=93

A master of period-drama, Akira Kurosawa recasts Macbeth as a Japanese warlord in one of the greatest Shakespearean adaptations.

=93

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Robert Bresson’s hugely influential study of a petty thief in late 1950s Paris is one of his most widely acclaimed films.

=93

The film that Martin Scorsese compared to ‘opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed’.

=93

Bernardo Bertolucci’s stylish period thriller stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a repressed bureaucrat in Mussolini’s Italy who is assigned to kill his former professor.

=93

Like Get Out, Bong Joon Ho’s endlessly twisty, blackly sincere class-war thriller is a pop provocation for our unequal times.

=93

Urban anomie and multi-generational growing pains are given rich, relaxed expression in Edward Yang’s heartfelt Taipei family tapestry.

=93

Instantly heralded as a modern masterpiece, Barry Jenkins’ stunning three-part story of queer identity is both a technical and an emotional marvel.

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Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned agit-drama of proto-revolutionary mutiny and repression, often quoted but still powerful in its montage effects.

=93

Barbara Loden’s tough, unsentimental portrait of a woman adrift in the industrial heartlands of the north-eastern United States.

=72

The tough, touching story of a northern schoolboy and the kestrel that brings hope to his hardscrabble life remains the most widely admired of Ken Loach’s films.

=72

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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, relocated to Benito Mussolini’s fascist republic.

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Robert Bresson’s last film turns a Tolstoy novella about a forged banknote into a formidably focused meditation on the supposed root of all evil.

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This study of a terminally ill civil servant seeking meaning in his life is one of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s finest achievements.

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Roman Polanski’s brilliant thriller stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles, a desert town where water equals power.

=72

During the plague-ravaged middle ages, a knight buys time for himself by playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s much-imitated arthouse classic.

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On a road trip to receive an honorary degree, an elderly academic (Victor Sjöstrom) looks back over his life in Ingmar Bergman’s art-cinema classic.

=72

David Lynch’s adult fairytale follows teen sleuth Kyle MacLachlan’s murder inquiry into the surreal, perverse corners of small-town America.

=72

Victor Erice’s exquisite impressionistic distillation of childhood fear and wonder in the ruins of the recently ended Spanish Civil War.

=72

Young love and teen delinquency in Taiwan’s early 1960s adolescence, in Edward Yang’s slow-burn, bittersweet epic.

=72

Industrial modernity proves mercilessly madcap in Charlie Chaplin’s final (mostly) silent feature, one of the most inspired and ingenious of all his comedies.

=72

The feverish Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so renowned are as spellbinding as they are disturbing.

=72

A restless young couple dream of escaping Senegal for Paris in Djibril Diop Mambéty ’s stylish, poetic, irreverent expression of post-colonial fantasies.

=72

Chris Marker’s speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland.

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Chantal Akerman’s epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother.

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To make sense of the 20th century’s most horrific atrocity, Claude Lanzmann reinvented documentary itself, giving the form colossal new significance.

=72

This poll’s last western standing, John Ford’s sweeping, stirring rescue-or-revenge quest remains a film of magnificent mystery and poetry.

=62

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An eccentric English officer inspires the Arabs to unite against the Turks during WWI in David Lean’s seven Oscar-winner, an epic in every sense.

=62

Steven Spielberg laid the template for the modern summer blockbuster with this expert thriller about the hunt for a man-eating great white shark.

=62

A work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may be overrated.

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As timely as ever in its grim poeticisation of demagogues and doom, helplessness and hope. If music be the food of death, play on.

=62

Tinseltown’s greatest self-satire, a gothic requiem for big-screen bygones and the highs of screen stardom.

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Iconic neo-noir in a befouled sci-fi Los Angeles where humans and their machine replicas vie to be predators rather than prey.

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Billy Wilder’s supreme gender-bending comedy has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as female-posing musicians on the lam, and many knickers in a twist.

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The first of Yasujirō Ozu’s great cycle of dramas that place the joys and sadnesses of family life in the context of a Japan disrupted by modernity.

=62

Had Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the sharply etched dreamworld of Meshes of the Afternoon?

=52

In Luis Buñuel’s controversial masterpiece, a novice nun gets more than she bargains for when she turns her dead uncle’s estate into a home for beggars.

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Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a couple re-examining their emotional bonds.

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The grand summation of Ingmar Bergman’s career, this epic family drama drew on the director’s own childhood experiences in early 20th century Sweden.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama of a doomed romance across racial and age divides probes social hypocrisy with feeling.

=52

This virtuoso drama of a mute woman’s and her daughter’s silent defiance of patriarchy in 19th-century New Zealand still has searing emotional heft.

=52

A purely beautiful outing from the Tramp, this delightful urban romance features one of cinema’s most heartbreaking smiles.

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In real time, Cléo becomes more real, more subject than object. She discards her whipped-cream wig and polka dots for a simple black shift. She performs less and feels more.

=52

Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.

=46

Peter Sellers plays three separate roles in Stanley Kubrick’s mordant Cold War comedy in which insanity and political manoeuvrings lead to nuclear meltdown.

=46

Set in off-season Venice, British director Nicolas Roeg’s tragedy combines an acute study of grief with a supernaturally charged thriller plot, to beautiful and devastating effect.

