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.

The meanings of Close-Up shift, subtly and profoundly, with every viewing; the only certainty is that its rewards are boundless.

There’s a quiet fury to Johnny Guitar, best embodied by Mercedes McCambridge’s vicious Emma, who wants to drive Vienna out of town. It’s a film that climaxes with a gunfight between two women, while the men hide behind tree stumps.

With diamond-hard repartee by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (by way of James M Cain’s novel) and ghoulish cinematography by the great John Seitz, this is the gold standard of ’40s noir, straight down the line.

A film steeped in psychological realism, its rigorously compact plotting and stark, noir-influenced photography perfectly complementing the mounting sense of clammy, metaphysical dread.

This is Young in his playroom, grabbing his toys at random while indulging his every antimelodic whim, and Demme’s off-the-cuff approach makes for the perfect aesthetic complement.

For all its simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece.

From the slam-bang direction to the relentless pace to the not-a-word-wasted dialogue and even the driving synth score, everything else about The Terminator just works.

There aren't many films we'd describe as perfect, but Robert Zemeckis's oh-so-'80s time travel tale fits the bill.

It's certainly one of the finest comedies ever to come out of Paramount, the allegations of dubious taste missing the point of Lubitsch's satire - not so much the general nastiness of the Nazis as their unforgiveable bad manners.

The Thing has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative effects blowouts.

With a rich, textured plot in which things are never quite what they seem, Rohrwacher paints a magical portrait of the decay of rural life, intertwining the past and the present in a work that is as exhilarating as it is sublime.

A groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

It’s a visual feast that’s served with enormous respect for the essence of Shakespeare’s words, even though Coen has shaved the text so that it moves at a furious pace, with a sudden slap of an ending that feels entirely fitting. It’s a creepy, bone-shaking triumph.

The final Harry Potter movie, above all others, supplies Radcliffe with the gravitas of not just an epic story come to completion, but some real dramatic heft. Not so bad for a Hogwarts dropout.

A heavenly slice of brassy Hollywood romanticism that’ll still have you swooning all the way to the trolley stop.

The arguments over whether Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made will rage on forever. But the greatest film about Citizen Kane – and just about any other movie – has definitely arrived. David Fincher’s eleventh film is a lavish love letter to old Hollywood in all its glory, cynicism and wild extravagance.

In lesser hands, this could have easily been some seriously detestable John Wayne jingoism. But via Fiennes, the film is a spiky and complex counterweight to Hollywood sentiment and indie cynicism alike.

Though McQueen continues to work his themes of suffering and spiritual transcendence, this unflinching, unforgiving drama is not about a slave, but about slavery itself.

By a whopping margin, this is Kubrick’s most radical film and greatest dramatic gamble.

Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.