A Korean variation on Japanese yakuza films, this whodunit first ventures into the realm of love drama - an underworld baron's henchman falls in love with his fiancée - before taking a brutal turn in the middle. Sequestered, tortured and left for dead, Kim (Lee Byung-hun, surely in his greatest role) then sets out to take methodical revenge on all the criminals who tried in vain to finish him off. A whirlwind of violence, an hour of dazzling gunfights, operatic violence with a touch of humor, reminiscent of the virtuosity of Kill Bill, shot a year earlier.

While Kim Jee-woon's delirious rodeo is obviously a tribute to Sergio Leone, it is above all an exercise in style, owing more to comic strips and Tex Avery than to the canons of the Italian Western. It's a Manchurian Western pastiche, conceived as a crazy, speeding train from which we emerge dazed and exhausted.

A vengeance-hungry policeman plays cat-and-mouse with a serial killer, torturing and releasing him at every encounter. Lee Byung-hun (A Bittersweet Life) and Choi Min-sik (Old Boy) in a nihilistic thriller that plays on the moral ambiguity of its hero, who is even more sadistic than the killer he is pursuing. The sudden bursts of graphic violence never veer into torture porn: Kim Jee-woon cleverly offsets the tension with cold humor and a gallery of surprising characters, including a memorable cannibal gourmet.

Fincher's pixel-perfect masterpiece, a thrilling biopic of a paradoxically fallible character, a lambda geek hiding behind his computer but soon destined for an extraordinary destiny: Mark Zuckerberg. The film's pace, sometimes compared to Howard Hawks' machine-gun comedies, owes as much to Fincher's storytelling talent as to Aaron Sorkin's dazzling script (The White House). In perfect counterpoint, the electro-spleen of the Reznor-Ross duo and the nuanced composition of Jesse Eisenberg make this portrait the most accurate incarnation to date of the ultra-modern loneliness of the Facebook years.

The film of maturity, a rigorous, wide-ranging of a thirty-year investigation by two journalists and two detectives on the trail of an elusive serial killer - the Zodiac - who plagued San Francisco in the late '60s. Far from the effects of his debut, Fincher adopts the classic form of 70s American cinema, that of Pakula and Pollack. The maniacal meticulousness of the reconstruction, magnified by the photography of the late Harris Savides, the implacable suspense of certain scenes and the impeccable casting make Zodiac one of the great American films of its time.

One of the best contemporary neo-noirs, a stylized rereading of the genre's archetypes, shaken up with a hybrid aesthetic inspired by the photographs of Robert Frank and William Eggleston, the paintings of Munch and MTV clips. While he was still learning his trade - this was his second film - Fincher was already making his mark: the sophisticated art direction, from the opening credits to Darius Khondji's cinematography, is still a hallmark of the genre today, and will spawn a series of copies that pale in comparison to this master stroke.

Bukowski only makes a very brief appearance in Barfly, as a discreet barfly sipping a whisky, but his wit, poetry and verbosity permeate Schroeder's film. Never a miserabilist, Schroeder films his celestial tramps with the grace reserved for angels: from the very first shots, his camera floats in long, ethereal movements, sublimated by the warm photography of Robby Müller (L'Ami américain). Faye Dunaway, sadly abandoned by Hollywood in the '80s, is deeply moving, while at her side, Mickey Rourke, funny, pathetic and heartbreaking in the same second, finds the role of a lifetime.

59 minutes of the hunt for a serial killer in a tight B-movie. Ahead of their time, Richard Fleischer and Anthony Mann (screenplay) probed the killer's psychological flaws, imagined the development of his sketch, and in so doing sketched out what would later be called profiling, in some remarkable scenes bordering on the fantastic. The famous faceless mannequin used by the police duo in their investigation, which seems to come to life in an incredible night scene, is one of the first striking images in the budding filmmaker's long career.

Richard Fleischer's first film, the story of an acrimonious divorce filmed from a child's perspective, whose realism caused a sensation at the time. While nothing is spared for his young heroine, who is mocked by her friends and abandoned by her parents - neither of whom really wants custody of her - Fleischer avoids any form of melodrama or pathos, on a subject that will often be treated with miserabilism by Hollywood. The film's modernity is striking from the very first shot, and deeply moving in the very last.