You know that crazy, giddy feeling you get when you suddenly have a great idea and you scramble to find a pen to write it down? That silly sensation when you think you may have just heard something that could change your life so you scratch it out verbatim on your palm with a borrowed sharpie? The night I met my wife I sprinted home reciting her telephone number aloud all the way, desperate to get to my phone and dial her up before she slipped away.

Milan in winter. The camera hovers over a grand, architectural city engulfed in white. Elevated buildings of grey breathe in a covering of snow. The credits open over this scenery recalling films in the golden age of Italian cinema. The score by John Adams (the main suite is titled 'The Chairman Dances') swells over the images, stirring deep emotions - pride, love, fear. Beauty has been personified.

A certain amount of reluctant discretion has to be considered when being critical of an established classic. Perhaps the quality of the work is simply something that you as a viewer have missed. The old maxim that the fault is not with the film but rather with the audience may be an important mitigating factor. However, it is not impossible that a film may be considered to classic but in fact be open to vast amounts of criticism.

Revolutionary Road was a much-praised film from 2008, which garnered a myriad of award nominations, but only really achieved one 'major' success for Kate Winslet at the Golden Globes. And that speaks volumes about the flaws in the film. It's a glossy, beautiful work with some terrific performances from a stellar cast, but ultimately leaves the viewer out in the cold...

The credits, taking up the opening two minutes of the film, really do set the tone. The first lot of names appears in fairly ordinary, bland writing except it is shown via strobe lighting as the names flicker in to and out of sight. After about half a second it goes to the next lot of names which go very much the same.

One might wonder if in years to come people will look back upon Joel Schumacher's ill-fated Batman and Robin and consider it as a significant work of recent cinema history. Of course, as everyone knows, it was infamously one of the worst films ever made – a ridiculous pantomime of camp grotesquery masquerading as a movie. However, I'm seriously beginning to think it was actually an inadvertent force for good.

During the dawn of the trashbag which is American film for the past 20 years, it takes an English director to make one of the few gems of American film of the 1990’s. Mike Figgis is by no means a hollywood director, though his work are sometimes a miss he has to be given credit for experimenting like giving the four simulatious cameras in 2000’s Timecode. He is also capable of genius like Leaving Las Vegas.

Bela Tarr’s 1994 feature Satantango is infamous within its obscurity, owing mostly to its runtime; an incredible seven and a half hours. It is Tarr’s fifth picture, and marks fully the end of the transitional period from his early films into the mature style he exhibits in later works such as Werkmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Man from London (2007).

Set in a town in Romania towards the end of the 1980’s and the Communist Regime, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (henceforth 4 Months) is the second feature film from Romanian director Christian Mungiu.

The opening credits for the Queen of Spades are shown on a torn and crumpled theatre poster, a sadly prescient image of how the film has been treated over the years. To watch this forgotten masterpiece is to find a screwed up piece of paper, flatten it out and discover a beautiful love letter.