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...

The directorial debut of illustrator and producer Stewart Mackinnon, Justine is a near-lost example of British avant-garde cinema of the 1970s. Produced by the BFI Production Board in 1976, it has been out of circulation for the entire 40 years since.

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 Hollywood version of Lady Windermere’s Fan is often misquoted as the first screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s enduringly popular 1892 play. In fact, the British got there first, with this early silent feature made nearly a decade before Lubitsch’s film. While the lac...

Akira Kurosawa’s visually spectacular epic transplants Shakespeare’s King Lear from Celtic Britain to feudal Japan. In its epic scope and expert execution, Ran can be seen as a culmination of the great Japanese director’s filmmaking career; a late triumph which he planned and refined over several...

In the 17th-century medieval court of Cosimo de Medici III, a group of players perform a production outlining an apparent virgin birth in the French town of Mâcon and the people who exploit this ‘miracle’ for their own gain. What follows is a damning indictment of corruption in all strata of...

A Nazi Strike Force plots to kidnap Winston Churchill while he is resting in a desolate Norfolk village. Colonel Radl (Duvall), Colonel Stenier (Caine) and Liam Devlin (Sutherland) are enlisted to carry out the operation, which if successful, would irrevocably alter the outcome of the war. Disgui...

This early masterpiece from legendary German director Werner Herzog stars Klaus Kinski as a power-crazed explorer in sixteenth-century South America who leads a band of conquistadors through the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

Unlike the horrifically antisemitic 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Lothar Mendes’ adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s book offers a fairly sympathetic depiction of a Jewish man (Conrad Veidt) who seeks political power in order to improve the plight of Germany’s Jewry. Despite some unpleasant ster...

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...

Patrick Troughton (riffing wonderfully on his prior incarnation as Doctor Who) plays a time-hopping inventor who’s disturbed by a couple of curious kids. He decides to send them back through the ages for themselves, but when his machinery begins to malfunction his charges wonder if they’ll ev...

George Hoellering's powerful adaptation of TS Eliot's classic verse drama is a stark and highly atypical example of British historical cinema. Little-seen despite winning a top prize at the Venice Film Festival, the film recounts - entirely in verse - the clash between King Henry II and Archbisho...

Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) promises his guests a night of horror only a mad poet can deliver and after partaking in hallucinogens, the guests tell ghost stories while exploring the dark corridors of his home - and of their minds. If any director is suited to retelling the wild night that conjured...

The plight of women in the 1840s London rag trade is explored and deconstructed. Informed by experimental film practice and evoking a serialised Victorian novel, this unusual film investigates the effects of protectionist ‘philanthropy' in the sweatshop-style London clothes trade using contempor...

In Wales during World War Two, a German airman crash-lands in a wood and is found by 12-year-old Elenya. She decides to keep him a secret and does so for as long as she can until finally the village learns the truth, with tragic consequences.

D'Artagnan (Michael York), a young swordsman, arrives in Paris with one dream: becoming a Musketeer. He meets and quarrels with Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), three Musketeers, who invite him to join them in fighting the evil Cardinal Richelieu (Cha...

Chris Newby’s poetic debut feature addresses the gulf between patriarchal power and female ritual and rebellion against the backdrop of a remote Medieval village.

Christmas 1183. An elderly King Henry the Second (Peter O'Toole) is torn over naming his successor. He wants the young Prince John (Nigel Terry), one of his three sons, to take over, however, his wife Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) wants another of his sons, Prince Richard the Lio...

Set in Ireland in 1920, Ascendancy is a powerful meditation on English guilt over the tormented history of Northern Ireland. Connie (Julie Covington) is an English aristocrat driven to despair over the horrors of war, including both the residual effects of the Great War and a new wave of violence...