What makes the film so effective is not so much the slightly sinister characterisation of the generally neurotic group, but the fact that Wise makes the house itself the central character, a beautifully designed and highly atmospheric entity which, despite the often annoyingly angled camerawork, becomes genuinely frightening.

This super-gargantuan historical drama may not be much of a movie, but it delivers Hollywood spectacle of the sort we’ll never see again.

As memorable as anything in the series (the arteries hadn't hardened yet) are modest highlights like Bond's encounter with a tarantula, Honeychile's first appearance as a nymph from the sea, the perils of Dr No's assault course of pain.

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.

If director Thompson isn't quite skilful enough to give the film its final touch of class (many of the shocks are just too planned), the relentlessness of the story and Mitchum's tangibly sordid presence guarantee the viewer's quivering attention.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Absolutely riveting as an investigation of a citizen - newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst by any other name - under suspicion of having soured the American Dream.

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

This isn’t quite tense or funny enough to become the masterpiece some Hawks lovers claim. But it is smart, incisive and often very funny.

Lang’s direction is never heavy-handed. Instead, he glories in the magic-weaving possibilities of cinema, from gorgeous visual effects – there’s a lovely flying carpet sequence – to expressionist sets, dreamy dissolves and postmodern looks-to-camera. This one will haunt your dreams.

It's admirable that Kore-eda sets himself new challenges each time he makes a film, but the attempt to conjure substance from conversations improvised around a complicated and obscure back-story in Distance proves fairly unrewarding.

Momentum builds, and come the '70s, with budding film-maker Gigi and and his jealous brother Giancarlo now free-living students, their accumulation of petty slights and betrayals becomes genuinely compelling.

An amusing watch, this has a freshness and naturalism rarely found in the typically over-styled French romcom genre.

A leisurely, wise and ultimately affecting meditation on the benefits of letting go.

It lacks internal logic and relies on the audience’s familiarity with its cartoon serial source.

The Stolen doesn’t dig too deep into its characters, so it’s not the emotionally devastating watch it could have been. But it has something to say about a penniless woman’s plight in the era, and it’s engaging and refreshing on several counts.