Two bikers ride to New Orleans with Jack Nicholson in tow; the counterculture on film.
Paul Newman eats fifty eggs on a chain gang; "what we've got here is failure to communicate".
Wheat fields at magic hour, locusts and fire; the most beautifully photographed film of its decade.
A man, a woman and a baroque hotel where nothing can be pinned down; the most argued-over puzzle film.
Truffaut's own childhood as Antoine Doinel, ending with the freeze frame on the beach.
Beatty and Dunaway rob banks and die in slow motion; New Hollywood begins.
Two friends and Jeanne Moreau over twenty years; the New Wave at its most exhilarating.
Bresson's thief in Paris, filmed as hands and gestures, and the ending in the prison.
Belmondo, Seberg and the jump cut; the New Wave arrives in one film.
Bertolucci and Storaro's fascist Italy in tilted frames and autumn light.
A Stasi officer listens to a playwright's flat and slowly changes sides.
Capra's idealist senator filibusters for 23 hours against a corrupt machine.
A Sonderkommando prisoner at Auschwitz tries to bury one boy; shot in shallow focus over his shoulder.
A cellist takes a job preparing the dead for burial in rural Japan.
Welles at 25: deep focus, a fractured biography and the word 'Rosebud'.
Three hours of the Paris theatre world of the 1830s, made in secret under the Occupation.
A dying Montreal professor is gathered up by his son, his friends and his ex-lovers.
A bailiff in 1920s Rotterdam sets out to break the illegitimate son he refuses to acknowledge.
A Danish doctor commutes between a refugee camp and a schoolyard where his son is bullied.
A German-Jewish family flees to a Kenyan farm in 1938 and the daughter grows up African.
A farmer plans to drown his wife and falls back in love with her in the city; Murnau in Hollywood.
A ballerina torn between art and love, with a 17-minute ballet in Technicolor.
Dreyer's trial in close-up, with a performance from Renee Falconetti that has never been matched.
A potter leaves his family for a ghost in war-torn Japan; Mizoguchi at his most beautiful.
A father and son search Rome for a stolen bicycle he needs to keep his job.
A dead screenwriter narrates from a pool; Gloria Swanson is ready for her close-up.
A married woman and a doctor meet in a railway tea room; the most restrained love story ever filmed.
A trans singer in Santiago is shut out of her partner's death by his family.
The Odessa Steps sequence, the pram, and the montage theory every editor still learns.
Ozu's widowed father persuading his daughter to marry, told in tatami-level stillness.
Infobox
