Featuring a breakthrough lead turn from Oscar Isaac as a struggling folk singer, the Coens have returned to the high watermark of such classic efforts as Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink.

Cited as a key influence by such contemporary directorial talents as Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, this most epic of dramas has lost almost none of its bite, wit and aesthetic beauty over the past 69 years, and stands proudly as one of the greatest cinematic works from the legendary filmmaking duo.

This film will draw you in and demand a second viewing.

Sherpa tells of a contemporary act of defiance which would undoubtedly bring a characteristic grin to the face of the forefather of modern climbing.

Hard to Be a God is a cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen.

Panahi’s courageousness as an agitator is matched only by his inventiveness as a filmmaker.

One More Time with Feeling is a bold poem in itself, a portrait of the artist struggling to understand the essentially incomprehensible.

Detached, hypnotic and often oblique, the dreamlike Memoria is sure to enchant and mystify in equal measure.

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.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

We rarely see films that are so loaded in meaning and symbolism yet subdued in action. It’s a treat to be sure, one that can be relished seventy years on with renewed fervour.

Endlessly thought-provoking, the disturbing nature of this quite incredible work cultivates a long-lasting sense of unease in the viewer and achieves what all good documentaries aim to do – it remains firmly lodged in you mind and refuses to loose its terrible grip.

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

Four decades after its release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still justifies its place in the pantheon of all-time horror greats.

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

It’s multi-layered and beautifully observed – as much about the creative process as it is about obsessive love. It’s a glorious affirmation of how experience feeds artistic endeavour.

Although Goodfellas doesn’t aspire to the grandeur of Coppola’s mob, Scorsese’s New Yorkers have their own vitality, even if – or perhaps because – the threat of violence is never far away.

Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.

Stylistically it is an indisputable triumph.

Drive My Car is not most films, its story told in minute, passing details that cannot help but grip the attention to the point that the emotional tension and catharsis feel so effortless that hours seem to pass in an instant. That very little happens in the way of narrative action speaks to how brilliantly Hamaguchi harnesses the emotions of his characters into compelling drama.

Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy.

Positing the question of whether the principal objective of incarceration is punishment, rehabilitation or undue persecution, Garrett Bradley’s Time is another vital addition to a growing canon of films to pointedly critique the US legal and prison systems’ unjust treatment of people of colour.

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

Son of Saul is not simply a good film, it feels like an urgent and important one, a warning from history.

Blurring traditional boundaries of documentary with rich, beautiful animation in many shades and colours, the Danish director has a great deal invested in telling this story.

It's as if Wiseman has taken his cue from the old style librarians and has wanted to give a portrait of a community but without the inevitable noise that goes with it, issuing one long "shhhhhhhhh".

At 82 minutes, this is a brisk but hugely powerful work that is cinema of the oppressed par excellence.

Goldin’s career and Poitras’ latest asserts the primacy of the artist as a participant in the world. Something which will make us see the world differently starting from the very walls from which the art might hang: the rooms in which the films are seen.