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So-so sci-fi rom-com from John Carpenter, with Chevy Chase as a stockbroker who gets caught in a nuclear accident that turns him invisible; Daryl Hannah plays his love interest, Sam Neill the CIA heavy chasing him. Totally dependent on hackneyed visual gags and special effects that were superseded long ago, what remains is indulgent fluff.

A Kyoto skyscraper is contrasted with a crematorium chimney, gravestones abound, as do sinister black crows. And yet despite the lugubrious undertow of this, Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate movie (made two years before his death), there's a warmth to the tale of the Kohayagawa family, their ailing business and their eccentric patriarch that somehow transforms post-war angst into sublime acceptance.

Watching the fabbest of all fours in their first US press conference, puffing away on cigs and deflecting inane enquiries, you feel proud to be a Brit. "Sing something for us!" "No, we need money first." Could Justin Timberlake—or Julian Casablancas, for that matter—be half as sarcastic? Imagine waking from a 40-year coma and coming afresh to these extraordinary scenes: four scouse charmers off the plane with their matching suits and Pan Am shoulder bags.

Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.

Another Cavalry Movie from Ford, and this time Johnny Reb's in the firing line as Yankee Colonel Wayne leads his troops on a demolition mission and kidnaps feisty southern belle Constance Towers. Here Ford's portentous 'Civil War is Hell' message doesn't quite gel with his trademark tomfoolery-drunken gags, funny fistfights and casual misogyny. The resulting film is strangely blank.

Stunningly underrated, ferocious portrait of Wild Bill Hickok

The original Mamet movie, a bravura directorial debut and a punchy manifesto, 1987's...Games pits frigid psychologist Lindsay Crouse against louche confidence trickster Joe Mantegna in the eponymous Chicago poker joint. Crouse is intrigued, Mantegna applies the charm, but soon the cons escalate and, in true Mametian style, the line between 'shark' and 'mark' disintegrates.

From the brief heyday of the Czech new wave, Jiri Menzel's 1968 Oscar winner (Best Foreign Language Film) retains much bawdy charm and a bravely downbeat ending. A young railway station apprentice in a small town, oblivious to the climax of WWII, longs to get laid, finding relief with a comely Resistance fighter. More witty, imaginative and romantic than it sounds.

Possibly Mike Figgis' least-known film, this moody 1991 erotic mystery is like Stormy Monday set in Binghamton, NY. A writer visits his dying mother and uncovers secrets about a 30-year-old murder while shagging his friend's wife. It looks sexy, but the moodiness leads to tedium, and Kim Novak's heinously wasted.

We'll always have Casablanca, thank God. This tale of lost souls waiting out WWII in the doldrums of a Moroccan café may well be the best film ever made—the Epstein brothers' dialogue still crackles, and the central love affair between Bogart and Bergman just keeps on pulling you in. Play it again!