Being There (Hal Ashby): An illiterate gardener with nothing to say is mistaken for a guru by Washington politicians only too ready to read profound wisdom into his trite adages. Hal Ashby brings out the deadpan best in Peter Sellers.

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese): A bravura Oscar-winning performance by Robert De Niro as the real-life middle-weight boxer Jake La Motta; one of the greatest fight films, it reunited Scorsese with Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader.

1981 Atlantic City (Louis Malle): Burt Lancaster gives a compelling portrayal of an aging small-time crook hanging out around Atlantic City's casinos. There is a beautiful elegiac feel to his relationship with Susan Sarandon. Malle is a rare example of a French director equally at ease in the US.

Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa): A humble thief is saved from the gallows to take the place of a dying 16th century Japanese warlord so his death will not become known (his generals fear the news might provoke an attack by his enemies).

Although shot on an epic scale, filling the screen with massed armies, towering fortresses and bloody battles, Kurosawa achieves a moral grandeur through the humanity of the central character.

Gallipoli (Peter Weir): Mel Gibson and Mark Lee trek across the outback to join up for the first world war, as much out of bravado as patriotism, and end up in the trenches of the Dardanelles, their initiation to manhood coinciding with a series of monumental military blunders that led to the Australian troops being used as cannon fodder.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg): Steven Spielberg's boxoffice popularity disguises his superb mastery of story-telling.

Many critics unfairly sneered at this rousing adventure yarn reminiscent of Saturday afternoon serials, with Harrison Ford as an old-style gentleman hero-byaccident improvising ways to foil the baddies.

1982 Missing (Costa-Gavras): The natural impulse of politically naive young Americans caught up in the coup that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973 was to turn to their embassy for help; what they failed to appreciate was that the embassy had helped engineer the coup. Costa-Gavras reveals the enormity of what happened through the gradual breaking down of disbelief of an ordinary patriotic American dad who goes to Chile looking for his missing son. Sadly, Missing has lost none of its timeliness.

Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog): Klaus Kinski gives a trademark portrayal of obsession as eccentric Irish rubber speculator Fitzgerald who literally has a steamboat hauled over a mountain to open up a new outlet in the Brazilian jungle and finance his dream of establishing an opera house there.

His venture is filmed with epic grandeur by Herzog, a visionary director of similar wild passion.

Le Bal (Ettore Scola): The changing popular music and behaviour of dancers in a ballroom portrays the transition of France from 1936 to the present, subtly hinting at the pain and tragedy of history - and all without dialogue.

Quest For Fire (Jean-Jacques Annaud):

A pioneering attempt to portray stone-age life and the discovery of fire, shot entirely in an archaic language devised by Anthony Burgess. Annaud's feel for physical reality and landscape makes for an engrossing imaginative time-trip.

Circle of Deceit (Volker Schlorndorff):

German journalist Bruno Ganz gets caught up in the events he's covering in war-torn Lebanon, has an affair with the widow of an Arab, and becomes involved in a stabbing before returning home to the wife from whom he has been estranged. The film was shot in Lebanon amid the daily atrocities, providing an outsider's inevitably compromised sense of what is actually going on.

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott): Inspired by a Philip K Dick novel, Scott's futuristic impression of Los Angeles in 2019 has the high-tech LAPD tracking down robots who hijacked a space shuttle and returned to earth, with Harrison Ford as a private eye who suspects there is more than meets the eye.

Melvin And Howard (Jonathan Demme):

Demme daringly films a chance encounter between Howard Hughes and amiable drifter Melvin Dummar - who doesn't recognise him and lends him his last dime - the wrong way around.

It's all about the cheerfully improvident Melvin, with Hughes only getting a look-in at the beginning and end.

Cutter's Way (Ivan Passer): Czech director Ivan Passer, who co-wrote Forman's Peter and Pavla, gives a fresh twist to the American revenge genre. Vietnam veteran John Heard, hobbling about on a crutch, isn't just trying to nail a tycoon for the brutal sex-killing of a young hitch-hiker, he is seeking retribution from society for the ruin that his life has become.

Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan): A laidback Florida lawyer helps a bored wife get rid of her husband in a reworking of Double Indemnity that draws power from the sexual chemistry between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.

The German Sisters (Margaretha Von Trotta): A Baader Meinhof terrorist, on hunger strike in prison, is visited in prison by her sister, a feminist journalist, raising the question of how they came to opt for such different ways to express their political beliefs.

Tootsie (Sydney Pollack): In a crossdressing comedy to rival Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman is a frustrated actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a job in a soap opera, but becomes such a hit that he has to keep up the pretence in real life, making it awkward for him to declare his passion for the soap's female lead, Jessica Lange.

1983 Danton (Andrzej Wajda): Polish director Wajda pits the idealism of Danton against the cold pragmatism of Robespierre, perhaps with the clash between Solidarity's Lech Walesa and General Jaruzelski in mind: in censored countries allegory is the only weapon of the artist.

Fanny And Alexander (Ingmar Bergman): Two contrasting family gatherings span the story of 10year-old Alexander and eightyear-old Fanny, whose mother marries a sadistic clergyman after their actor father's death, a nightmare from which they are rescued by their grandmother's Jewish lover. Bergman saw it as his farewell to cinema, but happily he's still active.

The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman): Sam Shepard is a veteran test pilot reluctantly drawn into Nasa's training programme for astronauts in a stylish adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's meticulously researched book. See it as a companion piece to Capricorn One.

1984 Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders): Wim Wenders' love affair with the American west finds its most poetic expression in Sam Shepard's story of a husband who goes missing, not knowing what he wants - an elegy for lost dreams enhanced by a haunting Ry Cooder soundtrack.

Once Upon A Time In America (Sergio Leone): As with his westerns, Leone treats the gangster genre as a form of opera, scored by Ennio Morricone. Four kids grow up on the streets in the 1920s and end up as powerful crime barons in the 1960s, with only their friendship to keep them human.

1985 Kiss Of The Spider Woman (Hector Babenco): An outré homosexual, thrown into a cell with a South American political prisoner, keeps their spirits up by acting out his favourite junk movies; a tour-deforce by Raul Julia and William Hurt, elegantly choreographed by the great Brazilian director Hector Babenco.

Heimat (Edgar Reisz): An extraordinary 15-and-a-half-hour saga - and Reisz has since continued it right up to the present - using soap-opera ideas to chronicle the ups and downs of two intermarried families in a fictitious German village between 1919 and 1982. It's particularly revealing on how the Nazi era was viewed by ordinary people.

A Soldier's Story (Norman Jewison):

Jewison returns to the territory of his 1967 Oscar-winning thriller In the Heat Of the Night, this time focusing on the killing of a black sergeant on a military base.

Howard E Rollins is riveting as the army captain whose search for truth raises issues of what it is to be black in a white man's world.

The Terminator (James Cameron):

Action thrillers don't come much more original than James Cameron's high-octane chase involving a robot sent from a future in which robots rule the world to eliminate a woman destined to give birth to a saviour of mankind. Ironically, Arnie Schwarzenegger's performance as the Terminator carried over into politics, helping him to become governor of California, now intent on saving the planet from global warming.

Witness (Peter Weir): Stunning American debut by Australian director Peter (Gallipoli) Weir, a thriller which brings tough New York cop Harrison Ford into the reclusive lives of an Amish community when one of their children is witness to a murder.

Striking imagery and a sharply observed clash of culture make for a gripping showdown.

1986 Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beneix):

Beneix makes up for the failure of Moon In The Gutter and confirms the stylistic promise of Diva with a sex-charged encounter between a waitress and a would-be novelist she's convinced is a genius. A performance of abandoned sensuality by newcomer Beatrice Dalle propels the romance to a tragic denouement.

Hannah And Her Sisters (Woody Allen):

Woody Allen does a Chekhov with the intertwining love lives of three sisters caught up in the rush of Manhattan life. Filmed within the framework of recurring family dinners that bring all the characters together, there is a pleasing and rueful symmetry to the unravelling stories, with less reliance on gags.

