Studio Canal Collection in pictures: classic film gallery

Michael Cimino's majestic 1978 debut The Deer Hunter follows a group of men from a close-knit community whose young lives are destroyed by the Vietnam war, and features spectacular performances from Robert De Niro and an Oscar-winning Christopher Walken. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

An intoxicating mystery set against the backdrop of a ruined post-war Vienna, Carol Reed's 1949 noir The Third Man is illuminated by a sublime cameo from Orson Welles as the charming but ruthless racketeer Harry Lime. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Le Mépris is Jean-Luc Godard's deeply recursive 1963 film about the disintegrating relationship between a screenwriter hired to revamp a new version of Homer's Odyssey and his gorgeous wife (Brigitte Bardot). Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Jean-Paul Belmondo's cop-killing, Bogart-aping gangster hides out in Paris with Jean Seberg's ultimate pixie dream girl in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's timeless 1960 existential classic of the nouvelle vague. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

In Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's offbeat 1991 black comedy Delicatessen, set in a starving, post-apocalyptic France, butcher Clapet rents rooms in the dilapidated building above his store to unwitting victims who become a cheap source of meat for his tenants. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

A woman, a man who claims to be her former lover, and another who may be her husband encounter each other at a sumptuous chateau in Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais's disorientating and surreal 1961 exploration of subjective memory and unstable reality. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

The Ladykillers, a farcical 1955 tale of a motley band of criminals who pose as classical musicians to rent rooms from a naive, elderly lady while they plan a heist, counts among the best of the Ealing comedies.
Photograph: Studio Canal captions Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Featuring a sublime performance from Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate ­ Mike Nichols' edgy comedy about the affair between a young man and a seductive older woman ­ epitomised the social tensions of the 1960s.
Photograph: Studio Canal captions Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

The Elephant Man, David Lynch's Oscar-winning 1980 paean to enduring humanity, tells the sorrowful yet heartening tale of John Merrick (John Hurt), a severely deformed man who becomes a cause celebre in Victorian London.
Photograph: Studio Canal captions Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey's final collaboration The Go-Between is an elegant yet hot-blooded 1970 tale of romance, class division and shattered childhood illusions set in the English countryside in the early 1900s.
Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is Volker Schlöndoff and Margarethe von Trotta's powerful 1975 vilification of yellow journalism and abuse of press freedom in 1970s Germany. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Inspired by Shakespeare's Lear, Ran, the final entry in Akira Kurosawa's grand canon, is the nihilistic, elegiac tale of an ageing Japanese feudal warlord who unleashes a power struggle among his three sons. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Luchino Visconti's 1954 melodrama is a lush, decadent tale of seduction and betrayal, featuring a smouldering Alida Valli as the beautiful countess swept up in the fallout from Italian unification. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

In Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard's vivid, pop art-inspired 1965 feast of French 60s cool, the unfortunate Ferdinand makes the mistake of running away with his baby-sitter Marianna, a guileful woman with a dark past. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's potent, beguilingly surreal 2001 neo-noir set among the Hollywood glitterati, is an enthrallingly eccentric psychological thriller in which events seem to emanate almost entirely from the writer-director's own impenetrable subconscious. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Heist movie maestro Jean-Pierre Melville's bleakly existential, super-stylish 1970 thriller Le Cercle Rouge centres on three misaligned partners in crime who set out to rob a jewellery store. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning 2002 drama The Pianist superbly exposes the full horror of the Holocaust by charting the harrowing descent of a once-proud musician into a vagrant struggling for survival in the wastelands of the Warsaw ghetto. Photograph: Studio Canal captions Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal

Luis Buñuel delights in exposing France's seedy underbelly in Belle de Jour, the 1967 tale of a rich housewife (Catherine Deneuve) who becomes a high-class prostitute in an attempt to kickstart her own sexual awakening. Photograph: Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal