The film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains.

If you've never seen it and don't, you're bonkers.

Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy is still perfect all these years later.

Day Lewis' re-creation of writer/painter Christy Brown's condition is so precise, so detailed and so matter-of-fact that it transcends the carping about casting an actor without cerebral palsy. He couldn't have done it better.

It’s the most haunted and dreamlike of all American films, a gothic backwoods ramble with the Devil at its heels.

No one watches Gone with the Wind for historical accuracy. What keeps us coming back is four-hours of epic romance in gorgeous Technicolor.

It offers perfect case studies of suspense, paranoia and montage for lazy film-studies tutors. And, of course, it was the first movie to show a toilet flushing, so we might also credit it with spawning the entire gross-out genre. Psycho: we salute you.

Too full of incident to reflect a typical night in reality, it's nevertheless funny, perceptive, pepped up by a great soundtrack, and also something of a text-book lesson in parallel editing as it follows a multitude of adolescents through their various adventures with sex, booze, music and cars.

What really transforms the piece from a rather talky demonstration that a man is innocent until proven guilty, is the consistently taut, sweltering atmosphere, created largely by Boris Kaufman's excellent camerawork. The result, however devoid of action, is a strangely realistic thriller.

What 12 Years a Slave is really interested in is creating an honest, believable experience: in culture and context, place and people, soil and skin. The result can, at times, be alienating.

A supremely intelligent and convincing adaptation of Ira Levin's Satanist thriller.

This isn’t just the best-looking film of the year, it’s one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in the history of special-effects cinema. So it’s a shame that – as is so often the case with groundbreaking effects movies – the emotional content can’t quite match up to the visual.

Gestures, looks and touches carry enormous weight, and Blanchett and Mara, both excellent, invite micropscopic readings of their every glance and movement.

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast.

The action is the attraction. If that means some of the film feels a little distant and chilly, it’s in the admirable service of avoiding simplistic drama or easy sentiment.

It’s a film of small moments and tiny gestures that leaves a very, very big impression.

It’s one of the most insightful films ever made about the British class system.

As ever with Leigh, Mr Turner addresses the big questions with small moments. It's an extraordinary film, all at once strange, entertaining, thoughtful and exciting.

At times, you ache to put the brakes on the chaos, but still Pixar manages to do with all this what they do best, turning the everyday rough and smooth of childhood experience into a thoughtful, inventive adventure, full of totally appropriate lurid and strange imagery.

As befits both its tortuous hand-to-mouth genesis and the devastating conflict it reflects, this is a film of pure sensation, dazzling audiences with light and noise, laying bare the stark horror – and unimaginable thrill – of combat. And therein lies the true heart of darkness: if war is hell and heaven intertwined, where does morality fit in? And, in the final apocalyptic analysis, will any of it matter?

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s slick and tense, and the camerawork has something of the in-the-moment, on-the-ground immediacy of the French New Wave films.

[Chazelle's] soaring, romantic, extremely stylish and endlessly inventive La La Land is that rare beast: a grown-up movie musical that's not kitschy, a joke or a Bollywood film. Instead, it's a swooning, beautifully crafted ode to the likes of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

Jennifer Peedom’s film is stunningly photographed (how could it not be?) and brilliantly sly: she gives the tour guides and their rich, self-absorbed charges just enough rope to hang themselves, and they duly oblige. But it’s also a heartfelt tribute to the resilience of a people.

That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.

Hard to Be a God is an endurance test for its protagonist and audience, yet the reward is an unforgettable cinematic experience and a timely insight into the need to remain human in a world of carnage.

It’s a more subtle, damning film for implicating the media – as much as the church, the courts, the legal profession and other Boston institutions – in the systematic, wider cultural cover-up it describes.

What Dominik gives us is a portrait of an artist and a man and a family at a low. He doesn’t try to understand, but he does find some beauty and truth among the chaos and despair.

Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed.

Sissako’s methods are confrontational, yet never to the point that you feel you’re watching sacrificial lambs instead of people caught in a horrible situation. In this terrible context, madness and death are blessings. It’s living that’s the curse.

A caustically witty look at the American South and its still-surviving chain gangs, with Newman in fine sardonic form as the boss-baiter who refuses to submit and becomes a hero to his fellow-prisoners. Underlying the hard-bitten surface is a slightly uncomfortable allegory which identifies Newman as a Christ figure. But this scarcely detracts from the brilliantly idiosyncratic script (by Donn Pearce from his own novel) or from Conrad Hall's glittering camerawork (which survives Rosenberg's penchant for the zoom lens and shots reflected in sun-glasses).

