Publish date: 2023-12-12

Naked
(Mike Leigh, 1993)
Disturbing study of misanthropy and misogyny in early 90s Britain. Brimming with bilious intelligence, David Thewlis gives the performance of his career as a mouthy Manc who turns up in London looking for an old girlfriend. His wanderings through the city's underbelly offer a bleak vision of inner-city decay and alienation.

The Naked Gun
(David Zucker, 1988)
The gag-packed style of David Zucker and his writing partner Jim Abrahams first entered moviegoers' consciousness with their classic sketch-film Kentuck Fried Movie. The Naked Gun is a zany cop romp, dependent on the deadpan style of Zucker/Abrahams stalwart Leslie Nielsen, as incompetent lawman Lt Frank Drebin.

The Nanny
(Seth Holt, 1965)
One of Hammer's less blood-soaked productions, The Nanny was perhaps its most psychologically effective, a creepy monochrome thriller casting Bette Davis against type as a family nanny who may or may not have a psychopathic bent. Davis plays the ambiguity to perfection, feeding from the paranoia of both the viewer and her accusing young charge to create an atmospheric and queasy study of trust.

Nanook of the North
(Robert J Flaherty, 1922)
Yes, Robert Flaherty may have cheated: making fly-on-the-wall documentaries about Inuit hunters in the 1920s wasn't easy. Still, even if some scenes are staged, this is a remarkable achievement which shows the harshness and beauty of Nanook's Arctic life. Nanook died of starvation not long after the film was made.

Napoleon
(Abel Gance, 1927)
What can Abel Gance do with the camera next? Put it in a snowball - or make it three in one of his delirious triptych effects? This is history written in black-and-white lightning, a film as much in love with its medium as with its solemn, diminutive hero. Restored in the 80s, with Carl Davis music, it's close to opera.

Nashville
(Robert Altman, 1975)
This knits together the lives of 24 characters as they gather for a music festival and a political assassination. All the Altman trademarks are here: overlapping dialogue, a crazy cast of egomaniacs and broken-winged birds, the cynicism, great music. "We must be doing something right to last 200 years..."� Altman begs to differ.

Near Dark
(Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
The vampire myth is relocated to the American south-west and mixed with the hormonally-exaggerated melodrama native to teenage romance. Full of gory sight gags, this is a movie in which making-out, making curfew and making a good impression with your girlfriend's clique are life-or-death propositions.

Night and the City
(Jules Dassin, 1950)
Dassin, who created a noir classic with his New York-set Naked City, does something similar for London here, to create a truly original thriller. Richard Widmark plays Harry, the whining wrestling promoter stalked by local hoods through an underworld that would do the Big Apple proud: "You're a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man."

A Night at the Opera
(Sam Wood, Edmund Goulding, 1935)
Using gags - some written by Buster Keaton - that they'd extensively road-tested on stage, the Marx Brothers really hit their stride with this revue-style romp. MGM's studio interference resulted in a limp romantic subplot and too many musical numbers, but these just provide a brief respite from the dizzying wordplay and sight gags of the Marxes at full steam.

The Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955)
Robert Mitchum's famous eyes emit a sleepy brand of pure evil as his murderous "Reverend" gets a family in his crosshairs. Laughton's only directorial job is withering toward religion, Puritanism and anyone who might romanticise childhood, but it also has a primal power - like a child's nightmare rewritten as an ancient fable.

Night of the Living Dead
(George A Romero, 1968)
The civil rights movement, McCarthyism, Vietnam: the first zombie film, as we've come to recognise them, bends to any and all of these interpretations thanks to single-minded execution. Skipping the garish satire of the sequels, it corrals the principals (ie the meat) in a Pennsylvania farmhouse: a brilliant distillation of a society under attack from without and within.

Nightmare Alley
(Edmund Goulding, 1947)
A criminally neglected carnival noir, with Tyrone Power playing against type as a phoney mystic set on a ruthless course of self-betterment. He starts off wallowing in fairground squalor, Freaks-style; several dupes later he's spiritualising for the wealthy - though his schtick is destined to come unstuck.

