Beginning with the romance between a grocery store worker, Monika (Harriet Andersson) and shy delivery boy, Harry (Lars Ekborg), Summer with Monika’s title describes the months the couple spend powerboating around a sunny Swedish archipelago before the walls of domestic life close in. Bergman’s rich and contemplative film traces the maturation of youth to adulthood, as summer turns to winter, and infatuation transfigures into something altogether more complex.

Mike Leigh’s nighttime odyssey follows Johnny, a nihilistic and malicious drifter, as he collides with the dispossessed souls of London’s underbelly. With a razor-sharp script and a blistering performance from David Thewlis, Naked is a rage-filled masterwork of British cinema, which, as Derek Malcolm wrote, "tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist".

Rising from a fractious post-war Japan, Early Summer transfigures the country’s defeat and western occupation into one of Yasujiro Ozu’s most intricate familial studies. After Noriko (Setsuko Hara) chooses to marry a childhood friend against the recommendation of her family, the bonds between she and them are torn apart. Black-and-white film renders the textures of water and light in as much painstaking detail as Ozu’s depiction of the slow fracture of a family. 

The spaghetti turns cold as the coupledom of Mabel and Nick collapses under the pressure of 20th-century domesticity. Inspired by his wife the actor Gena Rowland’s desire to write about contemporary womanhood, John Cassavetes’ film records Mabel's shuttling between the twin institutions of the family and the asylum in this frank portrait of love and where it fails. 

When a murdered samurai is found in the forest, four people – his wife, a woodcutter, a bandit and the samurai himself – give four wildly differing accounts of the circumstances surrounding his death. Groundbreaking cinematography charges the film with narrative power that diffuses through dappled sunlight: Akira Kurosawa’s visual and psychological masterpiece destabilises the very concept of truthfulness, becoming a monument to the impossibility of objective experience.

The camera pans throughout the various domestic environments inhabited by Louise – including Malcolm LeGrice’s kitchen and Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom – interrupted by Laura Mulvey reading the story of Oedipus encountering the Sphinx. Perhaps more than the subject matter, co-directors Mulvey and Peter Wollen are applying lessons from Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” to the domestic: “Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectre the illusions of looking in on a private world.”

Werner Herzog’s modern epic follows its titular protagonist’s attempt to expand his rubber-harvesting empire in deep Peru. A “conquistador of the useless” (as Herzog labelled his own directorial project), Fitzcarraldo drags a 320-ton steamer over a mountain in a feat of absurdity that dances along the line between dream and insanity – as did much of the film’s production, which boasts a Wikipedia subcategory headline of “deaths, injuries and accusations of exploitation”.

In the 1980s, Takeshi Kitano turned from presenting the wildly popular Takeshi’s Castle to creating crime dramas. Violent Cop is the first in a trilogy of Yakuza crime films, in which brutality and erratic humour nestle together to illustrate the increasingly absurd aesthetic landscape of a new turbocapitalist society. 

Jean Cocteau’s reinvention of the fairy tale represents a post-war return to fantasy and the impressionable realm of childhood. In the aftermath of her father’s floral theft, Belle steps from a world filled with light into the Beast’s lair. A lush orchestral score and intelligently-designed special effects produce a hyper-expressiveness that render this fairytale more vivid than reality – how unsettling that might be depends on the viewer...

The artist, dying of lead poisoning in exile with only his companion Jerusaleme by his side, recalls his youth in the city. Cavorting with the drunks and sex workers of 16th century Rome street life lend a precious beauty and a dark energy to his developing work, and Jarman’s use of chiaroscuro in the film itself makes this paen to artistry as expressive and textured as its namesake’s paintings.

Terence Davies’ debut feature is an intimate portrait of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool. Davies, himself the youngest of ten children born into a Catholic household, uses various family gatherings as a backdrop for the tipping of the 20th century into its explosive second half. Yet the film’s focus is on the drama and mundanity of everyday human experience, which Davies portrays with a tender grace.