Coppola's rethink of his Vietnam War epic is intriguing, but no significant improvement. Some of the added footage is fine, some redundant.

He invites viewers to laugh with him at him: rather a subject than an object of ridicule, he lances his neuroses preemptively, controlling the exposure. It’s a limited strategy, but still glamorising in its way – if you can’t be Bogart-smooth in all things, such a fund of wisecracks is a start.

This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore. Its power and its horrors sneak up on you.

Class conflict and small town chauvinism are the subject of Yates' ingenious youth movie, a film which intrigues as much by its portait of working-class America bitterly opposed to the affluent society as by its large measure of lovingly-crafted fantasy.

Her is a keeper of a film, quietly dazzling.

It may lack the authority-baiting, satire-with-a-purpose edge of Life of Brian, but Holy Grail is the looser, sillier, ultimately funnier film, packed with actual goofy laughs rather than hey-I-get-that cleverness.

Everyone has a different story. I found myself holding my breath listening to them talk. The story twists like a thriller.

Pawlikowski’s film may be bleak and unforgiving, but it’s also richly sympathetic and deeply moving.

Everything about this film makes you look with fresh eyes at the familiar.

[A] calm, reflective, gorgeously uneventful slice of nostalgic romance.

This is quite simply one of the saddest movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss.

From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic.

This is Hitchcock at his best. Full of subterranean hints as to the ways in which people cage each other, it's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun.

This is the director’s most vivid, most emotional and humane film, and perhaps his best.

Art, the film suggests, is about first noticing then communing with the world around you. In that sense, it’s another wise, wonderful Jarmusch movie about the importance, in this sad and beautiful world, of friendship and love.

The Fits is abstract and atmospheric, intense and surprisingly emotional. There are few explanations in this short tale. It’s hard to pin down, but guaranteed to leave a mark.

Ultimately story is secondary to Russell’s delicious detailing of character and milieu.

The film’s unwillingness to judge either the decent yet doubt-wracked pastor, or the damaged souls seeking a new start, effectively draws us in to a whole cluster of gnarly dilemmas, where humane intentions prove counter-productive and the truth only makes matters worse.

Another episode in Allen's Jewish-neurotic romance with Diane Keaton, this time with Napoleon's invasion of Russia interfering. This allows a string of terrific visual gags using battles, Death the Grim Reaper, swords, grand opera, village idiots, snow, Napoleon and Olga Georges-Picot. As less than half-a-dozen lines are bum, Love and Death is an almost total treat.

Most importantly, the film involves us: it draws us into the debate, makes us complicit, demands that we have an opinion, and then upends that same opinion a few minutes later. It's engaging and rousing.

Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff's admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It's sheer delight from beginning to end.

The fictional character Huppert creates is simply so lived-in and plausible that to insist Michele react differently to her own lived experience would be as obstinate as insisting that a person in real life cannot possibly feel the way that they say they feel. Whatever your take, it's a film that will inspire debate for decades to come.

This is a story of identity, and the lack of it. And it’s fascinating.

Notwithstanding the fairytale set-up, this is not exactly a children’s film. ‘Kaguya’ demands patience and open-mindedness. In return, it offers an achingly nostalgic meditation on what it means to love, age and depart from this world with dignity. A fitting farewell.

The film’s bravura fantasy sequence, imagining the hellishly licentious Bedford Falls that would exist without George, makes the grandest possible case for the importance and uniqueness of individual agency – ‘Battleship Potemkin’ this ain’t. Funny, compelling and moving.

It works and then some, making for a noirish and complex emotional thriller. And Hoss is incredible, playing Nelly with the shuffling gait and haunted expression of a dead woman walking.

The understated performances and reluctance to emphasise plot result in convincing characterisations, to such an extent that the often narcissistic Redford actually allows himself to come across as a dislikeably selfish, arrogant and icy man. And the location skiing sequences, revealing Ritchie's background and interest in documentary styles, are simply astounding, even for those with little interest in the sport.

Whenever it seems there might be a glimmer of hope, Romero cruelly reverses our expectations. The nihilistic ending, in particular, has to be seen to be believed. Chuckle, if you can, during the first few minutes; because after that laughter catches in the throat as the clammy hand of terror tightens its grip.

Cameraperson’ is a thoughtful examination of the role of the documentary-maker, showing us how it feels to be that person behind the camera.

It’s both soaringly romantic and truly sad.

The film's central irony is not the usual one of public success at the expense of private pain, but the complex one of success at the expense of personal knowledge. Streisand never looks into the mirrors that Wyler surrounds her with. Well worth watching.

