Lengthy adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about poor black folk in Georgia during the first half of the 20th century was Spielberg's first 'serious' film. The territory is admittedly dark (incest, domestic violence) and, despite its faults, it succeeds thanks to visual skill and a sterling cast led by Whoopi Goldberg.

A career highpoint for director Michael Caton-Jones, This Boy's Life also provides one of Robert De Niro's most memorably mannered performances as the parochial bullying stepdad to Leonardo DiCaprio's teen protagonist. With his seething Fargo accent and petty pronouncements ("I know a thing or two about a thing or two!"), he's always fascinating, even when the movie isn't.

Tub-thumping story of how America conquered the final frontier

Ambitious and underrated, this finds the Godfather team of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo mired in Harlem's seedy underworld of steamy dives, bootlegging mobsters and sultry divas circa 1920. Richard Gere and Gregory Hines kick out the jazzy jams while Walter Hill fave James Remar provides a disturbing portrait of Dutch Schultz. This is Coppola at his wild and uneven post-Apocalypse Now peak.

A dazzling epic with a dark and bracing tone, George Stevens' Giant details Rock Hudson's old-fashioned Texan cattle baron (and American national metaphor) as he races towards modernity, neck and neck with neighbouring self-made trailer trash oil-swiller Jett Rink (James Dean). Hudson's sometimes stiff, and the pacing is certainly stately, but it's worth it to catch Dean's final intricately self-conscious screen turn.

Philip Kaufman's letter-perfect realisation of Milan Kundera's student classic describes the spiritual transformation of Czech doctor Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis, mercifully playing a 'real person') from pseudo-existentialist to moral being thanks to the loving idealism of waitress-turned-photographer Tereza (Juliette Binoche). Along the way there's a Russian invasion, an escape to Geneva, and plenty of sex with Lena Olin in a bowler hat.

Musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with heiress Grace Kelly being romantically pursued on the eve of her wedding by ex-hubbie Bing Crosby and dashing reporter Frank Sinatra. If the casting somehow lacks the faultless pizzazz of the original, the score of dazzling Cole Porter tunes more than makes up for it.

John Milius' deeply personal take on the surf generation of the '60s is everything you'd expect from Hollywood's last great iconoclast. It's a sumptuous visual feast, an epic journey charting the testosterone-packed lives of three surfing buddies (Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt and Gary Busey) and an unbelievably heavy-handed extended metaphor, as the ebb and flow of the tide is mirrored in our heroes' lives.

Directed by Roland Jofféand elegantly scripted by Robert Bolt, with a landmark score by Ennio Morricone, this follows Robert De Niro's ex-mercenary and Jeremy Irons' Jesuit priest during violent 18th-century South American land-grabbing. And still, there's always been something disturbing about the way the movie so eagerly endorses the underlying missionary project.

The clinically style-obsessed Tony Scott might not have been everybody's choice to helm a Tarantino script just as St Quentin was white-hot (seems a while ago now, huh?), but he made a splendid 1993 pulpy pot-boiler which, in sum, outshines its pithy but disjointed parts. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the doomed Detroit lovers-on-the-run with a suitcase of coke, negotiating baroque badlands after Slater kills sleazoid pimp Gary Oldman and his comedy dreadlocks. Everyone who's anyone turns up to harass the couple and their sad dad Dennis Hopper.