Gael Garcí­a Bernal stars in the savagely brilliant debut feature from double-Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Inárritu (Birdman, The Revenant). Intertwining three intense storylines on the theme of animalistic desires, it follows the respective fates of a young man caught up in the worl...

Alejandro Amenabar weaves together a complex sci-fi romance with this audacious drama. Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) is a handsome and successful man, but feels completely different once he meets Sofia (Penelope Cruz), who captivates him with her beauty and sensibility. However, just at the beginning o...

Lilya is 16, and lives in a dismal suburb in a nameless town somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Abandoned by her mother, and bullied by a wicked aunt, her only comfort comes from Volodya, a good-hearted younger boy who she befriends. Hope arrives when Lilya meets and falls in love with Andrei,...

As a child in Kyoto in the 1970s, Nagiko's (Wu) calligrapher father used her body to write a birthday message in paint. Now grown up and living in Hong Kong, she seeks a lover who will use her whole body as a blank canvas. English translator Jerome (Ewan McGregor) reverses roles and becomes the s...

Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa) and Shigehiko (Yuji Kotari) are a strange couple, whose physical mismatch (she a lithe beauty, he an overweight, balding, obsessive-compulsive neurotic) is reflected in the complete lack of intimacy between them. They connect as human beings, but they live more like friends...

Blind Beast is a masterpiece of erotic horror that explores the all-encompassing and overwhelming relationship between the artist and his art and the obsessive closed world that the artist inhabits, with maestro director Yasuzo Masumura (Giants and Toys, Irezumi) conjuring up a hallucinogenic dre...

Unable to attend his daughter’s violin recital, suburban father Ian (Edward Woodward, The Wicker Man) is haunted by a series of prophetic nightmares that seem to foresee a looming tragedy. Are dark forces gathering to be unleashed upon him?

Legendary Toei director Ishii’s politically incorrect moral lessons paint a trio of tales of tragic heroines caught up in violence, sadomasochism, incest and torture. Told in anthology style by an impassive physician (Teruo Yoshida), the first story follows Oito (Masumi Tachibana), an innocent yo...

Berlin-born Hans Richter – Dadaist, painter, film theorist and filmmaker – was for four decades one of the most influential members of the cinematic avant-garde. Richter assembled some of the century’s liveliest artists as co-creators of Dreams That Money Can Buy, his most ambitious attempt...

Friendship (Tilda Swinton) has been sent to Earth on a peace mission. Heading for MIT, she inadvertently lands in Amman, Jordan during the 1970 ‘Black September’ war and is ushered to safety by journalist Sullivan (Bill Paterson). Holed up in a hotel as the conflict rages outside, the pair enter ...

Musician Davy Spillane stars as a reluctantly-married young traveller in this Irish road movie written by Neil Jordan. Michael and his wife Angela are tasked with smuggling goods back over the border from Strabane, but their road trip seems doomed at every turn - weighed down by history and pover...

Made thirteen years after Britain’s first major gay film Nighthawks, Strip Jack Naked puts the earlier film into a historical and personal context, with director Ron Peck drawing on his own journey from closeted suburban teen to politically radicalised filmmaker. A lucid account of the responsi...

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s. The second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen, both of whom are recognised as seminal figures ...

The idyllic, rural past of a Suffolk village comes to life through the memories of an old man who tends a country graveyard, in this extraordinary, film directed by David Gladwell. Although best known for his celebrated work as editor on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. and O Lucky Man!, Gladwell has,...

A private detective (Fairport Convention musician Dave Swarbrick) investigates the case of a young woman held captive by her drug-addict mother. This is just one of many witty, imaginative reframings of the Brothers Grimm fairytale in this beguiling feminist film. The wildly diverse episodes show...

Chris Petit's cult classic is one of the most striking feature debuts in British cinema – a haunting blend of edgy mystery story and existential road movie, crammed with eerie evocations of English landscape and weather.

Tilda Swinton stars in a playful and ingenious cine-essay from art critic John Berger (Ways of Seeing) and author/filmmaker Timothy Neat.

The first major British gay film, this study of a closeted schoolteacher who spends his nights cruising London’s gay clubs in search of Mr Right defies categorisation. Both a fascinating glimpse into the 1970s scene and a portrait of an ordinary gay man living in a homophobic society, Nighthawk...

Daniel Craig plays George Dyer, petty crook turned artist's muse, in this unconventional biopic of painter Francis Bacon (an uncanny portrayal by Derek Jacobi). The 1960s Soho demi-monde, centred on the infamous Colony Room, is artfully realised by director John Maybury, both seedy and seductive ...

The Moon Over the Alley reunited Duffer writer/directors Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq, with this strange London-set musical, again scored by Galt MacDermont (Hair). The film explores the problems facing the multicultural residents in a Notting Hill boarding house of the early 1970s, desti...

The debut feature by future Hollywood star director Tony Scott is a dark, surreal piece about a couple who accidentally kill a young man while out driving their car. Taking him home, the woman treats the boy as if he were her own - and as if he were still alive. She finds happiness by talking to ...

When a young poet (Michael Gothard, the brilliant character actor who excelled in films such as The Devils and The Valley Obscured by Clouds) hires a marketing company to turn his suicide into a mass-media spectacle, he finds that his subversive intentions are quickly diluted into a reactionary ...

The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early '80s feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental na...

For this remarkable experimental film, the provocative avant-garde legend Stephen Dwoskin gathered together a group of strangers and filmed them as they explored their fantasies over a period of five days: a project that now sounds a little like TV's Big Brother.