A thriller can be hard to define, but you know one when you see one – or rather, when you feel one. In your palms. Under your armpits. In your teeth as you grind down the enamel and your leg that won’t stop involuntarily shaking. Next to horror, it’s the most physical of all film genres, one that, when done right, prompts a visceral response unlike any other.

1. North by Northwest (1959)

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• Thrillers

If there’s a thriller out there more exhilarating, sexier or packed with iconic moments than this one, we’ve yet to see it. The greatest joy in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy caper is how effortless it all feels: a gliding magic-carpet ride from New York to Mount Rushmore, via Chicago and a Midwestern bus stop, as Cary Grant’s ad man suffers a potentially fatal outbreak of Wrong Man-itis. Of course, making a movie this effortless is hard work. It’s all a tribute to Hitch and his ensemble of behind-the-camera talents, including screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Saul Bass (designer of the iconic title sequence) and Bernard Herrmann, whose score lends menace and levity in equal measure. And the cast? Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau and Jessie Royce Landis – heroes, villains and worried mothers, they’re all having a ball. But it’s Grant’s movie: a Hollywood A-lister happy to be the punchline when the scene calls for it.

The killer moment: It has to be the crop-duster sequence, which begins like a Western standoff and ends with the suavest man in cinema face down in the dirt.

2. M (1931)

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Several real-life child murderers, cannibals and serial killers – their nicknames are grisly enough: the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Düsseldorf – terrorised Germany in the 1920s. Berlin’s most moneyed and celebrated director, Fritz Lang, was drawn to the subject, which would become the spine of his first sound film, in many ways the commercial birth of the modern psychothriller. M is cinema’s darkest landmark: a portrait of awful appetites that was revolutionary for also being an oblique mirror on society at large. (Filmed under the working title Murderer Among Us, Nazi party members refused Lang studio space.) The movie is immortal for Peter Lorre’s career-defining performance as Hans Beckert, trapped by sweaty urges and a dragnet of cops and mobsters. Lang also turned Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ – whistled by Beckert, but not Lorre, who couldn’t whistle – into an instant signature of aural menace.

The killer moment: In front of a wanted poster, a dark silhouette appears. Leaning down, Beckert lures a child into conversation: ‘What a pretty ball you have there.’

3. Chinatown (1974)

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The absolute zenith of New Hollywood’s 1970s-era adventurousness (it was all downhill from here), Roman Polanski’s majestic conspiracy thriller is the ultimate L.A. movie, locating seediness under the sun – even in the water. Robert Towne’s well-researched screenplay about land grabs, murder and one ‘nosy fellow’ remains the gold standard for aspiring writers hoping to grab a whiff of sociocultural currency; watching Chinatown is, for some Angelenos, like learning that you live in a stolen paradise, or hell itself. But for all the movie’s substance, it took a rascally Jack Nicholson, an absorbingly skittish Faye Dunaway, a fearsome John Huston and Polanski himself (working at the peak of his powers) to sock it over on audiences. The movie shimmers like a ’30s period romance but its veins pump black bile: a toxic masterpiece.

The killer moment: A withering Noah Cross makes his sole priority clear to our hero: ‘The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!’

4. The Third Man (1949)

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Set in a post-World War II Vienna filled with canted angles and stark shadows, The Third Man is expressionist perfection. Orson Welles’ performance as Harry Lime – thought to be dead by his childhood friend, Holly (Joseph Cotten), a down-and-out novelist, only to make a dramatic return – is one of cinema’s best. Welles swaggers through the film with cool self-assurance and delivers many an iconic line in his famous baritone. Faking one’s death is, of course, a risky proposition, and it’s challenging to present it believably. Director Carol Reed invests us totally in Lime’s fate, thrilling us with every plot twist. After watching this utterly engaging film, you’ll never look at tunnels or Ferris wheels (or hear zither music) the same way again.

The killer moment: After riding the wheel, Welles makes his famous quip (ad-libbed on the day), comparing violent Italy under the Borgias with peace-loving Switzerland. ‘And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

5. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

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Nothing about Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough was exactly new: the suits were pure Rat Pack, the dialogue was Scorsese intensified and even the plot was lifted from a Hong Kong crime flick called City on Fire. But like household ingredients blended to make a bomb, the result was incendiary. Reservoir Dogs changed cinema, and we’re still dealing with the aftershocks (see the smooth criminals of Baby Driver or the entire career of Three Billboards director Martin McDonagh for evidence). But even if none of that were true, it’s still such a joyful film to experience and re-experience: every line crackles like electricity, every performance is punchy perfection and every shot feels like a bracing bucket of water in the face. Tarantino hasn’t come close to it since – but neither has anyone else.

The killer moment: Too many to mention, but the off-camera ear-slicing scene set to the peppy ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ will go down in history.