Frank Pavich’s fun documentary captures an unbowed, exuberant Jodorowsky, who recalls his team of “spiritual warriors” with the camaraderie of a battle-scarred veteran.

Eraserhead is a singular work of the imagination, a harrowing, heartbreaking plunge into the darkest recesses of the soul.

Either via clay dolls or fragile flesh, the truth is unmissable—as is Panh’s film itself.

Touching, intense, sometimes unexpectedly amusing, sometimes agonising, and always achingly sincere.

Joaquin Phoenix is devastating as the villain-in-the-making in this incendiary tale of psychological escape and psychopathy.

It’s a reinvented romantic comedy, sassy and fun, that doesn’t necessarily rely on obvious tropes and is worth the wait.

The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country.

Shoah's ultimate legacy, however, is being the final word on the Final Solution-one that renders every well-intentioned dramatic re-creation of such horrors into repulsive Ausch-kitsch by comparison.

That’s the subtle level this movie operates on, and by the time it arrives at its powerhouse climax, a ruinous argument in a hotel room where all lingering doubts are finally and furiously outed, there’s nowhere left for them to ramble. They’re pinned down and have to improvise, but this glorious movie has infinite space to roam.

Quietly, though, this amuse-bouche of a setup (culled from six episodes of BBC television) blooms into a meal of majestic agony. Coogan and Brydon's competitive bursts of celebrity impressions - Michael Caine comes in for special attention - take on a tone of clingy desperation, as does their jockeying for status in taunts of love, marriage and career.

Snipes and Harrelson bounce off the screen like Michael Jordan, while Shelton and cinematographer Russell Boyd perfectly capture the agile thrills of the game itself. A double-whammy slam-dunker of a movie.

Most of all, Chimes at Midnight is gorgeously, heartbreakingly sad, shot through with romantic surrender and the ache of loss.

By the time they've taken full control of the movie's alternate universe-as the melodrama morphs with marvelous ease into a musical comedy-you feel like anything is possible. Cinema this alive is a rare bird, indeed.

An aggressively unpleasant man somehow lands a perfect series of gigs in this rudely funny documentary: first as a pounding rock drummer who revolutionized the field; then as a fearless, rage-filled polo player; and finally as an impatient interviewee.

That rarest of art documentaries, one that actually leaves viewers with a better sense of the gifted versus the phony.

Red Rocket is an engrossing state-of-the-nation comedy designed to make us feel so dirty that no amount of washing will remove the sweat from our nether parts.

What makes this hectic farce so fresh and funny is the sheer fertility of the writing, while the lives and times of Hi, Ed and friends are painted in splendidly seedy colours, turning Arizona into a mythical haven for a memorable gaggle of no-hopers, halfwits and has-beens. Starting from a point of delirious excess, the film leaps into dark and virtually uncharted territory to soar like a comet.

And though not all of Lonergan's conceits work on a scene-by-scene basis (an upper-crust womanizer played by Jean Reno skews a bit too close to caricature), the film has a cumulative power-solidified by a devastating opera-house finale-that's staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.

Mamoru Hosoda’s cyber fairy-tale is basically wall-to-wall bangers, all backdropped by virtual worlds that wash over you in waves of world-building so detailed and epic, they’d make William Gibson’s eyes pop.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Roxanne is far and away [Martin's] richest film to date, lyrical, sweet-natured, touching, and very, very funny.

Blessed with a weeklong run at the end of Film Forum's bliss-inducing Robert Bresson retrospective, the French filmmaker's 1956 tale of steel bars and iron wills boils a true-story prison break down to its bare necessities.

Tod Browning's heartbreaking, empathetic story of circus life is one of the most striking, unforgettable movies ever made.

An exotic and gripping piece of Hollywood mythology, made with all the technical skill and gloss one associates with Irving Thalberg's MGM.

It’s such a torrent of universes, ideas and styles that it should collapse under the weight of its own creative payload. But it all works – brilliantly.

Gallo and Dalle are sublimely tragic figures; the scene in which Shane stalks around Notre Dame like Frankenstein unleashed is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the way the film plays with and deepens movie-monster archetypes.

The rollicking, space-opera spirit of George Lucas’s original trilogy (you can safely forget the second trio of cynical, tricked-up prequels) emanates from every frame of J.J. Abrams' euphoric sequel. It’s also got an infusion of modern-day humor that sometimes steers the movie this close to self-parody—but never sarcastically, nor at the expense of a terrific time.

Kaufman (like Tom Wolfe, whose book The Right Stuff this is taken from) is well enough aware of the media circus surrounding the whole project, but still celebrates his magnificent seven's heroism with a rhetoric that is respectful and irresistible.

Magnificent...Scorsese's most poignantly moving film.

This time around, the director documents a 2011 Young solo show in Toronto (the musician's birthplace), but in an intentionally fractured way.

