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Charlie Chaplin’s total vision remains awe-inspiring: He wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in his own movies, which he also scored with an orchestra. And when those cameras were rolling, they captured a self-made icon with a global audience. Still, City Lights was something else. Chaplin, reticent to give up the visual techniques he’d mastered, insisted on making his new comedy a silent film even as viewers were growing thirsty for sound. As ever, the star had the last laugh: Not only was the film a huge commercial success, it also ended on the most heartbreaking close-up in cinema history—the peak of the reaction shot (since cribbed by movies from La Strada to The Purple Rose of Cairo), no dialogue required.—Joshua Rothkopf

There’s a new Batman in Gotham, in the shadowy form of Matt Reeves’s The Batman – and this is the bar it has to clear. The middle entry in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-trilogy is an almost flawless case study of how to do a sophisticated superhero epic for modern audiences – and the ‘almost’ is only because the final act refreshingly tries to cram in almost too many ideas, much moral arithmetic. Heath Ledger’s Joker, meanwhile, redefines big-screen villainy: It’s not enough to be sinister, you need a party trick now too.—Phil de Semlyen

Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist masterpiece is set in a world where owning a bicycle is the key to working, but it could just as easily be set in one where the absence of car, or affordable childcare, or a home, or a social security number are insurmountable barriers in the constant slog to put food on the table. That’s what makes simultaneously it a film for postwar Italy and modern-day anywhere-at-all. That’s what makes it such a powerful, enduring landmark in humanist cinema. You can feel it in virtually every social drama you care to mention, from Ken Loach to Kelly Reichardt.—Phil de Semlyen

You could watch Mulholland Drive, undoubtedly one of the greatest films of a new century, a hundred times and still get something different out of it with each revisit. David Lynch’s glamorous nightmare of Los Angeles is dense with mystery, terror and uncanny sexiness—themes that had long been a constant of the auteur’s work, but which here reached their lurid apotheosis.—Abbey Bender

There’s no other thriller as elegant, light-touched and sexy as Hitchcock’s silken caper. Cary Grant’s suavely hollow adman Roger O. Thornhill (“What does the O. stand for?” “Nothing.”) is Don Draper with a sense of humor, which he sorely needs when he contracts a bad case of Wrong Man–itis. The set pieces, the villains, Eva Marie Saint’s femme fatale, Saul Bass’s credits, Bernard Herrmann’s musical cues—somehow the film manages to be even more than the sum of its glorious parts. Oh, and somewhere in there, Thornhill even manages to find his soul.—Phil de Semlyen

Three decades on and still a shot of pure cinematic adrenaline, Martin Scorsese’s gangster opus is a gloriously-executed epitaph to boyhood heroes who turn out to have feet of clay and blood-soaked hands. It’s famous for many things – the 300 f-bombs, the iconic Copacabana oner, the umpteen needle-drop moments, Billy Batts’s death, Joe Pesci’s shirt collars, et al – but if there’s a single reason why it’s a favourite with everyone from hardcore cineastes to professional footballers (that, and Scarface), it’s surely the arc of Ray Liotta’s antihero Henry Hill. He goes from starry-eyed kid to aspiring mobster to hard-bitten wiseguy to coked-up paranoiac in 150 breathless minutes. Moral corruption is rarely this alluring.—Phil de Semlyen