Greta Gerwig runs through Manhattan to Bowie in black and white; a portrait of being 27.
Brie Larson at a foster-care facility for teenagers; the small film that launched a cast.
One continuous take across a Berlin night, a bank robbery included.
Martin Luther King and the 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Harry Dean Stanton walks out of the desert; the peep-show conversation with Nastassja Kinski.
Two women, a Thunderbird and the Grand Canyon; Ridley Scott's road movie that ends in the air.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talk through one night in Vienna; the first of three.
Nobody puts Baby in a corner; the summer of 1963 at a Catskills resort.
A janitor at MIT who is a maths genius, and Robin Williams saying "it's not your fault".
Five teenagers in Saturday detention; the John Hughes film that named a generation.
Two friends on a wine tour of Santa Barbara; the film that hurt Merlot sales.
Nine lives in the San Fernando Valley, an Aimee Mann singalong and a rain of frogs.
Emily Watson's Bess and a paralysed husband in a Calvinist Scottish village; von Trier's first great film.
A model and a retired judge who taps his neighbours' phones in Geneva; Kieslowski's last film.
Angels listening to Berliners' thoughts in black and white, one of them falling for a trapeze artist.
Juliette Binoche after the crash that killed her family; Kieslowski's trilogy begins with liberty.
Two Peking opera stars across fifty years of Chinese history; the only Chinese Palme d'Or.
Max Fischer, the worst student at the best school, and Bill Murray as his rival in love.
Hitler's last twelve days in the bunker, with Bruno Ganz; the meme and the masterpiece.
Johnny Depp with blades for hands in pastel suburbia; Burton's fairy tale.
A family drives a VW bus to a child beauty pageant; the push-start.
A Belarusian boy watches the SS burn villages in 1943; the most harrowing war film made.
Jim Carrey's whole life is a TV show; the door in the sky.
Twenty-four hours in the Paris banlieue after a riot, in black and white; "so far, so good".
Edward Norton as a reformed neo-Nazi and the curb-stomp scene.
A Polish hairdresser humiliated in Paris rebuilds himself in Warsaw for revenge; equality as black comedy.
Three stories tied by a car crash in Mexico City; Inarritu's debut.
Two Hong Kong cops and two women, canned pineapple and "California Dreamin'"; Wong Kar-wai's pop masterpiece.
Four boys walk the tracks to find a body; Rob Reiner's Stephen King coming-of-age.
Szpilman surviving the Warsaw ghetto and the ruins; Polanski's own history.
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