But mainly, it’s the film’s folk music that roots in the heart like a faraway lure.

The acting, especially from Menash Noy as an ineffectual attorney, is phenomenal, resulting in a feminist knockout told in inverse.

It’s a nuanced, careful work that will resonate strongly with everyone who has loved and lost, as well as offering a warning of possible heartbreak ahead for those who haven’t.

Immaculately shot by Russell Harlan, perfectly performed by a host of Hawks regulars, and shot through with dark comedy, it's probably the finest Western of the '40s.

Composed of serio-comic scenes from small town life, heavy with a future perfect sense of Myth-in-the-making, it's driven by tensions between insignificance and monumentality that explode in the histrionic splendour and excess of the celebrated final sequence: Abe Lincoln setting out to scale unseen heights against the portentous gloom of a gathering storm.

Superbly imagined and visually sumptuous, it's let down only by Hisaishi's sub-Miklos Rosza score.

It is a spectacular achievement hung on a remarkable performance by Savage. Like Barton’s startling artistic vision, Blaze is a masterpiece.

It’s artfully shot, the aspect ratio tightening claustrophobically as it flashes back to the 1970s. But Perkins’s script also sprinkles in sudden shocks, deeply macabre moments and slashes of dark humour to generate a deep unease all of its own.

Nichols has said that the idea for the film emerged from a free-floating anxiety that he sensed in the world at large, the feeling that everything we treasure in life could be lost in an instant. That sensation permeates this strikingly original movie - especially its enigmatic mind-fuck of a finale, which will haunt you for several lifetimes.

Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.

It is the richly evocative performances of Marion (aggressive yet enticing) and Merhar (wearing world-weariness like an aged suit) that cut deepest.

With no formal film training, Satter has crafted a claustrophobic thriller packed with such nail-biting tension there should be an emergency manicurist waiting outside each cinema.

Like Chaplin’s The Kid or ET The Extra-Terrestrial, The Wizard of Oz simply lays bare primal emotions, exposes our childhood anxieties about abandonment and powerlessness and brings to light the tension between the repressive comforts of home and the liberating terrors of the unknown marking all our adult lives.

Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 movie about the movies wears its golden-era confidence as big and bold as Kirk Douglas’s shoulder pads, and it’s pretty close to film heaven.

Serrated with political edge, Scorsese’s true-crime epic is impeccably constructed and utterly gripping.

1917 is a work of sweeping scale yet pinpoint intimacy.

Surely the definitive version of Louisa May Alcott's novel, sweet, funny, perfectly cast, and exquisitely evocative in its New England period reconstruction.

A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri's stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film's grisly murder.

Little Women sometimes plays like a comedy, one that includes a crumpled cry over a bad haircut and several kitchen interludes that feel like Christmas miracles. Yet it’s Alcott’s visionary attitude, well-struck by Gerwig, that stays with you the longest: the loneliness of female liberty.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

It’s rare for a movie to combine cinematic fireworks and social commentary in quite the thrilling and mischievous way that Korean director Bong Joon-ho manages with Parasite.

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

As gritty as Heaven Knows What often feels, it’s leavened by empathy and poetic moments: desperate kisses, a passed-out couch nap lit by slanting sunbeams, the beautifully eerie synth music of Tomita. This isn’t an easy watch, but it validates every risk we want our most emboldened filmmakers to take.

A masterclass in tension, visual panache and B-movie excess.

A richly textured masterpiece, Roma is cinema at its purest and most human.

You might actually say the documentary itself is Mohassess’s final canvas, so infused it becomes with his alternately infuriating and infectious personality.

Why do we care? Because never before have the steps to thugdom, as depressing as that destination may be, been so rigorously detailed, neither romanticized nor negated. Don’t miss.

The use of pop and opera and the black-and-white photography (by Michael Chapman) are exemplary, the actual boxing a compulsive dance of death.

Magnificently directed and shot (by Arthur Miller), flawlessly acted by Peck and a superb cast, governed by an almost Langian sense of fate, it's a film that has the true dimensions of tragedy.

If you can stomach the fear, go. Confident hands created this film. Its nightmare lingers for weeks.

Often topping lists of the best films of all time, and a great influence on many great directors of the last half century, not least for its purity of expression, this remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema’s masterpieces.

The movie is a coming-of-age story, but whose age is coming? That's the profound question we're left with, in a stellar adaptation that balances gore with black humor, ethical quandary, hope and—yes—plenty of brains.

The film plays like a better episode of "Mad Men," pitch-perfect in its details yet fully lived-in: a universe of rolled-up shirt sleeves, sweat-laden brows and screams that don’t sound canned.

