Burt Lancaster, gruff and manly, and Tony Curtis, delicately fey, star in Carol Reed's howlingly homoerotic tale of two leotard-clad acrobats in '50s Paris, vying for each other's respect, for the affections of Gina Lollobrigida, and for mastery of the triple somersault. "Teach me the triple!" says wide-eyed Curtis to Lancaster. "Are you crazy?!" splurts Lancaster, outraged.

Arthur Penn's follow-up to Bonnie And Clyde, based on Arlo Guthrie's blues hit about his arrest for littering and how it led to him being rejected for service in Vietnam. Penn's movie follows Guthrie as he wanders the US from draft board to college to commune, providing a time capsule of the dreams and rituals of late-'60s drop-out America; and one that, with its lingeringly downbeat ending, now looks prescient.

Prompting both genuflections at its breakneck brilliance and gasps at its gung-ho grisliness, Roger Avary's comeback has been a startling opinion-divider. Fans of the Bret Easton Ellis novel will relish the former Tarantino sidekick's fidelity to the blank immorality of the prose, yet the movie bursts with visual ideas. James Van Der Beek is fearlessly irredeemable as Sean Bateman (younger brother of the American Psycho), flailing across campus, gobbling up narcotics, rock'n'roll (it has a great soundtrack), girls, boys, suicides, whatever.

Rowdy late John Ford comedy starring John Wayne and Lee Marvin as Guns Donovan and Boats Gilhooley, brawling Navy veterans who stay on in the South Pacific after the war against the Japanese ("bad, black days"). Contemporary audiences will probably find it crude, noisy and rambling—but it's ravishingly shot, and beneath the slapstick there's a sharp satire on class, race and friendship.

Michael Winterbottom veers as far away as imaginable from 24 Hour Party People, proving yet again that he's bizarrely versatile, in this "fictionalised documentary" about two Afghan refugees who flee across Pakistan, Iran and Turkey in an attempt to reach the relative safety of Kilburn High Road. Not an easy watch, it won multiple awards for its grainy worthiness.

Deeply cool 1957 musical based on the feckless chancer of the John O'Hara stories. Who else but Frank Sinatra could play the nightclub crooner who's a heel to not only Rita Hayworth but Kim Novak (both of whose singing was dubbed)? Rodgers & Hart songs, some (though not quite enough) smart-ass dialogue, and Frank in full effect.

Director Fred Schepisi attacks John Guare's stageplay, frenetically switching locations and narrators as often as possible in an attempt to movie-ise this intelligent, satirical, wordy account of sociopathic homosexual confidence trickster Will Smith (acting, for real!) and his divisive impact upon a group of pompous, wealthy, middle-aged Upper East Side culturati.

Peter Mullan proves himself a director of real bite in this harsh, affecting study of how '60s Ireland's strict adherence to Catholic doctrines ruined the sanity of many a young woman. If deemed to be in "moral danger", girls were incarcerated, with nuns serving as jailers. Geraldine McEwan makes a chilling wicked witch, and a sparky cast ensures it's an engrossing, unpreachy story.

Not quite the outright remake of The Wild Bunch it's often written up as, but still by some distance Walter Hill's most explicit homage to Sam Peckinpah. Based on a story by John Milius, 1987's Extreme Prejudice pitches upright Texas Ranger Jack Benteen (a suitably monolithic Nick Nolte) against old buddy Cash Bailey (a colourfully demented Powers Boothe), a former DEA enforcer turned major drug baron who's flooding the US with massive amounts of cocaine from his Mexican fortress, where he's surrounded by a small army of heavily-armed desperadoes.

French director Chris Marker's short "film novel" from 1962, La Jetée, couples sequential still photographs with narration to tell the tale of a time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future coming to the present day (Terry Gilliam remade it as Twelve Monkeys in 1995). Marker's feature-length philosophical 1983 travelogue Sans Soleil focuses on the subjects of Tokyo and the nature of memory.