1. Cinema Paradiso

Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy/France, 1988

Our verdict: O Guardian readers, I love you and perhaps sometimes (as a Guardian reader for 50 years) I come close to understanding you. But Cinema Paradiso as the best foreign language film of all time? Better than M, The Rules of the Game, Ugetsu Monogatari or ... Maybe I'm a snob, and I know we're playing a game, not voting for president. But can't you see that this is the kind of movie lousy presidents remember when they want to be kind to cinema and show their humanity? The film is clever and touching, and in its way it's an ad for cinema. But ... there is work to be done.

David Thomson

2. Amélie

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/Germany, 2001

Our verdict: Forget La Règle du Jeu; forget L'Atalante; forget Abel Gance's Napoleon; if there's a single film that defines France in the eyes of the Guardian readership, it's this hyperactive magical-realist tale from the Gallic answer to Tim Burton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Its self-consciously cutie-pie tone has meant that, even before its release, it was thoroughly scorned by the People Who Count (ie, the Cannes film festival). The fact that it's cleaned up in country after country (£4.32m at the UK box office at the last time of asking) shows that, approve of it or not, Amelie has got something. As footballers are fond of saying, you can only beat what's put in front of you, and Amélie has done that for years.

Andrew Pulver

3. Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954

Our verdict: This is still the best mixture of the western and an authentic samurai film, in which seven noble and skilled fighters (beautifully delineated) decide to defend a farming village against marauding bandits. Kurosawa orders the action in waves and the weather deteriorates (so you need to see the long version). Today, perhaps, the ending begs for a touch more irony (as villagers might turn on their heroes), but this set international standards for action cinema, the slow-mo grandeur of combat and the general infiltration of Japanese "stoicism" into the age of tight-lipped Clint Eastwood heroes.

DT

4. City of God

Fernando Meirelles, Brazil/France/USA, 2002

Our verdict: There are plenty of ways to read City of God's fourth place in this poll - first, that young people are voting and seeking a true vision of the world from the movies; second, that that hope has extended to Latin America and the slums of Rio, where Fernando Mereilles' picture is set; and third, that young moviegoers use the movies as a way of focusing their anger or despair about the unfairness of the world. All the above could have been said about Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, made in 1950, and a better film. But Los Olvidados never woke the world up as City of God did.

DT

5. The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo, Algeria/ Italy, 1966

Our verdict: You could argue that no modern movie has had more political influence. For the tension in this dramatised documentary has been employed in the training and the inspiration of real-life terrorists opposed to occupying forces. Pontecorvo used people who had known the real war in Algeria - from all sides - and you can tell yourself you are seeing the "true" face of outrage. But, in fact, the picture is artfully made in a black-and-white that apparently appeals to Guardian readers a lot. Above all, this reminds us that "real" coverage of terrible events is itself a political weapon.

DT

6. Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960

Our verdict: This is one of the turning points in film history, modernism made for peanuts, with a strange American starlet (Jean Seberg) talking away to a French Humphrey Bogart (Jean-Paul Belmondo) as Godard experimented with ways of interfering with his own story. It was the start of the first period of Godard's work, and if you are thrilled by it, I urge you to pursue richer and more emotional films (such as Vivre Sa Vie, Contempt and Pierrot le Fou). But Godard in the 60s is still radical, funny and captivated by his medium in ways that make later modernists seem lazy.

DT

7. Jean de Florette/ Manon des Sources

Claude Berri, France/Switzerland/Italy, 1986

Our verdict: If any single event triggered the British exodus to Provence, the Dordogne and southern France, it was the release of the first part of this picturesque double-bill in 1986 - a good few years before Peter Mayle got going. Issuing from Gérard Depardieu's glory years and adapted from Marcel Pagnol's novel L'Eau des Collines, it exudes a certain kind of rural Frenchness that has as become as exportable, in its way, as Richard Curtis's England. Its enduring hold on the Anglo-Saxon imagination is not something, I suspect, the French will be wild about.

