20 best films of all time, chosen by Tim Robey Read a review of Les enfants du paradis The Earrings of Madame De... (1953) In Max Ophüls's exquisite daisy-chain of affections gained and spurned, a gift is passed between lovers, meaning only as much as its last bestower. The gliding camerawork is impossibly elegant, and it's blessed with cinema's most serenely ironic ending. Sansh­­ô Dayû (1954) Shattering, mythic storytelling from the Japanese master Kenji Mizoguichi, about the fate of two high-born children sold into slavery to work for the despotic bailiff of the title. You forget you're watching a period film, so intense and anguished is its focus. Read a review of Sansh­­ô Dayû Sweet Smell of Success (1957) "Match me, Sidney." No one matches spiteful New York columnist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), certainly not craven press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis). Their vicious complicity rivals Volpone - it's the ultimate inky-fingered film about media sleaze. Read a review of Sweet Smell of Success Vertigo (1958) A private detective is tricked into obsession, then won't let it die. The movie is a vortex sucking us in, imagining romance and cinema itself as a perilous dive into unknown chasms. Meanwhile, Scottie is the closest thing to a Hitchcock self-portrait. Read a review of Vertigo Hitchcock's romantic vortex: Jim Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo. The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) Somehow a gay Marxist poet got in cinema's last word on Jesus Christ. Pasolini uses his medium to work miracles - a leper's cured with a mere cut - but it also works phenomenally as a biopic of some interesting preacher guy we don't feel we've met. Persona (1966) Two identities - a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and an actress (Liv Ullmann) who's been struck mute - fracture and merge in Ingmar Bergman's most radical and stunning achievement, a work of fierce modernist provocation and unsettling formal brilliance. The Conversation (1974) Who's eavesdropping on whom? Hatched before Watergate and speaking eerily to it, this audacious story of an obsessive surveillance whiz (career-best Gene Hackman) is a slippery plunge into Seventies paranoia like no other. What a run Coppola had. Barry Lyndon (1975) Trust Kubrick to know exactly how literature and cinema might genuflect to each other, resurrecting Thackeray's age in a stately picaresque that Gainsborough and Watteau could have shot themselves. Every character is mounted like a perfect portrait. Read a review of Barry Lyndon The age of Thackeray: Ryan O'Neal as Barry Lyndon. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Three days in the life of a part-time prostitute in Belgium, who spends more time peeling potatoes than servicing her clients. It sounds unbelievably tedious, but it's mesmerising, because of Delphine Seyrig's magnetism and her director's fearless rigour. Nashville (1975) Great Altman is really hard to beat, and this is where it peaks: the high masterwork of epic patchwork cinema from which Paul Thomas Anderson has borrowed liberally. A scintillating pageant of American weirdness, hypocrisy, hope and sadness. The Shining (1980) Kubrick at his most chillingly controlled, in a story about creative block and the echoing hallways of the unconscious. The circularity of the movie feels like an endless incentive to check in, but watch your step in the maze, and on no account enter Room 237. Watch The Shining trailer The Ballad of Narayama (1983) A remote rural village in Japan follows the tradition of exposing its elderly on a mountaintop when they reach 70. Narayama must carry his mother to the summit, and the film's vision of the grave and what's left behind is the stuff of great, crusading art. Blue Velvet (1986) David Lynch, examining the many faces desire wears, from the wholesome to the hideously kinky. It's a luxuriant reinvention of noir tropes - voyeurism, duplicity, the femme fatale - that draws us in helplessly, and ends up on the side of the angels. Read director Tom Twyker's thoughts on Blue Velvet Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) Even above Annie Hall or Crimes and Misdemeanors, here's Woody Allen's most emotionally ambitious and perfectly-acted movie, a bitterly funny yet forgiving survey of adulthood's many mistakes. Allen's "American Chekhov" status rests on this. Toy Story (1995) It's hard to fault a frame of Pixar's impeccably imagined plastic world, which packs in more existential crises than the average Tarkovsky flick. Popping with this much cleverness and wit, it's just irresistible, but also a profound education in getting along. Read a review of Toy Story Crash (1996) Not the Haggis, the Cronenberg: yes, sex with accident victims on some lost highway of the soul. It's repulsive and seductive, often at once, and the high water-mark of its director's shimmering stylistic confidence. He finds incredible beauty in purgatory. Read a review of Crash The Thin Red Line (1998) The World War Two campaign in Guadalcanal is Terrence Malick's theatre of life, in this visionary masterpiece about paradise and its despoliation, man's inhumanity to man, and the magic of existence even as it threatens to be snatched away. Read director Amit Gupta's thoughts on The Thin Red Line Watch The Thin Red Line trailer Mulholland Drive (2001) From the wreckage of an abortive TV pilot, David Lynch salvaged an astonishing dream gone black, about the fantasies of a Hollywood ingénue (Naomi Watts) and the factory that destroys them. It transcends nightmare to become her haunting epitaph. Read a review of Mulholland Drive What is your favourite film of all time?