A fixture in critics' polls, Yasujirō Ozu's most enduring masterpiece is a beautifully nuanced exploration of filial duty, expectation and regret.

Two self-confessed hedonists wreak wanton havoc in Věra Chytilová's visually spectacular neo-dadaist farce.

An incontestable masterpiece of silent cinema, Carl Dreyer's moving biopic features one of the most powerful performances ever captured on film.

Yasujiro Ozu's influential masterpiece is a tender meditation on family politics, sacrifice and the status quo.

Dazzling document of Soviet life, by Dziga Vertov, showing a living city and the people and machines that propel it.

Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO for his debut film, boy wonder Orson Welles created this notoriously brilliant portrait of a media giant.

Agnes Varda’s classic character study follows a pop singer as she wanders around Paris awaiting the results of serious medical tests.

Renoir's depiction of an intransigent society teetering towards disaster was derided upon release and only later acclaimed as one of cinema’s most vital films.

A nurse and an actress who refuses to speak seem to fuse identities in Ingmar Bergman’s disturbing, formally experimental psychological drama.

Farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Kurosawa’s influential epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

Peter Lorre is unforgettable as the compulsive child murderer on the run from both police and criminals alike, in Fritz Lang’s seminal crime film.

A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere, Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s beautifully photographed tale explores the religious intolerance and familial tensions within a Danish farming family.

Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of writer's block with this magnum opus about a film director experiencing his own creative crisis.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece about the last years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from the perspective of both the revolutionaries and the French authorities.

Chantal Akerman reads letters sent to her from her mother in Belgium, against a tableau of shots of 1970s New York.

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, this unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide audiences, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough tells the story of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.

Roberto Rossellini's acerbic but finally very moving masterpiece about marital crisis boasts great performances from Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders

Fritz Lang’s expressionist, dystopian vision is one of the first science fiction feature films, and is arguably the most influential.

Agnès Varda’s award-winning study of those living on the margins of French society at the turn of the millennium.

Jacques Rivette’s biggest commercial hit is an exhilarating combination of theatricality, paranoia and ‘la vie parisienne’, around an entrancing examination of making and watching films.

Part One of Béla Tarr’s epic adaptation of Laszlo Karsnahorkai’s novel about the disintegration of an isolated community.

Part Two of Béla Tarr’s epic adaptation of Laszlo Karsnahorkai’s novel about the disintegration of an isolated community.

The Czech archive version of one of cinema's last and most luminous silent masterpieces, an enduring fable of love, loss and redemption.