Infamously shunned by the Academy at the time of release, as Hoop Dreams was (legend has it that the committee didn’t even bother to watch all of Crumb before blithely deciding not to nominate it), Crumb was nevertheless met with overwhelming praise from critics. One even described it as the best documentary ever made. They may well have a point.

2. Dellamorte Dellamore

Also known as Cemetery Man (a name saddled by a distributor that hated the movie for some reason), this true one-off may be one of the finest horror comedies ever made. Rupert Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, who looks after a cemetery in a small Italian town with the help of his simple assistant Naghi (François Hadji-Lazaro). The madness begins when the corpses in Francesco’s graveyard refuse to stay dead. Then Naghi develops an infatuation with a decapitated head. Then Francesco begins to go completely insane.

Blessed with an extremely funny script (“Someone’s been stealing my crimes!”), some fantastic direction from Soavi–his experience as a second unit director for Dario Argento really showing here–and a great central performance from Everett, Dellamorte Dellamore really is unlike anything else in Italian horror.

Like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Soavi succeeds in creating his own coherent little world; the events may become increasingly bizarre as Francesco’s grip on reality begins to slip, but the movie always has its own internal logic. It’s a zombie movie, a dark fantasy, a romance, a black comedy… a bewildering soup of genres, all in perfect balance.

1. Quiz Show

The problem with putting Quiz Show at the top of this list is that it earned four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. That was the year that it, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption lost out to Forrest Gump, but we’ll try and put that out of our minds for a minute.

Still, who talks about Quiz Show now? Where was it in the numerous end of decade lists that filled assorted magazines at the end of the last decade? And yet, for our money, Quiz Show is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant piece of cinematic drama, with four exquisite acting performances at the heart of it.

Directed by Robert Redford–and it deserves comparison with his very best films–Quiz Show tells the story of the 1950s American quiz show scandal where it was revealed that some of the programs were being fixed. Chief beneficiary? Charles von Doren, as played by Ralph Fiennes, effectively one of the earliest reality television stars. He’s a character who doesn’t need television, thanks to his wealthy background, but finds himself seduced by it. The late Paul Scofield plays his father, and ultimately trumps every other actor in the movie.

But only just, because John Turturro gives arguably his best screen role as Herbert Stempel, the champion usurped to make way for Van Doren, sidelined when the more publicly palatable contender comes along. Completing the acting masterclass is Rob Morrow, playing investigator Dick Goodwin, who decides to dig into the quiz shows, to see if there’s really foul play at work. Martin Scorsese cameos too, incidentally.

Paul Attansio’s screenplay homes in pretty much perfectly on the key beats of the story, whilst Redford’s direction is detailed yet unfussy, respecting actors and allow them to create characters all of whom are coated in shades and gray.