Watching this film makes me proud to be Algerian. I have a family member who appears in the film, and many Algerians do. It’s an incredibly elegant film that continues the legacy of Italian Neo-realism. But it is also its application to real life: In working with non-professional Algerian actors that had lived experience of the events depicted, the film itself becomes an event in Algerian history.

I saw ‘The Godfather’ for the first time when I was six years old. My father watched it once a month and in my curiosity about the things he loved, I harassed him to show it to me. Watching these beautiful images over and over as I grew up myself, I came to understand how a person might start out in life one way only to end up completely different. Watching Michael Corleone desperately wanting to keep his family together but ending up destroying it. It will always break my heart.

Forever my favourite in Marty Scorsese’s impressive filmography. The voice-over is so efficient in keeping you close to the journey of Henry Hill’s character: A man who is literally willing to do anything to get ahead. It’s rags-to-riches-to-ruin story holds a complex morality: If you want something in life you have to take it. And you have to be cool with the consequences.

Contrary to cinema in fashion the image has to tell you everything without relying on plot. And so it does here: Women, in a harsh and brutal environment, looking powerful as they combat the elements. Anthony Vaccarello’s boundary-pushing vision finds its perfect carrier here.

A bicycle in itself is a simple mechanism to understand. But it can take you places. The apparent simplicity of the plot here is the film biggest aesthetic asset. Just by turning two wheels over and over from one place to another a powerful metaphor for life’s fragility and unfairness is spun. A problem doesn’t have to be complicated to be tragic.

Really the s**t that shaped me. Pure greatness. Everything about it, the script is insane, the story is insane, the characters are insane. It’s the coolest film ever. Everyone is so fucking cool in it. It makes you feel cool yourself, it makes you you want to make movies. And it makes you feel like you can make movies.

I watched this film forty times in a row in high school to the point where my family thought I had mental issues. I grew up obsessed with Al Pacino. But then seeing Tahar Rahim, a man with the same first name as my father, opened up a new realm of possibilities. There is such authenticity in Jacques Audiard’s mise en scène and the actor’s craft remains contained, like an Italian Neorealist film in 2000’s France.

I am fascinated by the paradox at the heart of this film: The most moving sequence is about a man killing a machine. And at the same time the craft of Kubrick here aspires to something machine-like, almost expressionless, perfection. It’s the film that, in a very psychedelic way, makes me understand cinema while undoing my understanding at the same time.

David Fincher directs the four biggest supermodels in the world to sing along to George Michael. The titular ‘Freedom’ here becomes a program, about what it means when you let every artist do what they are best at. The definition of iconic.