La Cérémonie: No 16 best crime film of all time

France's master of suspense, Claude Chabrol, relishes every malevolent, icily controlled shot of this perfectly constructed thriller, right up to its terrifying, violent climax. He lifted the story from Ruth Rendell's classic thriller, A Judgement in Stone, translating it to a remote French village. Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is the new live-in housekeeper of a wealthy family: efficient but maddeningly unresponsive (you suspect they'd like a little more gratitude for their shows of kindness). What the audience knows, but the family does not, is that Sophie can't read – a source of daily humiliations. She loosens up when she makes friends with the village eccentric, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) – a chippy postmistress with a grudge against the family. Both actresses are thrilling: Bonnaire as severe as a scrubbed-clean saint and Huppert who keeps you guessing whether Jeanne is a harmless kook or seriously unhinged. But this is a psychological thriller, not class war, with a creepy, fierce friendship at its heart. Is Sophie falling under the spell of the charismatic Jeanne? Or is something frightening afoot? Chabrol's genius is that the pair's strangeness falls entirely within the realms of acceptable – if odd – behaviour, while inching towards an unholy finish.