1944 Double Indemnity 
Fred MacMurray helps Barbara Stanwyck to kill her husband and claim the insurance pay-out, but their plot doesn't fool claims manager Edward G. Robinson. Compulsive watching. And don't go getting any ideas now.

1945 Brief Encounter
Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 plays behind one of the most emotionally intense scenes that a movie camera has ever captured. The whole film leads up to it and many won't see it coming. Thank you David Lean.

1946 A Wonderful Life
Lord Acton is reported to have written that the "great issue which has flowed down the centuries and must eventually be fought is the people versus the banks". Capra's film is one of the few portrayals of that battle in which the people win. And I just love the way Jimmy Stewart plays it.

1957 Bridge Over the River Kwai
Another masterpiece of light touch direction from Lean, and performances to match from Guinness, Holden and Hawkins. The highest grossing film of the year and still a wonderful watch today.

1958 Vertigo
What a plot. Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak produce a charming piece of old school cinema.

1962 Lawrence of Arabia
Lean again, this time headlining Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in a tale of Middle Eastern intrigue after World War One. With a marvellous all-star cast in support, it remains one of the most watchable films ever made and an ending of political honesty that's still relevant today. 

1963 The Great Escape 
A one-stop opportunity to see the greatest actors of the day at their finest. Full of World War Two cliches and stereotypes, and many of them became so because of this film! Heavily fictionalised, but who cares, it's the performances that count.

1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Redford and Newman turn in possibly their finest performances in a film that achieves a rare combination of excellence in script, music, acting and cinematography. Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head for the film, also a classic. Director, George Roy Hill, went on to direct them with similar skill in The Sting four years later. 

1972 The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola directs Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in possibly the greatest film ever made. Script, cinematography, score, acting, it's got it all.

1974 The Godfather Part II 
Coppola directs again, this time with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. And this too is possibly the greatest film ever made. With six Academy Awards including Best Picture, it's a rare case of a sequel being equal or better than its predecessor.

1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Milos Forman based on Ken Kesey's novel. Set in a mental institution, it follows a rebellious patient clashing with a tyrannical nurse. It swept the "Big Five" Academy Awards, Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay, one of only three films to do so, and is rightly celebrated for its powerful performances and themes.

1976 All the President's Men 
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman turn in masterclass performances as Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein investigating the Watergate scandal. Jason Robards won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Wonderful procedural tension makes this film a defining depiction of how journalism should hold politics to account.

1977 A Bridge Too Far
Richard Attenborough assembled possibly the most expensive cast in history (Connery, Caine, Redford, Hackman, etc.) to make this epic on the failed Allied military operation codenamed Market Garden in 1944. With superb cinematography, star performances, and slick scripting, it's one of the most ambitious World War Two films ever produced. At the time one critic wrote "A Bridge Too Far and an hour too long" but few films remain as watchable as this fifty years after the release date.

1979 The China Syndrome
Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas expose a safety cover-up at a nuclear power facility in a tense and well-paced film, released just a couple of weeks before the Three Mile Island accident. Lemmon's performance is brilliant, and to think he was known as a comedian before this.

1982 The Verdict
Paul Newman and James Mason bring their considerable skills to bear on this courtroom drama. Newman, in his twilight years, is all the more credible as a flawed man fighting for his integrity and Mason's lecture to a "spy" is unforgettable. Thing is, behind closed doors, the world really can be like this.

1984 The Killing Fields
Three Oscars (but worth more) for a film that powerfully reflects the insanity of Khmer Rouge rulership in Cambodia. For those who know the history of the Vietnam war and its aftermath, this is also a sickening indictment of what colonial interference can produce. A must-watch for all kinds of reasons.

1986 Manon des Sources 
Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, and Emmanuelle Béart star in this sequel to Jean de Florette, beautifully set in Provence. Manon takes revenge against the men who wronged her family. Lush pastoral cinematography like this makes me love France. Pity it's full of French people. Haha, only kidding.

