So, you’ve scoured The Times Top 100 Films of All Time and have realised, with rising panic, that you’ve seen only five of them. You think Festen is a nasty infection of the toenail and that Deliverance is a posh pizza company. You like Duck Soup, but only in a Chinese restaurant. You’re a cinema dunce! But don’t worry, brushing up on our movie canon needn’t be hard work—after all, the films listed are pretty much guaranteed to have at least some artistic merit, and how often can you say that in the cinema these days?

Rather than plunge straight into the gruelling stuff (Deliverance, Hidden) or the nine-hour epic (Shoah) let’s start gently. A screwball comedy should whet your appetite for cinematic self-improvement, and they don’t get much better than Preston Sturges’s playful tale of a con-woman and the man she falls for, The Lady Eve, or the rapid-fire wisecracking of Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday.

Having wallowed in the 1940s, let’s fast forward to the 1970s, another golden era for American cinema. Take your pick of Chinatown, Days of Heaven or Dog Day Afternoon, then as a reward for all the incest/scenic longueurs/Al Pacino shouting, treat yourself to the loveliness that is Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, a salve to any troubled soul, except perhaps those that don’t like the song California Dreamin’.

All that unrequited love is all very well, but now perhaps it’s time to get take a tour of sex, cinema-style. Just take a glance at Cabaret, a Weimar fantasy of bedhopping in Berlin with lashings of divine decadence. For sexual proclivities of a decidedly bizarre nature, catch Dennis Hopper’s unsettling turn as sadomasochistic sociopath Frank in Blue Velvet.

Finally, you’re ready for the scary stuff. The Shining or Rosemary’s Baby should have you cowering behind the sofa; if they fail try The Exorcist.

Nerves frayed? Fingernails chewed? Sit down and treat yourself to The Sound of Music. You’ve earned it.