OK, so it's been done before: a city seen through seemingly separate stories which all turn out to be connected. But Paul Thomas Anderson does it with a more magical touch so that even when it rains frogs, you marvel at it.

American Beauty (Sam Mendes): Maybe it's that it's the turn of the century, but creative people seem to be taking stock. So here's the American suburban family - a husband in a midlife crisis, a wife wanting to be free, pampered children unable to cope. The result is an acerbic comedy of failed manners and stunted lives.

The Talented Mr Ripley (Anthony Minghella): Anthony Minghella's sensual delight in the look and feel of things gives added tension to Patricia Highsmith's thriller about an impoverished youth who assumes the identity of a pampered rich boy.

Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh):

Soderbergh shows that he can take on Hollywood on his own terms, pitting single mother Julia Roberts against a major corporation in a true life pollution case that made legal history.

Beau Travail (Claire Denis): Reduced to austere basics and all the more compelling because of it, this is a homoerotic drama of repression at a remote Foreign Legion outpost, driven by a sergeant's fear that a new recruit threatens his position.

2001 Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann):

Brazenly divorced from all reality, revelling in its reworking of La Bohème, this cancan extravaganza stars Ewan McGregor as a penniless poet who challenges a rich aristocrat for the love of dying courtesan Nicole Kidman.

Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu): In Mexico City a random car crash changes the lives of the three unconnected people; a film charged with energy, hurtling to a challenging denouement.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson): Many tried to bring Tolkien's massive allegory to the screen; it took Jackson to succeed by packaging it as three films, capitalising on breakthroughs in digital special effects.

Traffic (Steven Soderbergh): Using multiple viewpoints, Soderbergh tracks a consignment of drugs from South America to LA, leaving a trail of addicts, corrupt officials and dealers on the way.

2002 Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair): An open invitation to enter into an upper-class Punjabi arranged marriage, set in Delhi during the rains. Call it Fellini in a sari.

Y Tu Mam�? También (Alfonso Cuar�?n):

A cunningly subversive road movie set in the last summer of a corrupt Mexican ruling party that has held power for 70 years.

Seemingly no more than a rich brats teen flick, it takes off when a couple of 17-year-old youths persuade an unhappily married Spaniard to run away with them.

The Royal Tennenbaums (Wes Anderson): A quirkily original now/then family saga that unfolds like a photo album, set in a reimagined New York that isn't New York, inhabited by a dysfunctional family of children who behave like geniuses but aren't, presided over by Gene Hackman's disgraced patriarch.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Philip Noyce):

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a return to Noyce's investigative roots, a true story of three aboriginal girls snatched from their mother in 1931 as part of state policy to breed their colour out of them.

Sex And Lucia (Julio Medem): An erotic romance that begins and ends on the island of Fromentera, allowing Julio Medem to play with the permutations of chance that bring people together.

2003 City of God (Fernando Meirelles): A darkly exuberant celebration of coming of age, seen through the eyes of a group of kids who try to escape the squalor of Brazil's shanty towns through crime.

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes): A small-town love triangle set in the Eisenhower era, charged with racial and class prejudice.

Mystic River (Clint Eastwood): A horrific childhood experience haunts three working-class Boston friends after the murder of a young girl, given chilling immediacy by the contained fury of Clint Eastwood's direction.

Swimming Pool (François Ozon): A spinster author, staying in her publisher's villa in France, is distracted by the arrival of his nubile young daughter who swims naked in the pool and brings home pick-ups at the night. Attracted and repelled, the woman becomes a voyeur turning what she sees into fiction, or perhaps vice versa.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyasaki): A little girl finds herself trapped in a parallel world of gods and spirits, where she has to work her way to freedom; a mysterious animated waking nightmare of beauty.

The Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov):

A dreamlike journey through the Hermitage gallery in St Petersburg in which Russia's past comes alive.

2004 The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles):

Shooting with hand-held cameras and working from Che Guevara's notes and his friend Alberto Granado's diaries, Salles recreates the revolutionary's 1952 motorbike journey across Latin America.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore): Not so much a documentary as a footin-the-door J'accuse in which George Bush is indicted for creating a climate of fear.

The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand): A philandering Canadian history professor, dying of cancer in hospital, is visited by friends, exlovers and an estranged son, providing Arcand with a chance to explore western society.

Lost In Translation (Sophia Coppola):

Jaded film star Bill Murray, jetlagged in Tokyo, enjoys a brief flirtation with Scarlett Johansson.

Nothing can come of it but for a few idyllic hours they achieve an indescribable closeness.

2005 Sideways (Alexander Payne): If there's such a thing as a male menopause, you'll find it in all its muddled bravado in Alexander Payne's near-perfect comedy about the shambolic lives of wannabe novelist Miles and about-to-bemarried serial womaniser Jack.

Head-On (Fatih Akin): The first truly 21st century love story, throwing together a couple of Turkish immigrants in Germany in a relationship of convenience.

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel): A 25year-old secretary is witness to the last 12 days of the Third Reich.

Hirschbiegel's film, the first of its kind in Germany, confronts the unspeakable by putting us in the shoes of an ordinary person.

The Last Mitterand (Robert Guediguian): The dying French president asks a journalist to become his biographer. Through Michel Bouquet's performance, Mitterand is brought alive.