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 g...

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 ...

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 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, Nighthawks ...

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

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...

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, unti...

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 ...

Made thirteen years after Britain’s first major gay film Nighthawks, Strip Jack Naked puts the earlier film into an 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 responsib...

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...