Fortunately, Boyhood concludes on a note of such unbridled optimism, Linklater is defying you to leave the auditorium without a grin on your face. Indeed, few will after experiencing this astonishing cinematic treasure.

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.

Playtime attacks the good taste of understanding by making you understand the importance of both absence and presence that coexists in a modern shared public space and a gradually disappearing private space.

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.

Bold in ambition and delicate in execution, it will break your heart and then piece it back together.

Intolerance may not be perfect, but with such gargantuan spectacle and timeless mastery of form on show, it is nigh on impossible not to be swept up by this centruy-spanning extravanganza and its medium-shaping impact.

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.

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.

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

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

With The Passion of Joan of Arc, the world arguably saw the very best of both Dreyer and Joan – whilst also something approaching the very worst of humanity.

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.

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.

Rather than confront the guilt related to the sins of the past it paints over them in vivid colours, hoping the viewer will collude in its melodramatic muddying of the water.

Kubrick’s film is the most accurate and timeless portrayal of a world facing mutually assured nuclear destruction, and paradoxically accomplishes this feat not through a realistic study but through the blackest surrealism.

As a fictionalised account of what was once described as the worst European genocide in the post-war period, Quo Vadis, Aida? is wrenching and vital in its bitter grief. As a study of political and diplomatic inertia in the face of contemporary global human tragedies, it could not be more urgent.

Parasite is quite simply a supreme feat of film-making, a tense and hilarious jewel box of a film that draws you deeper and deeper into its wicked, absurdist satire.

Heralded as one of the most blisteringly influential films of all time, Eisenstein’s propaganda film has left an indelible scar on the establishment of film as art.

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

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.

Alfonso Cuarón returns to his childhood for inspiration with the meticulously beautiful Roma, an autobiographical black and white thank you letter full of warmth and love.

It’s a beautiful piece of celluloid that is worthy of its army of plaudits.

Overshadowed at the time and since, Summer of Soul brings the Harlem Cultural Festival and a pivotal point in American history into the light.

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.

With 12 Years a Slave, McQueen has not only created his finest work to date, but also a potential modern masterpiece.

Comedy is used to undercut the most horribly tragic of moments...given the sadness all the more pathos and offering glimpses of hope in a narrative resistant to catharsis.

It is the masterful ways in which Altman weaves doubt, hard truths, and holds up a mirror to the hypocrisies of contemporary America, that elevates his 1975 film to be one of the decade’s greatest cinematic achievements.

An unmitigated masterpiece from start to finish, Carné’s epic love story through Parisian theatreland feels as fresh and effervescent today as it must have done on its initial release, brimming with perfectly-sculpted heroes, villains and wildly imaginative set-pieces.