R: It struck me on this viewing how very like Billy Wilder at his blackest this is, sour and crackling with wit and venality; as if he hadn’t course-corrected after the terrifying Ace in the Hole and moved towards entertainments more palatable to audiences. Of course, SSOS flopped too.

R: The point at which Melville’s mature style crystallises. Portentous epigram, silent crime sequences, trenchcoats, fedoras, grimy boltholes, anachronistic nightclubs, worthy police opponent, codes of conduct adhered to and broken, doom closing in.

R: “Are you going to do something wild and unpredictable?” While you might think Bogart is always Bogart, Sam Spade is miles apart from Philip Marlowe. Where Marlowe is always collected and still, Spade is swarming with moods, snap reactions, role-playing. He’s mercury where Marlowe is steel.

R: Orson Welles thought he’d developed a new form of partly-dramatised film essay with F for Fake, but Benjamin Christensen had done it 50 years earlier. The gorgeously-designed and shot imagery here has been mined by other filmmakers for over a century.

R: Feeling more Hammer than American International, this late period gothic has a country house, a brothel, carriages, woodland walks, swirling leaves, a colonial curse and Christopher Lee. In his red hood and cloak, Sir Edward has an air of Fantomas or Judex about him.

R: A collage of French castle, Maltese knights, hidden rooms, son-et-lumiere and nocturnal prowlers in black gloves. Franju seems far more interested in the style he can drape the material in than the Kind Hearts and Coronets-esque plot. Like Max Martin covering an old folk ballad.

R: This gets written off as flotsam folly in the wake of Taylor’s divorce from Richard Burton, but it’s actually a fine piece of giallo-inflected 70s Italo-arthouse. If it starred someone like Monica Vitti rather than a major Hollywood star, it would be much better regarded.

R: From his debut, Terence Stamp was playing unreachable enigmas, be they angel, devil, saint or killer. There’s a straight line from this to Pasolini’s Theorem. Billy Budd the film is a despairing piece on how not even good men plus a robust justice system can counteract evil.

R: Meticulous attention to fashion; perfection of the body; sexual confusion; self-disgust sublimated into rage; a quest for transcendence; final release in violence and bloodshed - there’s a sense in which all Paul Schrader’s previous work was working towards Mishima.

R: Like Gilda, not so much a noir as a modern baroque gothic crammed with obsession and perversion. Just as deliriously appealing as that sounds. David Lynch’s work is shot through with this one.

It’s daft but so committed to its daftness its hard not to enjoy, like a drunk rendition of performances from old episodes of Top of the Pops. And bravo to Hammer for trying something new rather than one more vampire or mummy movie.

R: One of those films like From Dusk Till Dawn that starts out as one thing and ends up another, in this case something with Lovecraftian tentacled creatures and lost-in-time Spanish conquistadors.

Zachary Scott is brilliant, playing an alcoholic who, when pulled up by the abduction of his son doesn’t dry out and pull himself together, as you might expect, but carries on drinking and trying to muddle through.