The Angelic Conversation sees Derek Jarman conjure an evocative and radical visualisation of Shakespeare’s love poems.

Derek Jarman struggled for seven years to bring his portrait of the 17th century Italian artist Michelangelo da Caravaggio to the screen. The result was well worth the wait. It’s a freely dramatised portrait which conjures several of the controversial artist’s most famous paintings through elabor...

Based on Ronald Blythe’s much-loved oral history book, Akenfield traces three generations of one Suffolk family and their lives in the farming industry, with director Peter Hall – known for his theatre direction - using to great effect a cast non-professional actors drawn from the communities of ...

Shackleton's death over 100 years ago in 1922 is seen to have marked the end of the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration. A record of one of the greatest survival stories in the history of exploration, South is the original film – exquisitely photographed by Frank Hurley – of Shackleton’s 1914-1...

Hailed as Britain's first black feature film, Pressure is a hard-hitting, honest document of the plight of disenchanted British-born black youths. Set in 1970s London, it tells the story of Tony, a bright school-leaver, son of West Indian immigrants, who finds himself torn between his parents' ch...

The ravishing, romantic story behind the Taj Mahal, has been newly restored with a sumptuous new score from Anoushka Shankar.

Shiraz is based on the true story of the 17th-century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, his queen and the building of the world’s most beautiful monument to love, the Taj Mahal.

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"We expect no mercy from Everest," said George Mallory as he began his final ascent on the treacherous mountain - and he got none. Captain John Noel's moving and visually ravishing account puts the human struggle at its heart, while bringing home his own rapture at the 'lost world' of Tibet. Simo...

The anguished finale of the Terence Davies Trilogy opens with the death of Robert Tucker’s beloved mother, jumping forward in time to show an elderly Robert bedridden in hospital (an astonishing appearance by Steptoe and Son’s Wilfrid Brambell). Fragments of his past - a school nativity play, mal...

Working with cinematographer David Peat directors Murray Grigor and Patrick Higson capture Billy Connolly at his brilliant best, as the comedian employs his trademark humour and no small amount of roguish charm to navigate the political tensions of 1970s Dublin and Belfast.

The British New Wave came a decade earlier than advertised with Robert Hamer's downbeat postwar thriller. In a dank East End of ration-book misery, dosshouses and black marketeering, a world-weary housewife is shaken by the sudden reappearance of an old lover, now an escaped convict on the run. R...

For decades, Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide have been waiting for the restoration of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. Produced between 1921 and 1923, the collection is the last significant work in the Sherlock silent film canon to be restored. The hugely popular series, which ran for 45 ...

Powell’s amiable ‘Quickie’ comedy stars music hall veteran Jerry Verno as a lowly clerk who inherits a hotel, but gets more than he bargained for when various guests turn out to be crooks. (Watch out for the cameo from Powell himself). The production’s limitations are undeniable, but Powe...

Set in a world before Elvis, a Liverpool before the Beatles, Terence Davies' debut feature is a remarkable evocation of working-class family life in the 40s and 50s and a visionary exploration of memory. In a powerful succession of searing vignettes, Davies paints an autobiographical picture of a...

Gritty rather than glam, this incendiary, cult classic both confounded and delighted audiences upon its release in 1975, at the height of the legendary glam-rock band’s success. Charting the rise of fictional rock group Flame, with Slade themselves playing the band, it offers a witty, sublimely...

In the middle of World War II Cavalcanti provocatively imagined a postwar England in which the failure of the threatened German invasion could be safely seen in flashback, thanks to the resourceful villagers of Bramley End. Once the ostensibly British troops in their village are revealed as Nazis...

For this remarkable experimental film, provocative avant-garde artist Stephen Dwoskin gathered a group of strangers and filmed them exploring their sexual fantasies over a period of five days; the camera lingering on looks, movements, costumes and improvisations. A subversive investigation of soc...

Sally Potter's avant-garde debut is a key film of early '80s feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, and featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental narrative structure.

The Great White Silence is one of the jewels in the crown of the BFI National Archive fully justifying this stunning tinted and toned restoration with new score by electronic musician Simon Fisher Turner.

This dramatic reconstruction of two decisive naval battles from the First World War is one of the finest films of the British silent era. Walter Summers’ film was originally released on Armistice Day 1927 to act as a memorial to the thousands who died in the Battle of Coronel, triumph for German ...

Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it. Written by and starring Michael Palin, Terry Jone...

Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it.

Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it. Written by and starring Michael Palin, Terry Jone...

Innovative and influential, and originally envisaged as children’s show, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a madcap early-evening comedy sketch show that quickly acquired a cult following with Swinging Sixties adults, who rushed home from work to see it. Written by and starring Michael Palin, Terry Jone...

In this London-set drama, the Baptiste family are caught in intergenerational debates about identity, belonging and life in Britain. Shifting between real and mystic landscapes, co-directors Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien create a visual mosaic that explores the complexity of the Black Britis...