Clear an evening and indulge yourself in one of the few films that can justifiably be called an epic.

Director David Lean achieves a fine balance of creating complex characters from a fine cast, while keeping the pace up throughout this long movie.

It's hard to over sell a movie that is so supremely confident in writing and direction. Despite an almost audience-annihilating run time of nearly two and a half-hours, it is consistently absorbing.

A stark and intense film, Jeanne d'Arc is renowned for its sparse shooting style - which focuses in on Falconetti's face with such relentless fascination that everything else (sets, props, secondary characters) disappear from view.

The story has its moments of suspense, especially when Nina's child wanders off from the beach. But the soul of the film exists in the small exchanges and tensions between characters.

This is one of the truly outstanding works of post-war European cinema.

Full of haunting, iconic images and a touch of hopeful humanity, The Seventh Seal is cinema at its most artful, a philosophical meditation on the meaning(lessness) of this mortal coil.

Some people will dismiss the film as nonsense, and they could have a point. But Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a huge amount of fun.

It is a difficult film - slow-paced, unashamedly theatrical and heavily laden with philosophy – yet a profoundly satifying one: a rewarding display of filmmaking mastery that forms a mystical and enigmatic coda to a legendary career.

The thin, conventional storyline is swept along by the imaginative, urgent style with its then innovative jump cuts, overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork. A landmark film, it forever changed perceptions of cinema.

Full of energy, wit, passion and tragedy, looking backward and forward at once, it is one of the most moving films of the year.

Reed's take on the material is innovative, letting realism blur into an anaemic, soul-searching delirium.

Sensitively written and acted, beautifully shot, and with a charming, sparingly used score, Minari is so engaging that it's easy to forget how radical it is.

A comic epic, Hidden Fortress focuses not on the high drama of the aristocrats' escape, but on the slapstick antics of the faint-hearted peasants as they whinge and moan their way through the countryside.

One of the best literary adaptations ever made.

Perhaps no film can capture the enormity of that war, which left around 17 million dead, and generations to grieve. Director Sam Mendes wisely takes the opposite approach, personalising the experience through two young British soldiers sent on a harrowing, high-stakes, night-long mission, he creates a film that is tense, exhilarating and profoundly moving.

Be warned. Triangle of Sadness rants and smirks at the state of the world over two-and-a-half hours, which is quite some running time for a satirical comedy. But it is never boring. Partly that's because the political commentary is so shrewd, and partly it's because it has a surprising amount of warmth and nuance, too. Östlund ensures that while the situations may be absurd, the people in them are as human as any of us.

It's boldly imaginative and his most mature work yet.

Like any decent slasher movie, there's something unsettling about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that goes beyond the blood and gore. [4 star rating for DVD only]

American society, in all its strengths and missteps, has been a major theme for both Pynchon and Anderson, and it grounds Anderson's dazzler of a film, giving it an emphatic, unmistakable political charge.

A significant precursor to the same film-maker's North by Northwest, it remains a supremely entertaining and accomplished work in its own right.

There are great concert movies and great socio-political documentaries, but Summer of Soul combines both in one gloriously entertaining and intellectually astute film.

The finest movie ever made about the narcissistic hellhole that is Hollywood.

Woven into this heady romance is chic Hollywood comedy at it's finest, combined with evocative cinematography.

Leigh's strategy of taking us into his characters' world without prelude or explanation, letting the revelations and backstory waft out, help make his films feel authentic. He seems to have a magical ability to make the everyday captivating to watch

By turns funny, sad and romantic, it's a work that confirms Ray's formidable reputation as a world film maker of the highest order.

Apart from psychedelic dream sequences with a bowling twist, it's the wealth of great characters and their insane dialogue that make this a memorable film.

Black Narcissus has an erotic charge that's to this day been so often lacking in British cinema.