Patton (Franklin Schaffner): Writer Francis Ford Coppola and director Schaffner enable George C Scott to deliver one of the great performances as the charismatic American general; outrageous, heroic, witty and mesmerising.

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper): Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper go on a pot-driven motorcycle ride with Jack Nicholson - an orgy of cinema verité self-discovery (shot for $160,000 and grossing $13 million) that revolutionised Hollywood and defined a decade.

Closely Observed Trains (Jiri Menzel):

A rookie railway guard's attempts to lose his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia veers heart-wrenchingly between comedy and tragedy in its rueful, simply observed truths.

Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg):

Aborigines shelter small children abandoned in the Australian desert when their father kills himself, setting up a contrast between the wilderness and 20th century urban civilisation.

1971 The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah): Set in the twilight of the Wild West and shot with a shocking slowmotion blood-spurting directness, this confrontation between Texan bandits and a Mexican revolutionary is weirdly beautiful.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo):

A rare case of a film banned in France being passed without cuts in Ireland, Pontecorvo's mesmerising close-up of a pivotal period in the Algerian war of independence was shot in actual locations in 1965 with actors performing alongside real fighters.

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger):

Belatedly released in Ireland when John Schlesinger finally agreed to Appeal Board cuts, this story of rentboy Jon Voight and tubercular conman Dustin Hoffman had the compassion and humour to transcend such treatment.

The Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville):

Never has a professional assassin been more convincingly portrayed than in this ritualistic scrutiny of an expressionless Alain Delon going about his work.

Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti): A boat materialises out of the mist as the Mahler soundtrack swells to a crescendo, drawing us into the setting of Thomas Mann's novel with its ailing protagonist trapped by his infatuation with a young boy. The sense of obsession and doom is exquisitely modulated.

The French Connection (William Friedkin): Friedkin is better known for the ludicrously garish The Exorcist, but he's at his best in this meticulously observed cop thriller.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri): A fascist Italian police inspector slashes his girlfriend's throat to see if his own officers will be able to catch him. A forceful thriller by a communist director that infuriated the rightwing ruling elite.

Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler): This daringly perceptive docudrama by photographer Haskell Wexler draws on reactions to police violence at the 1968 Democratic Party convention to explore the nature of media voyeurism.

1972 Family Life (Ken Loach): A 19-year-old girl, driven to mental breakdown, is given hope by a young psychiatrist, but loses her way when he is transferred by a suspicious administration.

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola):

My preference is to include The Godfather 1 & 2 as a single work (Godfather 3, made under pressure, is best forgotten. ) Coppola transformed Mario Puzo's inflated best-selling novel into an epic study of corruption through the eyes of a loving New York mafia family.

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich): The closing of a cinema in Texas in 1951 provides a nostalgic framework for the coming of age of a group of teenagers. Shooting in black-andwhite, Bogdanovich beautifully captures the curiosity and longing of the young.

Dirty Harry (Don Siegal): Don Siegal was the Quentin Tarantino of his day. Dirty Harry, with Clint Eastwood as the San Francisco cop who takes the law into his own hands, while provoking criticism for its violence, is brilliantly shot and made Eastwood an iconic star.

The Candidate (Michael Ritchie):

Close-up on a young idealistic lawyer who finds he can only win a seat in the senate by compromising all his values. A compelling film that intelligently probes the weaknesses of a democratic system overdependent on hype.

Harold And Maude (Hal Ashby): The irreverent wit of Ashby's black comedy about a repressed youth who has an affair with an 80-yearold woman was a breath of fresh air in 1972 .

1973 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bu�?uel): A group of wealthy middle-class friends keep failing to get together for a dinner, a running gag that allows Bu�?uel to subject his pet targets - army, church and state - to surreal ridicule; a triumph of deadpan subversion.

Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer): An about-to-be married diplomat flirts with two sisters, developing a longing to fondle the knee of the elder one. Rohmer teasingly delays the fulfilment of his erotic desire so that, when it comes, the sensuality of the moment makes full-frontal screen sex seem dull.

