The nominal director is Lee H Katzin, but this was entirely Steve McQueen's project. Starring and driving, his 1971 film about the famous 24-hour race was his obsession, and he was in a strange place when he made it, his paranoid quest for perfection reflected in the extraordinary cinematography of motors in motion. Barely any plot, it's all wheels, speed and engine noise. Less a movie than a machine.

Directed by Oxide Pang, this was re-edited after his success with The Eye—Pang presumably feeling he could now take more stylistic liberties. The movie concerns a drug dealer who courts disaster by upping the ante to keep his girlfriend from prostitution, and sees Pang grandly messing with timelines, colour and reality. An enjoyable dip in the seedy Bangkok underground.

Rumour has it that the CIA funded Halas and Batchelor's 1954 cartoon adaptation of George Orwell's political barnyard allegory. But even though it's dated and stilted, it remains not only darkly savage anti-Stalinist satire but also a quite stunning piece of animation. Surely long overdue for a Babe-style remake?

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.

Three intense '60s masterpieces from Polanski in one box set, plus his Oscar-garlanded WWII ghetto drama from 2002

Storming sex-obsessed electro-garage

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.

Barbet Schroeder's outré 1976 tale of feral love between petty criminal Olivier (Gérard Depardieu) and high-class Parisian dominatrix Ariane (Bulle Ogier), complete with scrotum piercing and golden showers, was originally denied a BBFC certificate. In retrospect, the analogy between S&M and romantic power games is overplayed, but Schroeder's willingness to draw sex and death so close together is compelling.

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.

Mining that fecund Field Of Dreams territory, where baseball and unresolved Oedipal complexes collide, The Rookie is a rousing real-life account of loyal Texan husband, science teacher and occasional 98mph pitcher Jim Morris (Dennis Quaid), whose small-town existence and lifelong battles with cantankerous pop (Brian Cox) are suddenly transformed by the offer of a place in the Major League.