposition. In the desert, water shimmers and ripples, naked shoulders perspire, black mosquito nets recall sheer lingerie.

6

Stanley Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction cinema.

5

Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece is a heartbreaking story of illicit love that pulses with the ache of repressed desire.

4

Told in Yasujirō Ozu’s simple and elegant style, this story of intergenerational discord is heartbreaking and deeply human.

3

Famously sitting at the top of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an enduring classic.

2

A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.

1

A magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.