When Esse (Nicolas Duvauchelle, in his debut feature role) a young apprentice baker, loses his job, he is drawn in to a dark underworld of gangs and petty crime. Zonca delivers a raw and gripping portrait of life on the margins of society, as a boy on the verge of adulthood is pulled in by the t...

Late one night, Stephen (Bogarde) hears a car accident outside of his house. Rushing to help, he discovers that the occupants of the car are a student of his, William, and William's fiancé Anna. The accident seems to spark something in Stephen, leading him to analyse the events of the days preced...

Isabelle is a former nun living in New York, earning a living writing erotic fiction while awaiting her higher calling. She meets Thomas, an amnesiac unaware of his past as a ruthless pornographer, once responsible for turning his young wife, Sofia, into the world's most notorious adult star. As ...

An extremely fresh-faced Jude Law makes his film debut in this unusual short as a man who loses his job, his home and his fiancée, all in the space of one day.

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 to br...

The influence of Fritz Lang is unmistakeable on Powell’s earliest extant film – a thriller crafted with real visual style, despite its limited budget. The twisty plot concerns businessman F.X. Benedik (Rome), who has been receiving threats from a mysterious stranger. When Benedik is murdered, the...

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...

Drawing inspiration from a chilling real-life double murder, the film follows Jean, a newspaper photographer tasked with covering the century-old case. Accompanied by her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, they set sail to a remote East Coast island where both the investigation and their marriage fa...

Caught Looking sees a lonely gay man attempt to explore his sexual fantasies with the help of an interactive computer game, guiding his virtual reality persona through a series of potential encounters (a naval rough trade, a moustachioed ‘clone’, a retro ’50s muscle men) while offering wry commen...

Reformed junkie James looks back on a troubled past which took him from childhood mischief to adult criminality. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) takes us on a bold journey into an ex-addict's inner world, blurring the boundaries between his reality, dreams and memories....

Following his release from prison, Danny tries to take control of the mental health issues that have shaped his life. However, an encounter with a former flame evolves into tragic obsession. Treading Water looks with compassion and bracing realism at the lack of opportunity afforded to many peopl...

A gripping apocalyptic thriller from the Boulting Brothers, the relevance of which remains undiminished today. Praised upon its release as 'the most intelligent film so far to touch upon one of the problems confronting an atomic age', it used some 70 locations around London and remains a vivid sn...

With his reign coming to an end, a dying Henry VIII looks back on his life and the six marriages that would go on to define him. The film looks back with the King, following his life from his marriage to a Spanish princess to the foundation of Protestantism, to the beheadings and divorces that wo...

Much criticised at the time of its release, Michael Powell’s psychological study of a shy camera technician who films for his home movies the death throes of the women he kills is now widely regarded as a dark classic. Less a straightforward serial-killer thriller than a Freudian meditation on ...

Ridley Scott’s first film – featuring his younger brother, the late Tony Scott, as a schoolboy playing truant for the day to meander around Hartlepool on his bicycle – is a far cry from the director’s Hollywood blockbusters, a lyrical and highly personal evocation of the early sixties North East.

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.

Written for Channel 4 by radical literary theorist Terry Eagleton but heavily reworked by Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein is a bold, offbeat biography, personalised in Jarman’s unique style to address the politics and sexuality of the great, troubled philosopher.

In Godard's dystopian sci-fi, detective Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) travels to the soulless technopolis of Alphaville on a secret mission to capture the dictatorial Professor Von Braun and destroy the Alpha 60 computer that has outlawed human emotions. Love comes to his aid in the form of ...

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...

Carol Reed followed the success of Odd Man Out (1947) with this adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story, The Basement Room. Young Felipe (a revelatory Bobby Henrey) is a son of a diplomat who is never around, who instead forms a friendship with his butler Baines (Ralph Richardson). Baines imp...

A soldier, out on reconnaissance in the American Civil War, finds himself trapped - buried alive and alone under the rubble of a fallen wall - deep in enemy territory. Unable to move, he is overcome by a mad terror as he hallucinates and awaits his almost certain death. This potent short, based o...

Anna is a popular Italian film actress and aspiring filmmaker, writing her first screenplay, the semi-autobiographical project Scarlet Diva. Hurtling across Europe and America in a blur of hedonism and despair, she seeks artistic recognition while struggling against exploitation. A whirlwind desc...

When teenager Camille comes across Joëlle, a young woman who has just been dumped by her boyfriend, the two soon form a fast friendship. Guiding her new friend through the darker side of sex, Joëlle is also grappling with the unscrupulous Doctor Worms, who is using her as a sexual pawn in a cr...

‘They asked me the wrong question’ says murder suspect Susannah after being interrogated by the police. She was found in the apartment of a known criminal but this turns out to be the least of her problems as her past begins to catch up with her. Brooding acting and stunning location shooting mak...