This meditation on loneliness and the definition of family is a lot less bloody—though no less fascinating—than its predecessor.

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

The first hour is an absolute hoot, as the constant replaying of scenes lends a zany comic edge to Makoto’s otherwise banal social life. The animation is vibrantly coloured, the action fluid, the editing masterly and the voicework just on the right side of brash. It’s a shame, then, that the final third rejects the light touch of the preceding section to descend into drab moralising and a furious tying up of loose plot ends.

Following exiled Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon as he returns home to gauge feeling on Hussein and the devastating effects of sanctions, the endless conflicts and now the terrible carnage, the film grants brief access to the lives and opinions of those always on the harsh end of geopolitical manoeuvres.

Wong Kar-Wai's second feature is a brilliant dream of Hong Kong life in 1960.

Though he's too ubiquitous now to dupe real authoritarians, his film nevertheless proffers plenty of cheek - even if most of its gross-out gags come signposted.

Andersen makes humorous hay out of the stark home designs of Richard Neutra — only suitable, it seems, for drug dealers.

They don’t make many like this any more; Roger Corman would be proud.

The dialogue-free story makes for an accessible blast, although it's tricky to gauge individual personalities.

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.

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.

The best style has a purpose to it, and Russian Ark, in its hypnotic, endless swirl, gets at a deep truth of the post-Soviet psyche, haunted by its legacy of czarist rule and Stalin-era sacrifice. The film is a sad home for ghosts.

Ambitious, profoundly articulate, and despite its avoidance of sentimentality and sermonising, very compassionate.

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.

It's unfailingly lively entertainment that doesn't stint on (earned) feeling. Ideas about fear of the unknown, industrial corruption, and the splendours of polymorphity are all taken in stride. The balance tilts towards action and gags, and does them gloriously.

Beautifully directed, unsentimental and darkly funny.

Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated.

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.

It's a great package: salutary, short (74 minutes) and sweet.

Lee's satire on American TV is an intriguing failure.

It's enormously intelligent stuff, witty, poignant and thoroughly engrossing, and ends with one of the sharpest, funniest deconstructions of film form ever shot. Absolutely wonderful.

The lovely substance is in the wit, the nuances, the rhythms, and Ceylan's own very fine colour camerawork.

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

There's more than a hint of amateur theatricals about it, with Tilda and pals dressing up in wigs to stage the court scenes in her back garden, totally gratuitous female nudity, and a yawning gap between intention and result.

A potent and moving depiction of contemporary survival.

The denouement isn't very surprising or enlightening, but at its best this works as both a critique of Japan's pop culture system and an effective woman-in-peril psycho-thriller.

Stunningly acted and superbly shot (by Haskell Wexler), it is written, with Sayles' customary ear for vivid phrasing and telling details, as a meditation on man's desire to divorce himself not only from Nature but from his own true nature, imbuing the film with the intensity and rigour of an allegorical fable. And the ending truly makes you think about what you've just seen.

A characteristically elegant, eloquent and idiosyncratic meditation on the relationships between personal and political histories, and between life and art.