A Nightmare on Elm Street
(Wes Craven, 1984)
With all the wisecracking sequels that followed, it's easy to forget what a strong and effective idea a killer who could get you in your dreams originally was. Most horror-movie villains rely on their victims being dumb enough to wander into a dark cellar on their own; Freddie Krueger just needed them to fall asleep.

Nights Of Cabiria
(Federico Fellini, 1957)
Giuletta Masina used to joke that it was her recipe for tomato sauce that enraptured her husband Fellini. Her brilliance as an actress also clearly lured him. Here, reviving a character seen fleetingly in White Sheik, she excels as a fiery and resourceful prostitute. Life keeps on knocking her down, but she is always able to pick herself up.

Nikita
(Luc Besson, 1990)
The epitome of French 90s cool. Low-rent junkie thief Anne Parillaud is offered two choices after being arrested: life behind bars or glamorous assassin. Luckily for us, she opts for the latter. After a brutal three-year training programme, she's released back into the normal world, a sleeper femme fatale waiting to be activated by handler Jean Reno.

Nil By Mouth
(Gary Oldman, 1997)
It's telling that Oldman, despite the acclaim for his debut, hasn't directed anything else - the autobiographical Nil By Mouth feels like an unrepeatable necessity. An unremitting account of a south London family ruled over by an alcoholic father (Ray Winstone, with his capacity for violence), it's all the more remarkable there are chinks of empathy and forgiveness, too.

Ninotchka
(Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
"Garbo Laughs" was the astonishing poster line heralding the glacial Swedish actress's appearance in a comedy. Lubitsch coaxes a wonderful performance from her as the ultra-earnest Soviet commissar who learns there is more to life than five-year-plans on a trip to the decadent USA.

The Ninth Configuration
(William Peter Blatty, 1980)
According to Blatty, his novel The Exorcist wasn't so much about demonic possession as it was an exploration of theology. In that sense, he's correct in claiming this to be a sequel. Set in a military insane asylum, Blatty delivers an intriguing black comedy. Not only does he carry on themes from The Exorcist, one of the inmates is the astronaut Linda Blair warned would "die up there".

El Norte
(Gregory Nava, 1983)
The perilous journey across the Mexican-American border is the subject of this simple-yet-brilliant treatment of the relationship between the US and its Central American cousins. Two Guatemalan kids make their way north with only Good Housekeeping magazine to inspire them; theirs is the rough end of the American dream.

North By Northwest
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Why is everyone chasing Cary Grant - or trying to get him into bed? Because the fate of the world is at stake; or, if not quite that, the happiness of Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock at his most entertaining, ignoring realism and walking all over George Washington's face.

Nosferatu: a Symphony of Terror
(FW Murnau, 1922)
Murnau's prototype vampire movie is a rich, strange and alluring creature. Scuttling between the expressionist sets comes Max Schreck's feral, pointy-eared bloodsucker. His arrival paved the way for a procession of refined, dapper counts - yet none were quite as scary as this.

Notorious
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
One of Hitchcock's nastiest and most effective thrillers sees cynical CIA agent Cary Grant essentially prostituting the woman he's falling for (Ingrid Bergman, luminous) so as to net creepy, mother-fixated neo-Nazi Claude Rains in postwar Brazil. Perhaps his most sexually anguished, emotionally punishing film until Vertigo.

Now, Voyager
(Irving Rapper, 1942)
No actress fought harder to get the parts she said she deserved - and one was Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager, as played by Bette Davis. She's a shy, retiring woman who becomes a mature success. She has Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, and then: "Don't let's ask for the moon, we have the stars."

Nowhere in Africa
(Caroline Link, 2001)
Unforgettably powerful study of a Jewish family that moves to Africa ahead of the Nazi persecution in the 1930s. Poverty in Kenya flays them of their old certainties - only their young daughter can find a way to grapple with their new life.Lushly shot with opulent, haut-bourgeois interiors giving way to the endless skies, and stirring performances from the leads.

· This article was amended on Tuesday July 10 2007. The actress who starred in Nights of Cabiria was Giulietta Masina. The character she played in that film appeared briefly in White Sheik, not La Dolce Vita. These errors have been corrected.

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