As though North by Northwest boasts some of Hitchcock’s most ambitious and memorable set pieces it is also one his most terrifically funny, playful moving pictures, cutting just the right line between suspense and belly laughs.

Featuring a cavalcade of colourful characters, lively merriment and a wit and charm like no other, Jour de Fête marks a spectacularly well fashioned introduction to Tati’s old-fashioned and playful sense of humour.

The Defiant Ones combines Stanley Kramer’s trademark liberal politics with a picaresque adventure that is deftly entertaining, tense and heartfelt.

While not amongst the greater, more celebrated titles in Billy Wilder’s acclaimed filmography, his big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution boasts a fine, scenery-chewing performance by Charles Laughton, here playing a cantankerous barrister defending a murder suspect.

Touch of Evil proceeds with one of the most celebrated long-takes in screen history. The sequence is a marvel of technical virtuosity and staged action. From the very start, Orson Welles’s grubby and sweaty noir classic has us in its grip with a gloriously devised piece of showmanship emblematic of the director’s audaciously talented spirit.

While Sirk didn’t believe it to be his greatest work, it’s perhaps best-known for being his most personal, ambitious and starkly cynical film; far removed from the more distinguishable, Technicolor-infused melodramas of that peppered his career.

Although 12 Angry Men dismays at human weakness, it is fundamentally an optimistic film, celebrating reason and basic human decency in equal measure. In an era when both seem in short supply, Lumet’s film is a reminder that there is never a bad time to stand up for what is right.

It was once said that Runyon’s prose had a ungrammatical purity about it (what with the refusal of the past tense), but likewise Guys And Dolls works because it shouldn’t work.

Even the film’s weaknesses – a penchant for melodrama and a tendency towards the hysterical – work as remnants of their time and betray an earnest effort to emphasise with the characters and their heightened do-or-die mentality.

A constantly surprising treat of a film that returns more the less you give.

A haunting, Aesop-like parable of good and evil, The Night of the Hunter is well worthy of classic status thanks to its wonderfully realised cast of Southern players, Walter Schumann’s dexterous original score and Cortez’s enrapturing, expressionistic visuals.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood and a sumptuous saga of the rise and fall of a star.

Tati’s second film, Les Vacances de M. Hulot sees the birth of the everlasting character of Monsieur Hulot, he of the trademark pipe and umbrella.

Rarely seen but frequently referenced in film studies lecture rooms, Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a twisted tale of the rise and fall of Kirk Douglas’ ruthless Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields and one of the greatest ‘movies about movies’ to ever come out of Hollywood.

In one truly magic moment, Buster Keaton – who had fallen on hard times and was largely forgotten – joins Calvero for his final gala performance. It is a cinematic meeting to be cherished and makes up for the maudlin and wordy melodrama that precedes it.

The Tales of Hoffmann has aged beautifully and reminds us of why we go to the movies in the first place: to move through the screen and find yourself happily transported to another world.

It was the film that introduced the world at large to master director Akira Kurosawa and his frequent, infinitely watchable star Toshiro Mifune.

The sumptuous colours, outstanding choreography and toe-tapping tunes are nothing but first-rate.

Ultimately, The Lavender Hill Mob remains an unblemished gem that proves that the period wasn’t just one of fertility on the other side of the atlantic.

It is a tale of phenomenal creatives from Williams to Kazan and Brando and Leigh.

One of the major successes of A Place in the Sun is the way it delicately obfuscates the distinction between romantic longing and personal ambition.

Over 60 years since its initial release, On Moonlight Bay remains a fun and charming snapshot of classic Hollywood.

Notorious is a phenomenally rich experience whether it is on the first or the hundredth viewing. Hitchcock’s most emotionally nuanced and most adult depiction of relationships feels as vital as ever.

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.

A pitch dark noir whose eponymous anti-heroine (Joan Crawford) is surely one of the most compellingly flawed women of the genre.

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.

Meet Me in St. Louis, made when Garland was still on a career high from the phenomenal success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, despite being a product of its time still manages to feel as fresh as when it first aired over sixty years ago.

Where The Wolfman is a a fairgound ghost train, entertaining but ultimately shallow, Cat People is a true journey into the power of fear and belief, at once frightening, disturbing and psychologically complex.