=46

Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad.

=46

Disillusion in love and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production, with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri.

=46

Jean Vigo’s headily poetic portrait of young newlyweds on – and off – Michel Simon’s barge on the Seine.

=46

Alfred Hitchcock’s unsparing wrong-motel shocker starring Janet Leigh is a watershed for mainstream horror and still seminal in its suspense games.

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This prison-break study is Robert Bresson at his most starkly essential: a man, four walls, his ingenuity and the mysterious inflections of fate.

=41

Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as director, starring Robert Mitchum as an implacable child-hunting preacher, still leaves an indelible mark.

=41

Jacques Tati’s most painstaking accomplishment blends deft slapstick, endless visual ingenuity and sonic comedy in a stupendous modern satire.

=38

A brutish travelling strongman (Anthony Quinn) acquires a waif-like young assistant (Giulietta Masina) before taking to the road in Federico Fellini’s acclaimed neo-realist fable.

=38

Michelangelo Antonioni’s high-modernist breakthrough sends Monica Vitti in search less of her disappeared friend than her own self, via images to get lost in.

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Huge-spirited and sharp-eyed, Jean Renoir’s French-society fresco gathers high classes and low for a weekend of country-house fallout.

37

Robert Bresson gave us a typically stark vision of humanity as experienced by a put-upon, maltreated beast of burden that passes from owner to owner.

=35

The rare short film in this list, Marker’s dazzling photo montage ruminates on memory from beyond the apocalypse.

=35

Federico Fellini’s ode to Rome presents a lush, vibrant exterior to the swinging city, before revealing its rotting moral core.

=33

François Truffaut’s free-wheeling debut, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his rebel-schoolboy surrogate, is still a banner film for nouvelle vague lyric realism.

=33

The first American film by one of German expressionism’s leading exponents, this lush, atmospheric silent drama is replete with groundbreaking cinematography.

=30

An austere parable on the power of faith, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s penultimate film culminates in a transcendent resurrection scene.

=30

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s rapturous silent masterpiece, with soulful close-ups of Renée Jeanne “Maria” Falconetti’s tremulous martyr, transcending tyranny and temporality.

=30

Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.

29

Racial tensions reach boiling point in Spike Lee’s incandescent portrait of a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the hottest day of the year.

28

The dizzying story of wiseguy Henry Hill, from his seduction into a life of crime to his paranoid, cocaine-fuelled departure.

=26

The expansive second part of Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia saga continues the Corleone family story, charting in parallel young Vito’s earlier rise to prominence.

=26

Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of a medieval artist may be the most wrenching depiction of belief, creativity and the search for meaning ever filmed.

=22

Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, Martin Scorsese’s biopic is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films of the 1980s.

=22

A window on Algeria’s wider liberation war, recreating a violent phase of guerrilla struggle and suppression in powerful free-documentary style.

=22

All the mischief, discoveries, joys and tragedies of life are given endlessly lyrical expression in Satyajit Ray’s debut, the first entry in ‘The Apu Trilogy’.

=22

Hollywood is dark and dangerous, yet alluring, in David Lynch’s acclaimed thriller.

=20

The film that brought Japanese cinema to the world, this 88-minute firecracker proved a seminal assault on the notion of objectivity.

=20

The film that topped Sight and Sound’s inaugural Greatest Films of All Time poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s indelible neorealist parable offers a sharp-eyed portrait of Italy’s post-war privations.

=18

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Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War blowout, a hell-trip through the smoke and dazzle of imperial America’s most grandstanding rogue show.

=14

Two men recruit a guide to take them into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious realm where one’s innermost wishes come true, in this metaphysical sci-fi epic.

=14

Jean-Luc Godard’s cock-of-the-walk calling card, mixing pulp pastiche and upstart rebellion with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s footloose Parisian delinquent.

=14

Akira Kurosawa’s monumental, scintillating tale of hired samurai protecting a peasant village: period thriller and moral/political fable in one.

=14

Claire Denis’s great gift is to evoke emotion with gesture and juxtaposition. In the desert, water shimmers and ripples, naked shoulders perspire, black mosquito nets recall sheer lingerie.

=12

Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously designed epic recounts the picaresque exploits of an 18th-century Irish adventurer.

=12

Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s high-art vigilante movie for fallen times, with a coiled Robert De Niro as psycho-saviour of an infernal NYC.

=9

Any sense of a conventional psychodrama is constantly disrupted by the experimental, improvisatory filmmaking.

=9

The more ‘information’ we’re offered about the case, the more we come to realise that there are no easy answers to any of the questions being raised.

=9

Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece is a heartbreaking story of illicit love that pulses with the ache of repressed desire.

8

Cinema scaled new heights of visual poetry in this deeply personal, elliptical film by the master of ‘sculpting in time’.

=6

Federico Fellini’s portrait of the film director as harried ringmaster and unreliable dreamer, spinning gold from his memories and fantasies.

=6

A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.

=4

Told in Yasujirō Ozu’s simple and elegant style, this story of intergenerational discord is heartbreaking and deeply human.

=4

A magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.

3

The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.

2

Famously sitting at the top of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an enduring classic.

1

Stanley Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction cinema.