McQueen and Newland’s assured script grips from the start and keeps us deeply involved in the characters’ fates.

Like delving into a cold cave of human emotion, Three Colours: Blue is the jewel in the crown of Kieślowski’s trilogy – a fascinating examination of freedom, sorrow and identity, and perhaps one of the most necessary films of contemporary French cinema.

Mon Roi is one of the best films of the year and an impressively realistic depiction of the highs and lows of love.

Three Colours: White brings Kieślowski back to his Polish roots and explores issues of equality through nationality and the fragile dynamic of marriage.

The Good Dinosaur is up there with Toy Story in terms of its technical achievement and for providing an equally heart-touching, emotional tale.

Three Colours: Red is the trilogy’s anti-romance, depicting an unconventional love story blossoming against the insurmountable obstacle of age – perhaps the most adventurous and personal of the trilogy,

Films such as the exquisite Funny Face, where all the ingredients came together in picture perfect composition, allows us to share, even if only briefly, in this land of fantasy and make-believe.

Mandy is not just hideous, hilarious and thrilling – although, it’s all of those and then some – it’s also a meditation on personal grief which loses no poignancy for all its blood-soaked insanity and eye-melting psychedelia.

Piece by piece, Assassination Nation lays out and deconstructs the misogynistic assumptions that underpin many of our reactions to the girls’ behaviour.

Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is a visceral, astonishingly assured work, compelling, rarely predictable, and vital.

Petrov’s Flu finds its meaning through sensation, memory and aesthetics, depicting social and political decay in its purest form stripped of the comforting scaffolding of linear narrative.

Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything certainly doesn’t hold back in its skewering of a contemporary art world defined far more by financial gain and status seeking than a genuine love of beauty.

Truly one of the most emotionally devastating films to have ever graced the big screen, Au Hasard Balthazar is an exemplary example of Bresson’s art that transcends its symbolic reverie to Christianity to become an eloquent prayer for the potential power of cinema to truly move us.

Glazer’s Under the Skin is his otherworldly opus.

A hilariously louche and ramshackle psychedelic noir, Inherent Vice is an audacious stylistic leap for Anderson, but his risks pay off beautifully. It's an amazing work, capturing the heady vibe of Thomas Pynchon's novel while stumbling into in the great cinematic lineage of California noir.

Benefiting from the matter-of-fact, unerring defiance exhibited by the group, Heineman is unflinching in representing the brutality perpetrated by ISIS as well as their own very savvy use of the media as a tool for recruitment and influence.

The running time (like all Lanzmann's films) is not oppressive but allows for Murmelstein and his interlocutor to talk through, around and inside the context and reality of pragmatism, egoism, heroism and evil.

For fans of Mack’s juxtapositions of natural and synthetic imagery and of her fascination with repetition and patterns, The Grand Bizarre is surely the artist’s most accomplished work.

What shapes Breathless as such an influential and long lasting ‘classic’ of French cinema is Godard’s ferocious delivery of simplistic subject matter, his direction of iconic actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and his all-out gallantry in creating the first of many films that broke all the rules, both in his homeland and overseas.

It’s the film’s humanity which is at the core of its genius.

Anomalisa might be bizarre, surreal and far out, but it always feels paradoxically real, grounded and deeply true.

It's triumph is its determined optimism, even if it admits that is probably a fantasy. It's a tale of the fallen who, like Moonee's favourite tree, keeps on growing regardless.

Heineman himself has said he feels an “enormous kinship” with Colvin’s commitment to revealing the human cost of conflict. And that, despite all her personal flaws, is what makes Colvin’s story so profoundly moving.

There is much that is inexplicable and remote about Sun Choke, but those should not be read as immediate negatives, but held up as virtues. Cinema too often gives the viewer everything on a plate and then spoon feds us with details until 'we get it'.

Szabolcs Hadju's It's Not the Time of My Life is an engrossing, poignant and often very funny study of marriage, family and child rearing.

Rendering the passage of time as a painful yet serene experience, Varda by Agnès comprehends what it means to be a human with a natural flair for creative output.

Network is an outstanding satire that has become more rather than less relevant with each passing year. It is bitingly funny, whip smart and as mad as hell.

It remains a marvel of a modern ethos, particularly in the behaviour of its principal characters: whether it’s the total lack of jealousy or its cinematic style that encompasses newsreel footage, photographic stills and freeze frames.