Crimes And Misdemeanours (Woody Allen): The little lies and misdemeanours that have become second nature to eminent oculist Martin Landau on his way to the top effortlessly evolve into serious crimes, without him being aware of the difference, when a discarded mistress threatens his success; a morality tale tinged with humour, near-perfect Woody Allen.

Wild At Heart (David Lynch): Petty thief Nicolas Cage finds redemption in his obsessive love for histrionic Laura Dern, much to the fury of her evil mother Diane Ladd. Shot at feverish pace to the beat of Elvis Presley's 'Love Me Tender', this is David Lynch at his gaudy best, a triumph of heightened banality.

Life And Nothing But (Bertrand Tavernier): Two women searching for their missing husband and lover in a military hospital at the end of the first world war find out they are the same man in a story of heart-wrenching irony and disillusion observed with compassionate restraint. Phillipe Noiret, who died recently, gives one of his best performances.

Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore):

Anyone who grew up loving films can't be without this elegiac story of a little boy growing up in a repressive Sicilian village and finding a mentor in the projectionist of the local cinema, who lets him sneak in to see clips censored by the priest.

1991 An Angel At My Table (Jane Campion):

A withdrawn ugly duckling with a great mop of fuzzy red hair, too shy and sensitive for her own good, staggers from childhood through one rebuff after another until she becomes so withdrawn she's committed to a mental institution and given shock treatment.

Originally intended as a TV miniseries based on the autobiography of New Zealand's so-called "mad writer" Janet Frame, it's a 158minute journey of eventual selfdiscovery with a heroism and heart rarely achieved in cinema.

Romuald And Juliette (Colin Serreau):

A middle-aged black officecleaning woman and her affluent boss become involved in a relationship that stays joyfully and irreverently in character in a delicious comedy of social manners, office politics, marital infidelity, family bust-ups, class preconceptions and inspired human observation.

Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh): Since Bleak Moments in 1972, Mike Leigh has been devising hypnotically watchable, improvised slices of life. With Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner, bickering teenage twins of harassed suburban London parents Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent, he finds a comic situation that pushes laughter over the edge into desperation.

Hidden Agenda (Ken Loach): Inspired by the Stalker investigation into collusion by members of the RUC in the murders of nationalists in Belfast, Ken Loach's fearless political drama deservedly won the Jury Prize at Cannes despite attempts by some British critics to have it withdrawn.

1992 Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood): Clint Eastwood reinvents and deromanticises the western, playing a gaunt-faced retired gunman who teams up with a young wannabe to collect a bounty on the killer of a prostitute. Nobody gets killed without disturbing repercussions affecting everyone.

The Crying Game (Neil Jordan): Every studio in the US turned down this film about Provos combined with interracial sex and homosexuality, yet in systematically subverting conventional expectations with challenging originality and compelling narrative skill it proved everyone wrong, grossing $68 million and winning Neil Jordan an Oscar.

City of Hope (John Sayles): A son walking out on his father is the thread that links a mosaic of overlapping stories, bringing alive with riveting intimacy an astonishingly complex cross-section of a decaying New Jersey metropolis; a tour de force of story-telling that defines urban America.

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou):

An impoverished 19-year-old girl in 1920s rural China accepts an offer of marriage from a rich man only to find herself trapped in a feudal situation where her only function is to await the master's sexual whims, along with his other wives. The camera never leaves the compound, but within this brilliant formal device the characters are strangely believable: the force of the emotions is in the minimalism with which they are expressed.

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant):

This is a latter-dayMidnight Cowboy set in Oregon, where a couple of male hustlers become dependent on each other and set off on a strange motorcycle odyssey across America to find a lost mother; a sad, elegiac visual poem.

La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette):

The young mistress of a friend poses for a nude painting by a famous artist, which he put aside for ten years after his wife, the original model, left him. For much of the 240 minutes Emmanuelle Béart reclines naked while Rivette subtly explores ideas of art, love and obsession.

1993 Three Colours Trilogy (Krzysztof Kieslowski): Three films based on the French tricolour and dealing with liberty, fraternity and equality, but otherwise unrelated, or so it seems until the denouement of the final film provides a link. This is one of the rare masterpieces of contemporary cinema.

