Michael Mann's gripping crime drama following the intense rivalry between an expert thief and a volatile cop. Famed for the pairing of screen acting giants Robert de Niro and Al Pacino, and featuring the only scene to feature both actors.

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The hilarious, violent, suspensful Coen brothers crime-comedy with William H. Macy as an unsuccessful car salesman who conspires to wipe out his financial problems by hiring a pair of small-time hitmen to kidnap his wife, and collect the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law.

The ultimate brat-pack comedy with Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn playing thirty-something buddies who try to recapture their college years by starting their own frat house.

Akira Kurosawa's enduring 1956 classic, set in 16th Century Japan. Often credited as the first prototypical action film, it follows a samurai veteran who gathers six others to protect a village. The film culminates in an epic battle when 40 bandits attack.

David Lean’s classic epic is over three and a half hours long, but impresses at every turn with its widescreen vistas and an unusual lead character – a flamboyant and controversial British military figure with conflicted loyalties. Plus the score has made it onto every movie soundtrack compilation ever made.

In this 1973 horror, a teenager is possessed by a mysterious entity and her mother seeks the help of two priests to save her. It was scary back then and it’s still scary now.

Martin Scorsese returns to his gangster roots, and directs a Boston / Irish flavoured remake of the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs. Leonardo Di Caprio is a cop infiltrating the mob. Matt Damon (a Boston native) is a mob man infiltrating the cops.

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The genius of Neill Blomkamp's debut feature (which Sir Peter Jackson helped shepherd into existence) is that the thinking behind it wasn't revolutionary. It took a pretty familiar premise – aliens come to earth in a big spaceship – and just by nudging it ever so slightly to one side, created a fresh and original film.

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Stanley Kubrick's comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is about a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist (Peter Sellers) who has bizarre ideas about man's future, and works with the Soviet premier in a desperate effort to save the world.

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Renton (Ewan McGregor), deeply immersed in the Edinburgh drug scene, tries to clean up and get out, despite the allure of the drugs and influence of friends. “Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?”

Stanley Kubrick's brilliant nightmare of a film takes the heavy realities of the 'do-your-thing' and 'law-and-order' syndromes, runs them through a cinematic centrifuge, and spews forth the commingled comic horrors of a regulated society...

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Both a sprawling epic and a tightly focused character study about the rise of Daniel Plainview (the intensely brilliant Daniel Day-Lewis), an ambitious miner who transforms himself into a powerful oil tycoon against the epic canvas of turn-of-the-century California.

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Billy Wilder's classic, wild comedy stars Jack Lemmon as Jerry, and Tony Curtis as Joe, a pair of unemployed musicians who inadvertently become witnesses to the St. Valentine Day's Massacre. They flee the state in an all female band disguised as women.

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Part one of a two part, 247 minute homage to kung fu and samurai movies, Kill Bill was the story of one woman's bloody quest for revenge told, like most Tarantino films, in titled chapters and non-chronological order.

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Sam Mendes’ Oscar-winning drama starred Kevin Spacey as middle-aged office drone Lester Burnham. Provoked by forbidden passions, he decides to make a few changes in his rut of a life, changes that are less midlife crisis than adolescence reborn.

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The first film in the sci-fi thriller franchise, director by a young Ridley Scott (only his second film). Sigourney Weaver stars Ripley, a member of the Nostromo spaceship that - while on its way back to Earth - responds to an SOS on another planet. They find a derelict alien ship and investigate. A bad move, and the terror begins.

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This 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story was far superior to Tim Burton’s version, if mainly for the oddball performance from Gene Wilder as the creepy, and slightly unnerving, Willy Wonka. This nostalgic favourite still makes us want to win a golden ticket.

“I’m kind of a big deal,” said news anchor Ron Burgundy, and New Zealanders have agreed. This is Will Ferrell at his very best, playing San Diego's top rated newsman in the male dominated broadcasting of the 1970's, who struggles when a new female employee with ambition to burn arrives in his office.

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MGM's classic musical of Hollywood's golden age, often called the best ever, with Gene Kelly dancing up a storm. Roger Ebert: "There is no movie musical more fun than Singin' in the Rain, and few that remain as fresh over the years."

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One of the great romantic-comedies featuring the famous pairing of Richard Gere, playing a successful corportate mogul, and Julia Roberts, as the carefree call-girl he falls for.

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