Leone's three-hour opera of a western, with Henry Fonda as the villain and a harmonica.
Tati built a whole glass city to get lost in; a comedy with no close-ups and no plot.
Paul Newman eats fifty eggs on a chain gang; "what we've got here is failure to communicate".
Benjamin, Mrs Robinson and the bus at the end, to Simon and Garfunkel.
Beatty and Dunaway rob banks and die in slow motion; New Hollywood begins.
Alain Delon as a hitman in a trench coat and fedora; Melville's cool influenced every hitman film since.
Three men and a Civil War gold hunt; the graveyard standoff to Morricone.
The icon painter through medieval Russia, the Tatar raid and a boy casting a bell.
A Swinging London photographer enlarges a picture and may have found a murder.
The Algerian uprising filmed like a newsreel; the Pentagon screened it in 2003.
Belmondo and Karina drive south in primary colours; Godard at his most alive.
Lean's Russian Revolution romance, the ice palace and "Lara's Theme".
An entomologist trapped in a sand pit with a widow, digging forever; Teshigahara and sand as texture.
Clint Eastwood with a poncho and a cigar; the spaghetti western begins.
Every line sung, every wall painted; Catherine Deneuve at a petrol station in the snow.
Birds attack Bodega Bay for no reason; the school playground scene.
Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian prince watching his world end, and Visconti's hour-long ball.
A brainwashed war hero, a Queen of Diamonds and a political assassination; paranoia in 1962.
A ronin asks to commit seppuku in a lord's courtyard and tells a story first; Kobayashi's samurai masterpiece.
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch defending a Black man in Depression-era Alabama.
A man, a woman and a baroque hotel where nothing can be pinned down; the most argued-over puzzle film.
Two hours in the life of a singer waiting for a cancer diagnosis, in near real time through Paris.
Two friends and Jeanne Moreau over twenty years; the New Wave at its most exhilarating.
A woman vanishes on an island and the film forgets to look for her; Antonioni booed at Cannes, then canonised.
Belmondo, Seberg and the jump cut; the New Wave arrives in one film.
Bresson's thief in Paris, filmed as hands and gestures, and the ending in the prison.
A French actress and a Japanese architect, memory and the bomb; Resnais and Duras.
Truffaut's own childhood as Antoine Doinel, ending with the freeze frame on the beach.
John Wayne, Dean Martin and a jail to hold; Hawks made it as an answer to High Noon.
Cary Grant chased by a crop duster and up Mount Rushmore in the template for the spy thriller.
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