It’s a family adventure that’s the right sort of heartwarming, delivering real human emotion through the medium of a small bear.

Like Orwell on helium, this reimagining of Stalin’s demise and the subsequent ideological gymnastics of his scheming acolytes is daring, quick-fire and appallingly funny.

It’s full of sharp dialogue and entertaining characters and fuelled by a wryly enlightened view of our world and how it can be at once cruel and caring. For a story built on such dark foundations, it’s weirdly reassuring. It’s also enormous fun.

Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.

Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.

When the film gets outdoors, it soars, and Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.

Citizenfour is at its most eye-opening and essential simply as a portrait of the then 29-year-old Snowden at a point of absolute no-return in his life as he spends almost a week hiding out in Hong Kong before disappearing into an entirely new existence.

You can watch The Innocents twice and walk away with different conclusions. Psychological horrors have imitated its ambiguous ending ever since. Few have pulled it off half as creepily.

A film with a fistful of memorable moments—most of them involving Bridges hurling insults at people—but not a great deal new to say.

The virtue of Aquarius – the title, incidentally, alludes to the name of the block Clara lives in – is that it never feels the need to sermonise: its ethical, political and psychological insights are carefully contained within a consistently compelling narrative that feels fluid, relevant and true.

True to the spirit of the title, writer-director Lee organises the sprawling mess of Mija’s personal life with the control and grace of a master, each digression and seemingly arbitrary encounter all building upon his elderly protagonist’s spiralling sense of distress.

It's dazzling and rambling, intimate and sprawling, and it's carried along by an infectious, off-the-cuff jazz score. As soon as it ends, you'll be dying to fly with it again.

The effect is talismanic: overlaid by a thoughtful voiceover, it invites the audience to share the pain in a cathartic act of imaginative reclamation.

The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

Any kid growing up in the early ’60s will remember this one for several reasons: Birley Shassey’s screamer of a theme; Bond’s shocking use of a beautiful girl as a human shield; bullion-obsessed baddie Auric Goldfinger’s top hat-wielding henchman, Oddjob; Honor Blackman’s risquely monikered Pussy Galore; and, above all, Bond’s stupendous, gadget-infested silver Aston Martin DB5, the car that spurred a thousand Corgi purchases.

Best of all is Steven Spielberg’s direction: the camera moves like a predatory animal, gliding eerily across the surface of the vast Atlantic, creating sequences of almost unbearable suspense.

We Are the Best! is a joyous celebration of youth, friendship and rebellion, and if there’s a nagging note of regret and bitterness it never manages to undermine the overwhelmingly compassionate tone.

Needless to say, the film’s big Brit hitters – Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier and especially Charles Laughton – all make exceptional work of Dalton Trumbo’s reflective screenplay, while Kubrick himself handles the film’s mechanics of corruption with skill.

This is Tavernier’s own film story so don’t expect a linear, full history of the cinema of the time. However, it’s anything but dry, as the film swoons with passion for Gallic films and filmmaking.

The writing and direction lean towards the obvious, but there’s much to chew on regarding tradition, progress and the power of the white lie.

What a ballsy film and honest too.

It’s not all doom, gloom and personal disasters — the film also offers lucid insights on the links between the man and his movies.

The film’s real success is that Puiu impresses both with his compassion for human behaviour and his tight grip on realist, documentary-style filmmaking.

Lyrical, satirical and hugely entertaining, it deserves a wider audience.

Where Antonioni's images made you think, De Palma's merely make you blink, and the baroque plot confuses as often as it frightens. Still, plenty of style, a modicum of thrills, and a suitably s(l)ick ending. Collectors of character performances will enjoy Lithgow's right-wing nut.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

Dreamcatcher is harrowing.

Rarely has a film used London’s landmarks so cannily, and rarely has screen Shakespeare been so sharp and satisfying.

The extraordinary skill with which Shults’s camera prowls and probes the enclosed surroundings also channels Robert Altman in chamber-drama mode. Those are strong comparisons, but this unexpected and hugely impressive US indie debut is worthy of them.

De Palma’s grasp on King’s material is never in doubt: this is a truly throat-grabbing horror movie, sporting a handful of pitch-perfect set-pieces, not to mention one of the few examples of effective split-screen.

This painful, beautiful doc chronicles the fightback.

Not a lot to it, certainly, but the acting and performances combine to produce an obliquely effective study of the effect of landscape upon emotion, and the wry, dry humour is often quite delicious.

Don’t watch this doc for a lesson in the crisis. Maidan is hard work, with no voiceover or interviews and just the odd scrap of information written on screen to guide you through.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.