Prizzi's Honour (John Huston): Unlike the recent Mr & Mrs Smith, John Huston relies not on jazzy special effects but on black humour to play out the till-death-do-thempart romance between Jack Nicholson, a hit-man for the Prizzi mob, who falls for beautiful stranger Kathleen Turner not knowing she is a hired assassin.

1987 Blue Velvet (David Lynch): A severed ear found in a suburban backlot leads a curious Kyle MacLachlan into an underworld where he glimpses mobster Dennis Hopper abusing Isabella Rossellini and mistakes her for a damsel in distress. Welcome to the idiosyncratic world of David Lynch whose startling visual imagination thrives on abnormality.

Hope And Glory (John Boorman): To small children in suburban London, the Blitz could be a magical experience of fireworks every night, sleeping out in bunkers and getting off school because it had been blown up.

John Boorman captures the magic of horror seen through innocent eyes in a bittersweet autobiographical reverie.

The Dead (John Huston): A great director signs off with a masterly adaptation of James Joyce's novella of a dinner party that serves up unsettling truths and memories where the simple reading of a poem has the impact of an emotional time-bomb.

Salvador (Oliver Stone): An American journalist hoping for escape goes to El Salvador for sex and drugs but finds himself in the middle of a war where his own government is supporting the bad guys. His reawakening was intended to trigger a similar response in American audiences ignorant of what they are responsible for.

The Untouchables (Brian De Palma):

Hollywood genre entertainment at its best with Brian De Palma allying his technical slickness to a superbly structured David Mamet narrative - set during the Prohibition era - pitting Kevin Costner as the upright investigator Elliot Ness against Robert De Niro's manic Al Capone.

1988 Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders): A divided Berlin is seen through the eyes of angel Bruno Ganz who eavesdrops on people's thoughts, taking on the burden of human suffering. It may sound soppy but Wenders turns it into an elegy of overwhelming compassion.

Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg):

This epic recreation of JG Ballard's memories of being trapped in Shanghai at the outbreak of war and going through adolescence in a Japanese camp is Steven Spielberg without the prop of a cute ET or a monster shark;

it's just real people caught up in events beyond their control and the shock and wonder of world upheaval through innocent eyes.

Sammy And Rosie Got Laid (Stephen Frears): Thatcher's England is seen here as it was never seen in the Saatchi and Saatchi posters, through the eyes of a corrupt Pakistani politician who arrives hoping to find "the home of civilisation" of his student days, but instead is plunged into a thirdworld ghetto amid a yuppie shareowning paradise of property speculation and greed.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies): Terence Davies uses impressionistic fragments drawn like living photographs from his own family's memories to recreate an impassioned portrait of working-class life in England in the 1940s and 1950s, in a film of throbbing pain and love and understanding unequalled in British cinema.

1989 Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee): This starts out like a Brooklyn EastEnders, on an intolerably hot summer's day in the life of a black neighbourhood centred around a white pizza parlour, but the riot triggered by a perceived racist insult reverberated through cinema, putting Spike Lee at the forefront of a new wave of American independent filmmakers.

Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle): A new boy arrives at a provincial French Catholic boarding school towards the end of the second world war and is befriended by another boy who wonders why no parents ever come to visit him. It turns out that the boy is Jewish and is being sheltered from the Nazi death camps by the Jesuits.

Implicit in a seemingly simple story of friendship and fear is a metaphor for a society divided within and for the guilt of Vichy France; this is a film of compassionate genius.

Baghdad Café (Percy Adlon): A plump German frau, Marianne Sagebrecht, stops the car and walks out on her nagging husband in the desert wilderness somewhere beyond Las Vegas.

She arrives at a dilapidated café, where her contagious friendliness transforms it into the place everyone wants to stop, its own warm centre of the universe; a culture clash of sheer idiosyncratic joy and humour.

Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almod�?var):

Ditched by her married lover on an answering machine, pregnant and distraught television actress Carmen Maura is launched into a series of farcical encounters observed with surreal glee by Pedro Almod�?var, the exuberant enfant terrible of Spanish cinema.

Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh): A couple whose marriage is falling apart are visited by an old friend who has a fetish about videotaping women talking about their sexual experiences. It's a narrative device that allows debutant director Steven Soderbergh to deliver a stylishly cool ensemble piece.