1987 Wall Street
Oliver Stone's defining critique of 1980s Wall Street excess influenced perceptions of the world of finance for decades and Michael Douglas' portrayal of ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. His "greed is good" speech became iconic. I sat next to Michael Douglas for dinner once, at Bibendum restaurant in London. Can you believe he didn't say a word to me all evening? You see, his was the table behind mine and our chairs were back-to-back, so technically speaking . . . 

1990 Misery
James Caan rescued a career which had nosedived after the Godfather with this portrayal of an injured novelist held captive by an obsessive fan. Kathy Bates is that fan, and she won the Best Actress Academy Award for her chilling performance. A fantastically nerve-jangling psychological thriller.

1990 Goodfellas
Scorsese directs, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci deliver. The unglamourised violence and voiceover narration gave this film an unrelentless pace and made it a classic of modern cinema. Using the piano coda from Layla as a backdrop for dead bodies in a meat chiller was a masterstroke. 

1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley
Directed by Anthony Minghella based on Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel. Totally gripping and at times so tense that it's difficult to keep watching. Set in the beautiful Amalfi coast at a time when it was inhabited mostly by Italians. 

2004 Green Card
A witty script pits French style against staid middle class America. The magic of Gérard Depardieu makes up for the appalling Andie MacDowell. The scene in which Depardieu shows the visa inspector to the broom cupboard is a moment of buttock-clenching brilliance. Likewise, Depardieu's poetry at the piano in front of Madame whatever-her-name-was is moving and memorable. Worth its Golden Globes.

2005 The Constant Gardener 
Based on John le Carré's novel, Ralph Fiennes stars as a British diplomat investigating his wife's murder and uncovering pharmaceutical corruption in the process, Set in Kenya, the film blends political thriller with romance in a beautiful setting. Films like this make me even more certain that the medical business isn't there to cure us so much as to keep us all taking the tablets. 

2006 The Lives of Others
Ulrich Mühe plays a Stasi agent spying on a playwright in 1980s East Germany. This film should be compulsory viewing for control freaks on every continent. It's a warning of what spying can do to a society, and to the spies themselves. The plot builds slowly at first then grabs you in an almost unbearably powerful embrace. And then there's the ending. Oh God I almost cried. Sadly, so much of this really happened to people. 

2013 Gravity 
Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are astronauts stranded after debris destroys their shuttle. A brilliant breakthrough in visual effects and long-take cinematography, the film won seven Academy Awards and is a completely gripping survival thriller. It remains a landmark in space film-making visual effects technology.

2013 Inglorious Basterds 
Quentin Tarantino directs Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent in this tale of a group of Jewish-American soldiers who plot to kill senior Nazis in occupied France. Waltz's menacing performance includes a brilliant scene in fluent Italian and it won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Sharp dialogue, incredible tension, and Tarantino's signature gore.

2018 Stan & Ollie 
What a tender tribute to a wonderfully talented pair of comics and a golden era which will never return. Steve Coogan and John Reilly are comedy duo Laurel and Hardy doing an end-of-career theatre tour of Britain. The film received widespread praise for its poignant portrayal of fading fame.

2019 Parasite 
Song Kang-ho stars in this South Korean black comedy which follows a poor family infiltrating a wealthy household. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and four Oscars including for the screenplay. Superb class commentary and a brilliant plot twist half way through. 

2019 Dark Waters 
Mark Ruffalo is attorney Robert Bilott in this depiction of DuPont's decades-long chemical contamination cover-up involving PFOA. The restrained handling of this corporate malfeasance story brought the film strong critical acclaim but limited award recognition in the USA, and maybe that shouldn't surprise us.

2025 Palestine 36 
Hiam Abbass, Karim Daoud Anaya, Jeremy Irons and Liam Cunningham star in this historical drama depicting the 1936 Arab Revolt against British colonial rule in Palestine. This was Palestine's official submission for the Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards and its greatest achievement is probably that it got made at all, given the production difficulties. For those who believe that Palestine was a "land without a people for a people without a land" this film may be something of a challenge, but the really important question is whether any of it is true.