Top up your watchlist... 41 films every budding film student should watch

Director: F.W. Murnau

Exaggerated sets and shadows were the name of the game in 1920s German cinema, establishing a hugely influential style that has shaped the crime and horror genres ever since. This early Dracula adaptation contains some of the era’s most famous images.

Director: Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang’s expressionist, dystopian vision is one of the first science fiction feature films, and is arguably the most influential.

Director: Fritz Lang

The blueprint for the modern serial killer film can be found in this landmark crime movie, starring Peter Lorre as a compulsive child murderer on the run from police and criminals alike.

Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein

A fixture in the critical canon (and university curricula) almost since its premiere, Sergei Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content. Understanding the editing techniques known as Soviet montage begins here.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Developed out of the ruins of the Second World War, the Italian neorealism movement brought a new street-level authenticity to filmmaking. Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City was a milestone release.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica’s story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a classic of postwar Italian cinema.

Director: Fei Mu

Fei Mu’s newly restored 1948 masterpiece, a piercingly poignant study of adulterous desire, was once voted the greatest Chinese film ever made.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Among the most celebrated of all British films, this hugely influential melodrama from the creative duo Powell and Pressburger centres on a ballerina torn between love and her career.

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide audiences, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough tells the story of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

A constant fixture in critics’ polls, Yasujiro Ozu’s most enduring masterpiece is a beautifully nuanced exploration of filial duty, expectation and regret.

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s beautifully photographed tale explores the religious intolerance and tensions within a Danish farming family.

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s best-known film is a brilliant allegorical drama starring Max von Sydow as a knight trying to elude his own death.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s epic drama follows a mother and her five sons who move from a small town to Milan, changing their lives forever.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni’s mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman (Richard Harris).

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Emerging in the late 1950s and early 60s, the young directors of the French New Wave threw out the rulebook and helped reinvent cinema for the modern era. Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary debut feature, an insouciant and iconoclastic crime film, is a release all film students will get to know.

Director: Jacques Rivette

This remarkable first feature from cinematic visionary Jacques Rivette brilliantly captures the mood of paranoia and uncertainty of the Cold War period.

Director: Lindsay Anderson

British filmmakers of the 60s also embraced a new realism, shifting the focus to the working class and the cities of northern England. Lindsay Anderson’s fantastic first feature masterfully dissects the brutal life struggles of a rough-edged rugby footballer on and off the field.

Director: John Schlesinger

Mixing realism with fantasy, this classic from the British New Wave features Tom Courtenay as the clerk whose overactive daydreaming compensates for a dull provincial life.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Directors including Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were among the new guard who helped spawn the New German Cinema movement of the 60s and 70s. Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, Fear Eats the Soul is an unconventional love story that combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

Director: Wim Wenders

One of the finest achievements of New German Cinema, Wenders’ remarkable road-movie follows two young men as they travel through a country in the midst of momentous change.

Director: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog’s uniquely skewed take on Americana follows the journey of Bruno S. as he leaves Berlin for the bleak trailer parks of Wisconsin.

Director: Kent Mackenzie

Away from the big-budgets and gloss of Hollywood, there’s the alternative history of American independent filmmaking. Made on a shoestring, The Exiles is Kent Mackenzie’s gritty, vérité depiction of the lives of marginalised Native Americans living in Los Angeles.

Director: John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes is a major figure in the story of US indie. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is his uncompromising character study of a gangster, with Ben Gazzara as the small-time club owner whose life begins to spin out of control.

Director: Elio Gelmini

This documentary tells the story of another key filmmaker of the American undergound, Kenneth Anger. Made on the fringes of Hollywood, Anger birthed bold, erotic fantasias, including Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963), that remain classics of avant-garde cinema.

Directors: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

A scabrous study of desire, the subconscious and anti-clericalism, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s provocative first film is a classic of surrealist cinema.

Director: Michael Powell

Michael Powell’s dark, disturbing, once controversial tale of a shy camera technician who films women as he kills them is now rightly deemed a classic.

Director: Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous film is one of the most important avant-garde films of the 1970s, examining the position of women within the patriarchy through a prism of psychoanalysis.

Director: David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg’s multi award-winning psychological thriller exploring the bizarre lives of identical twins Elliot and Beverly, both played by Jeremy Irons.

Director: Patrick Keiller

The first in Patrick Keiller’s highly imaginative trilogy of films is a photographic trip through London, recounted by our unseen narrator.

Director: Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold’s highly acclaimed film, winner of top prizes at Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival, is a haunting drama about a woman confronting past demons.

Director: Gideon Koppel

Gideon Koppel’s charming documentary about a small farming community in mid-Wales, observing the unalterable rhythms of country life and the monthly visits of a mobile library.

Director: Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard’s film about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar mixes reconstruction, interviews (performed by actors) and scenes from the plays.

Directors: Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy

Desperate Optimists’ (Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy) deliriously deconstructed biopic of the extraordinary Ambrosio O’Higgins, who left Ireland to become the captain general of Chile in the Spanish Empire.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Start our tasting menu of new trends in world cinema with Lucrecia Martel’s acclaimed psychological thriller, in which a woman is plagued by paranoia after she hits something – or someone – with her car.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’s scary, witty tale of a dysfunctional Greek family is original, ingenious and sadly relevant as a study of parent-child relationships.

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethaku

Apichatpong’s Cannes prizewinner, about an ailing man revisiting his past, is a measured, lyrical evocation of mysterious beauty and quiet humanity.

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Loveless) relates a taut, caustic tale of need and greed leading to desperate deeds; a bleak and brilliant study of contemporary Russian mores.

Director: Lav Diaz

Lav Diaz’s epic drama follows the contrasting stories of two men, a law school dropout who descends into criminality and the humble family man wrongly accused of his crimes.

Director: Lisandro Alonso

Viggo Mortensen is a distraught Danish military man searching his fugitive daughter in this visually breathtaking drama from Lisandro Alonso, part of a younger generation of international filmmakers pushing modern cinema in new directions.

Director: Anocha Suwichakornpong

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising and innovative treatise on memory, politics and cinema.