Gershwin, black-and-white New York and the bench under the Queensboro Bridge.
Two bikers ride to New Orleans with Jack Nicholson in tow; the counterculture on film.
The Algerian uprising filmed like a newsreel; the Pentagon screened it in 2003.
Klaus Kinski leads conquistadors down the Amazon into madness; the raft of monkeys.
Jack Nicholson as an oil-rig worker who was once a concert pianist; the chicken salad scene.
A press agent and a gossip columnist in the meanest New York ever filmed.
Three sisters and a maid in a red house while one of them dies.
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 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.
Beatty and Dunaway rob banks and die in slow motion; New Hollywood begins.
Lean's Russian Revolution romance, the ice palace and "Lara's Theme".
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.
Wheat fields at magic hour, locusts and fire; the most beautifully photographed film of its decade.
A noble family sold into slavery in medieval Japan; the saddest film Mizoguchi made.
Sissy Spacek narrates a killing spree across the Dakota plains; Malick's debut.
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.
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.
Paul Newman eats fifty eggs on a chain gang; "what we've got here is failure to communicate".
Satyajit Ray's first film: a boy and his sister in a Bengal village, and a train through the kash field.
A woman vanishes on an island and the film forgets to look for her; Antonioni booed at Cannes, then canonised.
An entomologist trapped in a sand pit with a widow, digging forever; Teshigahara and sand as texture.
Belmondo, Seberg and the jump cut; the New Wave arrives in one film.
A newsreader who is "mad as hell" becomes a ratings hit; Chayefsky predicted television.
Altman's 24 characters over five days of country music and a political rally.
A French actress and a Japanese architect, memory and the bomb; Resnais and Duras.
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