The King of the American Indie production. Jim Jarmusch is perhaps the most successful of an endangered breed of filmmakers (not that there were many of his ilk to begin with). In over three decades and ten feature films he has never succumb to the temptations of the studio system, he has never compromised his minimalist approach to directing, he has remained tirelessly faithful to his own style and made few (if any) concessions to populist demands.

“From Geneva comes the news that the famous international crook, Gaston Monescu, robbed the peace conference yesterday. He took practically everything except the peace…”

Executive Order 9066 represents one of the darkest pages in the history of the United States of America. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan, the then President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans, some 62% of them citizens of the USA. It was an act of pure, paranoid hysteria compounded by racial prejudice and ruined many lives of innocent men and women in the process. It would be another forty-six years until Ronald Reagan officially apologised for the action and reparations were made to the tune of $1.6 Billion.

We, by the nature of being Human, like to rank things in a preferential order. We have popularised best of entertainments and lists, but when it comes to film this form of revisionism explodes exponentially. Every year, every actor, every director and every genre creates it own set of lists in every film fan and every film critic.

Sam Peckinpah's less known (but superior) Western is a forgotten masterpiece of the genre and explores the theme of dying like no other film before or since.

Though it may have been rendered a relatively minor footnote in the temporary revolution that galvanised American film during the 70s by works more illustrious or grandiose, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces was one of the best and most significant films of that remarkable decade and may in fact better represent what distinguished the filmmaking of that era than the epic masterworks of Coppola, Altman or Scorsese, as well as remaining one of the touchstone entries of counter-cultural cinema.

In many ways Bob Rafelson's 1970 feature film represents the start of the second golden age of American cinema, coming at the very start of the decade famous for it's subversive and intellectual stature movie making, this represents one of the first American films made with a deliberately European flavour. A film which mirrors the works of Ingmar Bergman in particular.

When we consider the great American films of the 1970’s and indeed the great American film makers who created their best works in that decade, the same names and the same films often appear: Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver, William Friedkin, The French Connection, Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather, Terrance Malick, Badlands, Sidney Lumet, Dog Day Afternoon.

John Cassavetes' crime thriller is one of the forgotten classics of 1970's American cinema. A brilliant central performance from Ben Gazzara and a intense naturalistic presentation of events make this an unmissable masterpiece.

David Lynch

An enigma of modern cinema, no other film maker has created such vast and inexplicable mysteries, conjured from what could be considered a deeply disturbed subconscious. Elusive, cryptic, genius. Three adjectives which can be used to describe the work of Lynch – they could also easily be countered by the words vague, pointless, and pretentious.