The rise and fall of a porn star in the San Fernando Valley, 1977 to 1984.
A son accuses his father at a 60th birthday dinner; the first Dogme 95 film.
The hottest day in Bed-Stuy and a pizzeria; Spike Lee's film about race that ends without an answer.
Robin Williams tells his boys to seize the day; "O Captain! My Captain!"
Gershwin, black-and-white New York and the bench under the Queensboro Bridge.
One juror against eleven in a hot room; Lumet made a whole film out of a single table.
A noble family sold into slavery in medieval Japan; the saddest film Mizoguchi made.
An entomologist trapped in a sand pit with a widow, digging forever; Teshigahara and sand as texture.
Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian prince watching his world end, and Visconti's hour-long ball.
Leone's four-hour Jewish gangster epic across fifty years of New York.
Pacino robs a Brooklyn bank to pay for his lover's surgery; "Attica!"
Altman's 24 characters over five days of country music and a political rally.
A newsreader who is "mad as hell" becomes a ratings hit; Chayefsky predicted television.
Klaus Kinski leads conquistadors down the Amazon into madness; the raft of monkeys.
A French actress and a Japanese architect, memory and the bomb; Resnais and Duras.
A woman vanishes on an island and the film forgets to look for her; Antonioni booed at Cannes, then canonised.
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch defending a Black man in Depression-era Alabama.
Jack Nicholson as an oil-rig worker who was once a concert pianist; the chicken salad scene.
Sissy Spacek narrates a killing spree across the Dakota plains; Malick's debut.
Three sisters and a maid in a red house while one of them dies.
Two hours in the life of a singer waiting for a cancer diagnosis, in near real time through Paris.
Satyajit Ray's first film: a boy and his sister in a Bengal village, and a train through the kash field.
Schoolgirls vanish on a Victorian rock in 1900 and nobody explains it.
The icon painter through medieval Russia, the Tatar raid and a boy casting a bell.
Lean's Russian Revolution romance, the ice palace and "Lara's Theme".
Benjamin, Mrs Robinson and the bus at the end, to Simon and Garfunkel.
James Dean in a red jacket, the knife fight at the observatory and the chickie run.
A press agent and a gossip columnist in the meanest New York ever filmed.
The Algerian uprising filmed like a newsreel; the Pentagon screened it in 2003.
A ronin asks to commit seppuku in a lord's courtyard and tells a story first; Kobayashi's samurai masterpiece.
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