The Garden of the Finzi Continis (Vittorio De Sica): A wonderful comeback by the then sadly neglected De Sica in which the barbarism of Italian fascism is portrayed through the lives of a wealthy Jewish family.

Fat City (John Huston): Not so much a boxing film as a film that uses boxing as a metaphor for failure and the struggle for dignity.

Huston loves his characters, and it shows.

1974 The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice):

A little girl in Franco's Spain sees Boris Karloff 's Frankenstein, prompting her to befriend a fugitive she imagines to be like him, a game of make-believe that turns sour in the real world.

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman):

A journey into the soul of a woman whose different facets are expressed by four women, one of whom is dying.

Day For Night (François Truffaut): A joyfully personal celebration of film-making in which Truffaut plays a director trying to complete a chaotic shoot.

Chinatown (Roman Polanski): Private eye Jack Nicholson famously gets his nose cut by a hoodlum - Polanski himself - as a case threatens to unearth a public scandal in 1930s California.

American Graffiti (George Lucas):

Lucas announces his arrival with a nostalgic low-budget ensemble comedy about a boy's night out before leaving for college.

1975 The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni): Jack Nicholson as a journalist on assignment in Chad who realises he has been seeing what he is conditioned to see. He escapes into a new life which turns out even more disenchanting in a classic Antonioni crisis of identity.

A Woman Under The Influence (John Cassavetes): Through long takes and free-structured dialogue Cassavetes enters the soul of a housewife overwhelmed by the domestic responsibility.

Cassavetes's wife and mother play the leading parts.

The War of the Pig (Torre Nilsson): A chilling parable about a gang of teenagers in Buenos Aires who decide that old people must be liquidated because they have become a burden on society; a masterly study of how ideological obsession drains compassion.

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder): Thanks to the new Project Film Club, Ireland was belatedly introduced to a young director who spearheaded a new wave of German cinema, in this case defying racist and sexist prejudices with a love story between a widowed charlady and a lonely Moroccan mechanic.

Jaws (Steven Spielberg): From the opening image of a shark picking off a night swimmer, Spielberg gives a master-class in how to build suspense, letting the presence of a monster in the deep prey on the viewer's imagination.

Amarcord (Federico Fellini): Fellini remembers the Rimini of his childhood through the eyes of a boy obsessed with big breasts.

Nino Rota's theme music counterpoints the dreamlike ambience.

Badlands (Terrence Malick): A folk tale reminiscent of Bonnie And Clyde - a teenager and a handyman she elopes with embark on a spree of killing - transformed by first-time director Terrence Malick's extraordinary visual flair.

Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman):

Altman intriguingly subverts the 1930s gangster genre by treating the melodramatic shootings and tear-jerking love scenes almost as asides, focusing instead on what happens in between.

Night Movies (Arthur Penn):

Underrated Chandleresque thriller in which a disillusioned private eye tries to find a runaway girl but also hopes to find himself.

Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle): In one of the first French films to confront wartime collaboration, Malle dispassionately follows the actions of a peasant youth who falls in with the Nazis and targets a Jewish family in hiding.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More (Martin Scorsese): Still my favourite Scorsese film, a road movie loaded with foul-mouthed wit in which a widow and her son set off in hopes of a singing career.

The Parallax View (Alan Pakula): A presidential hopeful is assassinated and a congressional inquiry finds no evidence of conspiracy, but when witnesses begin to die, reporter Warren Beatty senses a cover-up.

1976 The Mother And the Whore (Jean Eustache): The main character of Eustache's extraordinary, 215minute black-and-white film professes to believe in letting life happen while talking profusely about it, which describes Eustache's approach to cinema.

Yet within the flow of voices, glances and gestures, there is humour, sadness and humanity.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman): Letting a sane but subversive Jack Nicholson loose in a mental asylum, where he becomes a threat to the system, allows Milos Forman to find laughter in despair and question social prejudices about madness.