In the Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan): Sheridan's dramatised version of the case of the Guildford Four is a classic tragedy of right and right. Instead of heroes and villains, the protagonists on both sides - apart from campaigning lawyer Gareth Pierce who led the campaign that resulted in their eventual release - are flawed and fallible, caught up in events beyond their control.

Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis): A brilliant variation on It's A Wonderful Life finds cynical TV weatherman Bill Murray reliving his day over and over until he becomes a better man.

A Few Good Men ((Rob Reiner): To defend two marines accused of murder, military lawyer Tom Cruise must discredit their warhero commanding officer Jack Nicholson; a classic court room drama, superbly acted.

1994 Short Cuts (Robert Altman): Twenty years after Nashville, Robert Altman finds another metaphor for America in the interweaving short stories of Raymond Carver.

This is a slice of dysfunctional Los Angeles, defining moments in the seemingly mundane lives of people living on the edge, at once funny, sad and absurd in their random twists.

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino): Sort of a punk culture variation on Short Cuts, a headlong rush of cinematic adrenaline fusing four violent stories involving a couple of hitmen, an impromptu heist, a mysterious beauty and a boxer who fails to throw a fight, brilliantly sustained by Tarantino.

Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige):

The turbulent emergence of revolutionary China seen through the lifelong friendship of a couple of boys who train together in the Peking Opera in the 1920s - one doing female roles, the other male - and stay in touch through all the turmoil to deliver a final performance in the 1960s.

1995 Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone): A murderous couple become tabloid celebrities, their bloody odyssey depicted by Oliver Stone as a pastiche of virtually every known soap-opera stereotype. Shot in a bewildering melange of colour and black-and-white, handheld Super 8 and widescreen 35mm, the action is intercut with cartoon references and clips from newsreels and films notorious for their depiction of violence; a Swiftian rant against the media exploitation of real-life violence to boost ratings.

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai):

Two stories of lonely love - a jilted Hong Kong cop who falls for a drug dealer and another cop who is secretly loved by a fast-food waitress - combine to capture a sense of the random, fractured alienation of modern urban life.

Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee): For a change, a film that's obsessed with food rather than sex or violence.

Following The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee goes one better by serving up 100 Chinese dishes, the only way a widowed master chef can communicate with his three headstrong daughters. Only when he marries them off can he rediscover his own sense of taste.

Il Postino (Michael Radford): Exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda arrives on Capri, leading to a delightful friendship in which his poems enable a local postman to woo the woman of his dreams. Within days of finishing the film the actor Massimo Troisi died suddenly, enhancing the film's elegiac aura.

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater): An aspiring American writer and a French girl meet on a train and talk their way through the night and a day in Vienna before parting with a promise to meet again, which they fail to keep.

Ed Wood (Tim Burton): Forget about B-movies, Ed Wood made Zmovies, yet here he is with his own biopic, shot in black-and-white and perhaps getting near to the truth of cinema's appeal than grander films. Johnny Depp captures the childlike enthusiasm of a man impervious to rejection, while Martin Landau brings Bela Lugosi back from the dead.

Burnt By The Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov): A retired general, hero of the Russian revolution, living out his life with his family in a country dacha in 1936, is visited by a man, once the lover of his young wife but now a spy in Stalin's secret police, whose mission is to finger him for allegedly betraying communist ideals. Amid the scheming, the love of the father for his eight-year-old daughter burns like the sun.

1996 Toy Story (John Lasseter): Animation takes on an exhilarating new look with the arrival of the first completely computer-generated feature. It succeeds not just because it's a startling technological breakthrough but because it's superb story-telling, rooted in the chagrin of a toy cowboy who gets dumped when his young owner gets a present of a mechanised astronaut.

Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier):

Von Trier's back-to-basics filming making, which inspired the Dogme movement, delivers a story of harrowing rawness, set in a remote port in Scotland where a young woman sells herself to raise money to save her husband, paralysed after an accident.

