The epitome of love-it-or-hate-it cinema, Mark and Michael Polish's surreal account of a mid-'50s Montana town about to be submerged by dam waters has absolutely no hook for the viewer other than sheer admiration for the beauty of the landscape, a gutsy disregard for narrative pacing and the detached Lynchian performances. Proudly unique, nonetheless.

Cocteau's dissection of the decadence of youth may be an acquired taste, but in 1949 it must have been quite a shocker. Callow siblings Nicole Stéphane and Edouard Dhermithe sow emotional havoc with their quasi-incestuous games, and reap tragedy with the help of Cocteau's narrator. An atypical first film from director Jean-Pierre Melville.

This dark treasure from 1945 was Robert Bresson's second feature. Scripted by Cocteau, it's erotic longing and revenge, as spurned spider woman Maria Casares seeks the downfall of her ex and his lover. In contrast with the grey, static textures of Bresson's celebrated work, there's near-noirish lustre, but the intriguing, deceptive narrative bareness, the sense of forces moving beneath the surface, are his alone.

The simmering sexuality. The blood lust. The savaging of bourgeois restraint. The horse flagellation. Ken Russell and DH Lawrence were made for each other. The nude wrestling scene is the one that everyone remembers, but the satire bites best in the form of Hermione, Eleanor Bron's caricature of avant-garde pretence. Made in 1969, this is probably the last time Russell showed restraint before he hurtled into kitsch overkill.

Robert Altman's wry comedy tackles the origins of modern showbiz and media manipulation in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Paul Newman plays the legendary 'star' as a bundle of neuroses who more than meets his match when the show is joined by Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts)—a man of principles, unimpressed by the razzamatazz. An enjoyable indictment of Hollywood.

Every film buff knows Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront and East Of Eden, but his two greatest films are terribly overlooked. In the case of America, America (1963), it's probably because he didn't cast a star. In the case of Wild River (1960), it's almost inexplicable. Montgomery Clift is a government official trying to persuade an old woman she must leave her home before it's flooded. Complex, tender, rich and true, this is a masterpiece, lost and found.

Ken Russell's 1967 movie was the last in the original Harry Palmer trilogy, and it's lunatic great. Retired from MI5 and living on cornflakes as a flea-bitten private eye, Michael Caine's downbeat, kitchen-sink Bond has to deliver some eggs, and deal with a militaristic right-wing Texan oil baron who's planning to destroy Soviet Russia with his computer (the titular brain). Caine is quite brilliantly morose.

Cool crime thriller starring a homicide detective with dentures

Alejandro González Iñárritu's follow-up to Amores Perros is an agonisingly bleak film about death and the apparent pointlessness of things, with a dying Sean Penn getting involved with distraught widow Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro's sweaty born-again ex-con. Highly charged, intensely acted but eventually somewhat predictable.

RELEASED A YEAR after Sergio Leone created the genre with A Fistful Of Dollars (1965), Django, directed by Leone's onetime assistant Sergio Corbucci, was the movie that saw the spaghetti western explode; a fact borne out by the countless unauthorised sequels it spawned across Europe and beyond (as far as Jamaica, where Perry Henzell's 1973 Rude Boy classic The Harder They Come paid heavy homage). Blue-eyed Franco Nero plays the eponymous mystery gunslinger, wandering in from the filthy wilderness, dragging a coffin behind him, toward a Hellish-looking bordertown.