David Lynch’s Reagan-era neo-noir follows clean-cut student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) as he delves into the terrifying criminal underbelly of his picture-perfect hometown.

According to Lynch, “This is the way America is to me. There’s a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s a horror and a sickness as well. It’s everything.”

The film’s opening sequence would be a huge influence on Mendes’ own American Beauty.

Perfect cinematography

Taxi Driver (1976)

Slide guitarist Ry Cooder was given just three days to write the music for Wim Wenders’ haunting road movie before the film premiered at Cannes.

The result is an evocative, much-imitated score, which the musician has called “a mood; that kind of lonely sound.” With no dialogue in the film’s opening sequence, Cooder’s plaintive guitar seems to act as a voice for Harry Dean Stanton’s aimless drifter Travis.

David Fincher’s acclaimed drama about the origins of Facebook saw him team up with notoriously verbose writer Aaron Sorkin.

The film’s dialogue-heavy opening scene perfectly sets up the character of Mark Zuckerberg, as he and his girlfriend talk at great speed in a Harvard bar. Most films average a page of script per minute – Fincher managed to cram 178 pages of Sorkin’s dialogue into The Social Network’s two-hour running time.

Dancer, choreographer, actor and director Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical opens with a documentary-style montage showing the arduous Broadway casting process.

The editing is tightly choreographed, with repeated movements and match cuts, soundtracked by George Benson’s On Broadway. Fosse was also behind the 1972 movie of Cabaret, a musical that Mendes has directed in New York and the West End.

Lighting indicates shifting moods and merging identities in Ingmar Bergman’s enigmatic thriller about young nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) and her patient Elisabet (Liv Ullmann).

Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist shared a fascination for light, believing subtle changes could significantly alter the meaning of a character’s actions. The dream-like scene where Elisabet visits Alma in the dead of night was shot using natural light from Sweden’s midnight sun.

Steven Spielberg called the War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s jet-black political satire “the best film set ever designed.”

Created by maverick production designer Ken Adam, its centrepiece is a sprawling 22-feet diameter table. Kubrick asked for the table to be covered in green baize with a huge light overhead, because he wanted it to look as if the politicians and generals sat around it “are playing with the world like a game of cards.”

In a film full of unusually long takes, director Paul Thomas Anderson manages to sustain momentum by using multiple framings within single shots.

The scene where ruthless oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) meets Paul Sunday (Paul Dano, who also plays Sunday’s twin Eli) is one of the longest in the film – but the camera only moves a few feet. Yet with each small movement, the dynamic between the characters completely changes, ratcheting up tensio

Loneliness forms the basis of an unlikely friendship between ageing actor Bob (Bill Murray) and young graduate Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Sofia Coppola’s sophomore film.

Coppola balances the poignancy of the pair’s relationship with pure visual comedy from Murray, in scenes like the memorable one where he battles against a Japanese exercise machine. Murray was the director’s only choice for the role, who said “I wasn’t going to make the movie if he wasn’t doing it”.

Acting as both sequel and prequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 epic, The Godfather Part II presents two parallel stories – Vito Corleone’s rise to power and his son Michael’s spiritual fall.

This stunning shot of the Statue of Liberty reflected in a window as young Vito arrives in the US was actually filmed 4000 miles from New York in Rome. Unsure how they would pull it off, cinematographer Gordon Willis told production designer Dean Tavoularis, “Just do a big, black-and-white photo blow-up of it. We’ll put it outside the window and I’ll do something…”