What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Herzog's epic-feeling but actually pretty spare take on one man's mad quest to travel downriver and find the fabled city of gold El Dorado in 16th century South America. And if you're looking for the one man with the maddest mad quest credentials, there is only Klaus Kinski, at his insane best here both on- and off-screen.  Come for the history, stay for Kinski as King of the Monkeys.  The wildest fo wild rides. 

The worst Christmas holiday ever. Teacher John Grant is travelling from his no-horse outback town to Sydney to meet his girlfriend,  but drunkenness, gambling and the worst of macho humanity conspire to stop him. A horror movie where Australia is the monster. 

Not long after the Columbine school massacre, Gus Van Sant and his group of amateur youngsters reimagine a school shooting by playing with time and perspective.  What could have been a technical exercise is instead an extremely moving picture of random violence and young lives cut short. A one of a kind. 

The master of perviness and his famed one-location, "one-shot" thriller (not really), with James Stewart unravelling the mystery, and John Dall and Farley Granger being one of the outest gay couples in 1950s Hollywood. Follow that nosy camera around the room and marvel.  

TV times with James Woods and Debbie Harry in Cronenberg's icky sticky dissection of video nasties, watching the unthinkable and living through your screen. Long live the new flesh. 

Listen carefully... Coppola's The Conversation is a masterpiece of misdirection, with Gene Hackman's Harry Caul the essence of paranoid loneliness. Sometimes you really can't believe your ears. 

How do you make a feminist film under a repressive theocracy like Iran? It's not a joke to say "very carefully", and Marzieh Meshkini has done just that. Three apparently separate stories of women and girls just trying to live their lives have more in common than we think. It sounds po-faced but it's not - these stories are funny and poignant, with some surrealism and a lot of hope. 

Philip Marlowe, hardboiled detective, finds himself in laid-back 1970s California, looking for lost cat, his lost client and his lost friend. There is a plot but that's not the point in Robert Altman's vision of Raymond Chandler, brought to life by a wonderful performance from Elliot Gould. 

Marx out of 10? 10 all the way for this Marx Brothers masterpiece. It's got  mangled language, pratfalls and puns a-plenty and still has time to say that war is pointless and borders are imaginary. And it's 90 years old. HONK HONK.

The best film EVER about car sex, serial killing, steroid abuse, oil lactation, self-injury and fireman discos? Well it's certainly in the top ten.

Titane is a weirdfest from start to finish, grounded by two amazing performances. French body horror at its best. Formidable. 

A man who doesn't want to run is being pursued by a man who doesn't want to chase him.

Sam Peckinpah kills the Hollywood Western stone-dead in this dreamy meditation  - when the West and the world are being transformed, what happens to men who can't change? 

Kate Winslet gets in with a cult, Harvey Keitel tries to get her out of it through the power of his personality and a fetching red frock. Jane Campion wrangles the not-inconsiderable sexual heat between them. Smokin'.

Olivia de Havilland is trapped in the slowest elevator in the world - her cries for help are heard by a vicious young hoodlum in the shape of a very scary James Caan, in this 1960s apocalyptic home invasion. 

Love doesn't lift them up where they belong.  

Ghost Dog is a spiritual hit man who's sworn to protect the Mafia goon who saved his life. His best friends are an ice-cream man who speaks no English, a bookish little girl and a flock of pigeons. Oh, and the Mafia like hip hop. Watch this and swoon. 

Bill's not like the rest of his family -he's not blonde, he doesn't want to massage his sister and he feels there's some secret he's not being told. But maybe a nice dinner together will bring them closer. Come hungry!

Colonial misadventure as Michael Caine and Sean Connery give career-best performances in their search to become kings in Victorian-era Afghanistan. The very definition of be careful what you wish for. 

Love and hate, light and dark, good and evil, innocence and guilt, all wrapped up in one of the most luminously beautiful films ever made. Actor Charles Laughton only got one chance to direct a film, and he didn't waste it. We've got LOVE tattooed on both knuckles for this one.

Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls -  Gilda is film noir at its most deviant. Ignore the "plot" (there isn't much of one), and just enjoy the sexual power games of Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and the other guy.