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam): Bruce Willis is a convict sent back from 2035 to find out more about a disease that is destroying mankind - or perhaps he's hallucinating, which is what the authorities want people to believe. Terry Gilliam's off-centre imagination gives sparkle to the conundrum.

Secrets And Lies (Mike Leigh): Mike Leigh's impromptu approach enables him to create challenging situations out of soap opera - in this case an educated black woman searching for her real mother only to find she's white, working-class and unmarried.

Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen): Frances McDormand breaks new ground as a pregnant small-town cop in snow-swept Minnesota hunting down a couple of ruthless killers hired by a bankrupt car salesman to fake a kidnapping of his wife; a classic mix of Coen black humour and sudden violence.

Heat (Michael Mann): A duel of wits between a veteran LA cop and a heist robber who defies capture, bringing out the truth that the two men are essentially opposite sides of the same coin. It's lovingly crafted by Michael Mann, the procedural detail giving the characters credibility, while Al Pacino and Robert De Niro relish the opportunity to star together for the first time.

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz): A riot in a suburban housing ghetto, brutally suppressed by the police, brings together an Arab, a black and a Jewish youth who vent their anger in the plush boulevards of Paris. A wake-up call that caused a major political row in France, but sadly changed nothing.

1997 LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson): Real life mixes with fiction as Curtis Hanson, working from James McElory's best-selling novel, dishes the dirt on a 1950s Los Angeles where prostitutes offered themselves as lookalikes of stars and headline-greedy cops acted as if they were in films. Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce are rival cops caught up in a spiral of murder and corruption through their lust for mysterious hooker Kim Basinger, aka Veronica Lake.

A Self-Made Hero (Jacques Audiard): A coward reinvents himself as a Resistance hero after the liberation of Paris and comes to believe his own lie, in the end even behaving like a hero. Along the way Jacques Audiard raises awkward questions about French reluctance to confront the past.

1998 The Truman Show (Peter Weir): It's even easier now than in 1998 to imagine how a man could grow up and live happily on an island without realising that he's in fact the star of a 24-hour global soap opera in which his wife, family and friends are all paid actors.

Wag The Dog (Barry Levinson): To divert attention from a sex scandal involving the president, his aides, with the help of a Hollywood producer, spin a phoney international crisis, complete with manufactured news footage of non-existent atrocities, which seems eerily prophetic.

As Good As It Gets (James L Brooks):

Hollywood comedy as good as it gets, pivoting on Jack Nicholson's brilliance as an anti-social grump with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose reserve is broken down by no-nonsense waitress Helen Hunt.

Marius and Jeanette (Robert Guediguian): Robert Guediguian turns a seemingly simple story of a single mother with two young children, who attracts the attention of a security guard with a difficulty in expressing his feelings, into cinematic magic.

1999 All About My Mother (Pedro Almod�?var): A grieving mother who returns to Barcelona in search of the father of her dead son who is now a transsexual prostitute, a pregnant nun with Aids who helps her, a drug-addicted actress. . .

Treating his bizarre characters like the cast of a sitcom and catching us up in their emotions with a funny, heart-wrenching playfulness, Almod�?var delivers the ultimate woman's movie, in the best sense of the term.

The Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders): A documentary that reaches beyond its form to become a stirring testament to survival through art and music. Reaching beyond politics, this haunting film enabled a group of forgotten Cuban musicians, with the help of Ry Cooder, to enjoy a remarkable late summer in their careers.

Gods And Monsters (Bill Condon): A fictional encounter between the ailing Frankenstein horror director James Whale and a handsome young gardener who stirs in him a flicker of desires provides an enthralling window to Hollywood in a golden era.

The Straight Story (David Lynch):

David Lynch puts aside his propensity for the weird and the scary to follow an elderly widower, whose only transport is a lawnmower, when he decides to visit his ailing estranged brother in another state; a road movie of engaging simplicity giving free rein to the folksy charm of veteran actor Richard Farnsworth.

Happiness (Todd Solandz): The title is ironic: whatever the characters achieve in their weird longing for sexual fulfilment, it's not happiness, but Solandz imbues their search with a comic and compassionate understanding.