Michael Mann

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Apocalypse Now

Coppola’s dark, high-voltage identity quest, journeying into overload; wildness and nihilism in an operatic and concrete narrative. A masterpiece.

Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein not only laid the theoretical foundation for much of 20th-century modernist narrative but in 1924 made one of cinema’s great classics, applying dialectics to montage, composition and meaning. Its influence on British, Weimar and American cinema is huge.

Biutiful

The profound struggle of a human soul through the lower depths of Barcelona street life, Biutiful is resplendent with grace, pathos and love. Pure poetry.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The whole of Dr. Strangelove is a high-energy third act. It’s all denouement. Cold War policy and military culture, it is devastatingly more effective via hilarious ridicule than any number of cautionary fables.

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane was a watershed: a life’s linear history reassembled into a novelistic narrative by investigators querying its meaning. And done with Wellesian brio on a grand scale.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Experience conveyed mostly from his visualisation of the human face: no one else has composed and realised human form quite like Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Raging Bull

Raging Bull immerses us into the failing and besotted life of La Motta, his violent quest for affirmation and his pursuit of redemption. The humanity of this picture is extraordinary, as is Scorsese’s execution.

Out of the Past

Alongside The Asphalt Jungle, it's a masterpiece of fatalism and alienation in the wake of WWII: an authentic and radical blast from the 1940s.

KAWAITA HANA

For its incredible opening scenes alone.

KOKUHAKU

A Japanese masterpiece. Frighteningly controlled, rigid, it’s unheralded high art.