AP

8. Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1948

Our verdict: It's fascinating that this classic of the Italian neo-realist movement holds its power more than 50 years after it was made. A man needs a job desperately - putting up movie posters of Rita Hayworth. For the job he needs a bike. But in an impoverished city, the bike is stolen. With his son, he goes on a great search in a city of bicycles. De Sica judges the pathos very well, though as a rule he advanced on scenes where children taught adults about life. Hollywood wanted a remake (with Cary Grant), and in that crazed urge you can feel the end of Hollywood coming.

DT

9. Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro, Mexico/Spain/USA, 2006

Our verdict: Del Toro placed himself at the vanguard of Latin-American film talent with his exotic Oscar-winning fairytale set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. On its release last year, the critic Mark Kermode hailed it as "the Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema". If that sounds a bit rich, you should sample the film itself - a dark gateau layered with true-life monsters (that fascist colonel) and fantastical freaks (the terrifying pale man), and iced with imagery lifted from Goya and Arthur Rackham. All told, it's quite a treat.

Xan Brooks

10. In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong/France, 2000

Our verdict: "Everyone" knows now: Asia makes the most interesting films, and most of them come from South Korea and Hong Kong. Wong Kar Wai's great romance is set in the latter in the 60s. It is a strange, secret love story between two people who try to rent the same apartment, starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. What sets this above so many other Asian films is the stylistic intricacy, the ambiguous relationship of story and politics, and the subtle implication that it's a film about everything. Hollywood, in that sense, now exists in the Far East - and we are far away.

DT

11. Tokyo Story

Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1953

Our verdict: What a great pleasure to see Guardian readers voting for this masterpiece by Ozu (though I'd like to remind them that the greatest of Japanese directors is still Kenji Mizoguchi). Ozu developed a simple, withdrawn camera style perfect for the observation of different members of a family. As always, this is about concession, compromise and the way the passage of time first reveals and then helps us pass over the unfairnesses in life. After this, there are only about another 20 Ozu films worth seeing!

DT

12. Les Enfants du Paradis

Marcel Carné, France, 1945

Our verdict: This is a tribute to the romantic energy of 19th-century French theatre - and to the same champagne excitement as Paris recovered from German occupation in 1944-45. Carné set it up as the Germans were still in town, but the film opened in a free city and it is as much of a patriotic endorsement as Olivier's Henry V. But, written by Jacques Prévert and designed by Alexandre Trauner, it is a masterpiece of studio film-making. Still hugely enjoyable and a treasure house of great performances from Arletty to Barrault.

DT

13. The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957

Our verdict: One of those films not subject to the vagaries of fashion or marketing, Bergman's breakthrough hit remains arguably the most unforgiving, cold, user-hostile entry on the list. That resonant opening scene, with medieval knight Max von Sydow taking on Death at chess, has become a much-parodied classic - Bill and Ted beating Death at Battleships springs to mind - but take the trouble to look again, and you find a stark crystallisation of Bergman's key themes: faith, despair and the silence of God. From a time before merchandising and date-movies weren't prime considerations, this is one to be cherished.

AP

14. Jules and Jim

François Truffaut, France, 1962

Our verdict: In so many ways, this is the ideal "new wave" film - it's set in period (the first world war) and yet it's a new version of sexual politics in which one impulsive, dangerous and utterly seductive woman can keep two men (at least) in her life. So it was rich material in an age of new promiscuity. It has fabulous black-and-white widescreen (by Raoul Coutard) and a classic score by Georges Delerue. But, above all, it has Jeanne Moreau, one of the true and unstoppable "beasts" of cinema, devouring or changing everything she sees.

DT

15. La Haine

Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 1995

Our verdict: In the wake of the French election, the troubles of the banlieues have come in for one of their periodic bout of attention, but it was this agonised shout from the wrong side of the chemin de fer that first alerted the wider world to a nasty underside of the shiny Gallic dream. Taking his cue from Boyz n the Hood, then-unknown actor Kassovitz cast another barely-known actor, his friend Vincent Cassel, as a gun-toting hoodlum driven bananas by racism and petty crime; it's clearly still got something to say.