The Third Man remains among the most consummate of British thrillers: Reed and Greene’s sardonic vision of smiling corruption is deliciously realised with superb location work, a roster of seasoned Viennese performers and the raised eyebrow of Anton Karas’ jaunty zither score.

A masterpiece.

It plays like one of Linklater’s most intimate gifts, an adult rumination on the tricky subject of patriotism.

A delight from start to finish, with everyone involved working on peak form.

This one’s a crucible of sweaty pre-natal panic, weird knocks at the door, mind games and ultimately, a roaring, miniature apocalypse set inside a single claustrophobic living room. If that already sounds like your home, it's time to go and give it a try.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

A superbly chilling essay in the supernatural.

Funny, creepy (in a way already peculiar to Hitchcock) and always entertaining, both in the moment and in the realisation that you’re enjoying a particularly witty and playful script.

Rudolph's script is both playful and precise, his images fantastic yet real, the music elegiac but ecstatically sung by an impassioned Marianne Faithfull. Part thriller, part comic fantasy, part love story, Trouble in Mind even offers an ambiguous, high-flown ending that suggests this really is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Redford has fashioned (from Paul Attanasio's brilliant screenplay) an impeccably nuanced Faustian drama which aspires to capture America's fall from grace: that point at the end of the '50s when the country first lost faith in itself.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

The most gratifying thing about the film is feeling Moodysson’s warmth return to him.

Barry Lyndon is best known for its photography – Kubrick borrowed a low-light camera from Nasa so he could shoot in candlelight – and it is uniquely, heart-stoppingly gorgeous. But there’s much more to it: this is a story of identity, and the lack of it. And it’s fascinating.

This spry, sharp and relentlessly clever middle finger to censorship is Panahi’s boldest act of defiance to date.

It’s the creature’s instinctual murder spree that makes the immediate impression, but that would be nothing without the simmering tensions among the human counterparts. [30th anniversary release]

You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.

Admittedly this is a legal "Rocky, convincing rather than realistic, witty rather than analytical, but it amounts to a far more effective indictment of the US legal system than ...and justice for all, and is the first courtroom drama in years to recapture the brilliance of the form.

A fun, bombastic, brilliant choreographed and totally enthralling film.

What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?

It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

The final KO of a brilliant cinematic one-two punch, Leos Carax’s follow-up to his gobsmacking feature debut, Boy Meets Girl (1984), proved this enfant terrible was no one-hit wonder. Boy still meets girl, in the form of feral Denis Levant and gorgeous Juliette Binoche, but this sophomore outing’s real romantic coupling is an artist swooning head over heels for his medium.

Forty years on, Taxi Driver remains almost impossibly perfect: it’s hard to think of another film that creates and sustains such a unique, evocative tone, of dread blended with pity, loathing, savage humour and a scuzzy edge of New York cool.

It encapsulates the power of a community to protect the environment.

Cox's weird and wonderful first feature defies description, with a plot and characters at once grounded in the seedy reality of Reagan's America and effortlessly enhanced by flights of pure, imaginative fantasy. What distinguishes the movie is its offbeat, semi-satirical sense of humour, seamlessly woven into its wacky thriller plot. But there are endless things to enjoy, from Robby Müller's crisp camerawork to a superb set of performances, from witty movie parodies to a tremendous punk soundtrack.

Its seminal importance in the early gangster movie cycle outweighed only by its still exhilarating brilliance, this Howard Hughes production was the one unflawed classic the tycoon was involved with.

The attention to visuals is above and beyond what most vérité is capable of; doing double duty as the film's cinematographer, Fan demonstrates a pitch-perfect photojournalistic eye.

McQuarrie also builds on the last film’s self-aware level of wit and, most importantly, its set-piece-crafting sophistication. No action sequence is allowed to peter out, or be chopped to ribbons in the edit, or lean on the crutch of CG augmentation.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Voyage to Italy is the kind of movie that makes those unhappily in love feel understood. And even if that’s not you (congratulations), it’s still possible to groove on Rossellini’s stranger-in-a-strange-land psychodrama.

Phenomenally sad yet exhilarating.

This is a story about the importance of making mistakes, of learning, of pulling yourself up and trying again – whether in love, sex, art or friendship. It’s a delirious ‘making of’ film: the making of an artist and the making of a life in all its messy glory.

Superbly scored, beautifully designed by Boris Leven to highlight the genre's artificiality, and performed to perfection.

Sorry, Baby is a captivating comedy-drama that avoids the reductive binary of hero or villain. Instead, Victor articulates the flaws of humanity, of people, but also the hope we can find in each other and ourselves.

It’s a movie about memory that actually improves the more you go over its folds.

Ozu’s final film is a movingly valedictory affair, its familiar story of Ryu’s elderly widower marrying off daughter Iwashita carrying even more poignancy than usual as a poised and wise reminder of passing time and the inevitable approach of mortality.