Nashville (Robert Altman): A pop concert to raise money for a political campaign goes hilariously out of control as Altman's camera cuts in and out of overlapping stories, building up a mosaic of overheard moments that become a metaphor for 1970s America.

Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese):

Unique among gangster films, the plot is shaped by the characters rather than the characters by the plot as Scorsese eavesdrops on wannabe mafia youths.

The Mattei Affair (Francesco Rosi): In the style of Citizen Kane, Rosi pieces together the career of Enrico Mattei, the man who bluffed Italy into being a player in the world oil market, as journalists probe the murky circumstances of his death in a plane crash in 1962.

Belle De Jour (Luis Bu�?uel): Held up 10 years by Irish censorship, Belle De Jour stands out as one of the great films of all time. Catherine Deneuve brings a mystifying sangfroid to her performance as a bourgeois Parisian wife who, fearing she is frigid, works afternoons in a brothel.

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet):

Sidney Lumet marvellously draws out the humour in the botched attempt by two incompetent thieves to rob a bank, so much so that the abrupt climax comes as a real shock.

Innocents With Dirty Hands (Claude Chabrol): Like Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol lets you know what's going to happen: Romy Schneider and her lover are going to kill her husband and run off with his money. The tension comes from watching to see what might go on.

Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson):

The Arthurian heroes encased in ridiculously unwieldy armour represent for Bresson the folly of dogmatism. The contradiction between behaviour and impossible ideals is inherent in every frame.

All The President's Men (Alan Pakula):

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are the journalists investigating Watergate in a compelling procedural thriller.

1977 Lenny (Bob Fosse): Putting stand-up satirist Lenny Bruce on film might seem impossible, but Dustin Hoffman pulls it off with a virtuoso performance.

Star Wars (George Lucas): A triumph of pure cinema, a completely new genre set in an imagined galaxy.

The story is rooted in nostalgic memories of growing up amid the fantasy idiom of films and television.

Carrie (Brian De Palma): The implications of religious mania induced by sexual guilt are expressed in the dilemma of an ugly-duckling girl who has a perhaps satanic ability to move things by the force of her mind.

Annie Hall (Woody Allen): Allen jumps into mainstream recognition by developing a persona capable of giving scintillating cinematic form to his stand-up ability to shuffle gags with philosophical insights.

1978 Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani): A brutish father puts his small son to work as a shepherd, cut off from normal life until military service liberates him. It's easy to see why a dying Roberto Rossellini insisted on awarding it the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Julia (Fred Zinnemann): Zinnemann brings the suspense of a thriller to Lillian Hellman's story of a childhood friend trying to help Jews escape Nazi Germany; a rare film where women are important not in terms of how they relate to men but to each other.

Providence (Alain Resnais): John Gielgud gives the performance of his life as a dying writer trying to finish his last book.

Last Tango In Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci): A mourning Marlon Brando tries to find renewal in an affair with a young French girl, their lovemaking challenged the limits of what could be shown in mainstream cinema.

1979 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola): A film of hallucinatory brilliance which looks into the heart of the Vietnam war's darkness. Cynical CIA killer Martin Sheen is on a mission to 'terminate' renegade war hero Marlon Brando, who is waging his own ritualistic war in Cambodia.

Capricorn One (Peter Hyams): When a technical foul-up jeopardises a mission to land on Mars, the US authorities decide to fake it instead; a smart chase thriller posing serious doubts about public trust.

The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino): The Vietnam war seen through the experiences of ordinary guys from the same steel plant, caught up in the draft and forced to fight for their survival in a hell beyond their imagination. Cimino cuts between the carnage and their families back home, catching the bewilderment of Americans caught up in the consequences of imperial ambitions.

Cria Cuervos (Carlos Saura): A woman relives the frightened childhood she only now properly understands, the camera cutting to her as a little girl, an innocent witness to the cruelties of her parents, a typical bourgeois couple in the Franco era.

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes): A Los Angeles stripclub owner assassinates a Chinese underworld boss to pay off a Mafia gambling debt. The thriller element is incidental for Cassavetes, who instead explores the porn world with spontaneity and immediacy.