AP

16. Il Postino

Michael Radford, France/Italy/Belgium, 1994

Our verdict: Is Postino is better than Antonioni's La Notte? Than Rossellini's Open City? Than Bertolucci's The Conformist? Than 20, 30, 40 other Italian films? Why is it that Italy is connected with this sweet air of aberration? Is it that we want to live in Italy? Is it that such films as Il Postino awaken the tourist in us? Have we turned story, drama and characters into the sites of travelogue? I am serious - I think that Il Postino is not really a movie, but a kind of animated magazine section on the idyll of a certain kind of Italian life. The great interest of this is that it shows fantasy - the engine of the movies - still thriving.

DT

17. Oldboy

Chan-wook Park, South Korea, 2003

Our verdict: This is a terrific Korean action film that unfolds the story content of about five lumbering US films in a bare two hours. Director Chan-wook Park never lets us settle. It begins as a bad dream, moves to a 15-year prison sentence and then explodes in flashbacks that trace the real crime. In addition, it has a fantastic taste for eating and eateries, and an overall confidence that the films noirs made by RKO 60 years ago may be the most lively model for movies that explore the thriving prosperity and moral chaos of south-east Asia - and which leave us in little doubt that this is our future.

DT

18. Delicatessen

Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 1991

Our verdict: Delicatessen has lost none of its freshness in the years since it was first sprung on an unsuspecting public. It's a mad, Heath Robinson-esque assemblage: part comedy, part love story, part cyberpunk comic-strip, with its decaying tenement home to all manner of roguish inhabitants (sad-faced clowns, cannibalistic butchers, lentil-eating guerrillas et al). Forget trying to make sense of the plot. It's just a peg on which to drape the wacky misadventures and fiendishly choreographed set-pieces. Co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet went on to further success with Alien: Resurrection and the winsome Amélie, but he's never equalled this bizarre and brilliant one-off.

XB

19. La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini, Italy/France, 1960

Our verdict: Few films have their cake and eat it with quite the confidence - and abandon - of Fellini's classic. A freewheeling tour of the Rome party circuit, this lambasted the tawdry lifestyle of its modish characters while simultaneously luxuriating in it. Along the way, it coined the term "paparazzo" and rustled up a crop of indelible, iconic images. Nowadays we remember the famous shot of Anita Ekberg in the fountain far more than we recall that allegorical image of Christ being forcibly lifted out of the city. If that's not what Fellini would have wanted, one fears he has only himself to blame.

XB

20. The 400 Blows

François Truffaut, France, 1959

Our verdict: This was Truffaut's first feature film, and it introduced Jean-Pierre Léaud as a version of Truffaut himself, leading a rough, tough life, and barely avoiding juvenile delinquency on the way to the great sea called cinema. I love its unsentimental view of childhood, its adoration of a Paris seen in black and white (thank you for voting so often for b/w) and the naturalness of Léaud. Truffaut would lose his touch later in life, I fear, and he started to make foolish pictures. But for a few years in the 60s, the sight and sound of his work (there's another great score by Jean Constantin) is enough to remind us all that cinema can be heavenly.

DT

... and the next 20

21. Aguirre, Wrath of God

Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1972

22. Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders, West Germany/France, 1987

23. Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden/France/ West Germany, 1982

24. Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1969

25. Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union, 1925

26. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ang Lee, Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China, 2000

27. Pather Panchali

Satyajit Ray, India, 1955

28. Ran

Akira Kurosawa, Japan/France, 1985

29. Three Colours: Blue

Krzysztof Kieslowski, France/Poland/Switzerland/UK, 1993

30. Central Station

Walter Salles, Brazil/France, 1998

31. Come and See

Elem Klimov, Soviet Union, 1985

32. Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 2001

33. Three Colours: Red

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland/France/Switzerland, 1994

34. Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957

35. All About My Mother

Pedro Almodóvar, Spain/France, 1999

36. Hidden

Michael Haneke, France/Austria/ Germany/Italy, 2005

37. Cyrano De Bergerac

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France, 1990

38. Downfall

Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany/Italy/ Austria, 2004

39. La Règle du Jeu

Jean Renoir, France, 1939

40. Life Is Beautiful

Roberto Benigni, Italy, 1997

Talk more about them on the blog.

· All your entries - more than 2,500 individual votes for more than 500 different films - went into the giant sack for the draw for the £200 HMV gift card. And the winner was Dr N Mandel, of Essex, whose three nominated films were Les Enfants du Paradis, The Apple and Red Sorghum