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While Billy Wilder’s snappy screenplay for Sunset Boulevard bounces from scene to scene in crisp, elegiac prose, he also efficiently constructs one of the most tragic cinematic characters in Norma Desmond, played by a magnificently theatrical Gloria Swanson whose every line and action resounds with pride and misery of grandiose proportions.

Though the baby mix-up premise of Parallel Mothers is in itself absurdly comical, humour is only one tool in Pedro Almodovar’s arsenal to draw out the melodramatic expressiveness of his characters’ rich, colourful lives, as he delivers a personal ode to all those wide-ranging, meaningful, and unpredictable experiences of motherhood.

There is a beautiful, architectural surrealism to the miniature replicas of world-famous monuments of The World, as the theme park where Jia Zhangke sets his film shrinks these landmarks down to a size that makes both tourists and staff look like giants, and criticises a globalised Chinese culture that allows for such a cheapening of…

In straddling a line between pulpy violence and sophisticated visual artistry, Point Blank astonishingly transcends all genre trappings, as John Boorman’s confounding, non-linear narrative extracts a dizzying fever dream from the vengeful quest of a wronged man across formidable urban landscapes.

Michael Mann’s fascination with the bleary lights and architecture of sprawling urban spaces is expressed with a fully-developed cinematic voice in his remarkable debut film, Thief, but for all of the mobs and crowds that plague these dark, neon spaces, an overwhelming isolation continues to prevail and trap its inhabitants in neo-noir nightmares.