Le Samourai is as efficient a piece of cinema as it is darkly romantic.

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.

This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

Perhaps that final meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s front room does not offer closure. Nothing could. An amazing and dramatic historical tableau nonetheless.

There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments.

This 1950s melodrama – as underscored by Todd Haynes' modern riff, Far from Heaven – offers smart insights into the American class system and carries a powerful emotional clout way beyond the usual limitations of its genre.

This debut from the writer-director Corey Sherman is a real four-leaf clover: delicate, unique and subtly magical.

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.

The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.

There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.

This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.

The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.

There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".

What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.

The film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

It’s too soon to know for sure, but this may end up being ranked as one of the best nonfiction films of the year.

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

Tsou and Baker’s script sharply examines what it really means to lose face: which shames are noble, which are indulgent, and what should be passed from one generation to the next?

Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

Hitchcock's 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London which caused 72 deaths is now the subject of Olaide Sadiq’s heartwrenching and enraging documentary, digging at the causes and movingly interviewing survivors and their families, whose testimony is all but unbearable.

I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.

The greatest ever making-of documentary.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

With great verbal athleticism, the film earns its reputation as one of the fastest-talking comedies ever made.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

The seamless gun choreography is hypnotic in its fluidity, more akin to dance sequences than deadly shoot-outs – never was the phrase "bullet ballet" more accurately applied.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

The final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.

The Conversation is an immaculate thriller, a study in paranoia and loneliness, long in gestation, partly inspired by Antonioni's Blow-Up, and released as the Watergate scandal was unfolding.

The inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted.

In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both.

Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.

Roland Joffé's 1984 masterwork is a solid piece of historical film-making, capturing factual detail without sacrificing fine storytelling.

The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.

Mad Max has always radiated an otherworldly vibe, a slightly sickly sensation that something at its core is fundamentally wrong.

The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.

This is really Schlesinger's achievement. He has caught on film a slice of America as well, if not better, than one had any right to expect.

The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.

It may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.

An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie.

The film is fun and stirring; a robust portrait of youth at the crossroads and a bittersweet salute to the town at its centre.

What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.

Dirty Harry director Don Siegel reunited with Clint Eastwood for this taut 1979 thriller about real-life bank robber Frank Morris, who led the one possibly successful (bodies were never found) escape attempt from the notorious maximum-security prison on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island.

From a potentially creaky, cliche-filled premise (a gaggle of stereotypes are invited to a spooky old house where all is not as it seems), director Robert Wise leads us on a brilliantly unsettling journey.

Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy.

Despite the twists, turns and exceptionally complex detail of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men manages to make it both comprehensible and watchable – with a few flashy fictional touches to gussy up the facts.

There are moments of dramatic licence, but overall The Right Stuff is a terrific historical film about the space race: accurately reflective of a complex reality, beautifully filmed, and done with wit, energy and an impressive sense of balance. Top marks.

With the help of his cinematographers, Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor, Attenborough has produced a very beautiful-looking movie that is maybe a little too seductive for its own good. But Attenborough shows once again his skill in managing the big set-piece.

The 1994 film of the play by Alan Bennett is a model of historical accuracy and psychological tact. A triumph.

Like Woody Allen's "Take The Money and Run", The Jerk is basically designed to allow Martin to use as many of his standup jokes and routines as possible, but his charm and timing makes this cleverly constructed movie seem fantastically loose and easy.

The film clearly nods to old-school Hollywood and Vegas, but it has a sharp edge that keeps it funny and authentically modern, with Steve Kloves's streetwise and sometimes surprisingly elegiac script summing up the seediness and melancholy of 80s glamour.

Fantasia is mashed potatoes and gravy but there's more than a hint of beluga there too.

Elegant neo-noir with a perfectly cast Robert Mitchum, at 58 the oldest actor to play Marlowe.

Blow-up is still an absolute must, such is the degree of visual and intellectual excitement of the film.

Medium Cool encapsulates the divisive issues of race and poverty that remain as urgent today as they did in 1968. It also makes us think about the way the media shape our lives and are used to deflect public attention from sustained political action.

For all of its 113 minutes, Charade presents us with a temporary entry into that brighter place, into the possibility of adventure, the vicarious possession of beauty. Acted by two Europeans in a mythic, dangerous, beguiling Paris, it remains a quintessential Hollywood film.

Stagecoach remains a tale for our times.

The film is marred slightly by an over-abrupt ending and the irritating device of speeded-up clocks, but these are minor flaws in a film that has grown in stature over the years.

It leaves the facts wounded and strewn haphazardly across the battlefield, but El Cid remains a flat-out terrific movie.

It is the most thoroughgoing exposé of the absurdity of war, and the most explicitly pacifist movie ever made.

It's a superbly crafted film by a cult film-maker and features a virtuoso bank robbery sequence shot in a single take from a camera in the back seat of a car.

It's a riveting, provocative film that rewards several viewings.

Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie.

A splendid recreation of Napoleonic France and a compelling movie to boot.