The second Hollywood film by Britain's enfant terrible, Ken Russell, is a deliriously demented erotic thriller with Kathleeen Turner as the ballsy hooker playing dangerous games with two unstable clients. One is a guilt-tormented private detective (John Laughlin) while the other is a deeply distu...

Close your eyes and tell me what you see.' begins the new feature from Lukas Moodysson, who opened our eyes to the disturbing face of the new Europe in Lilya 4-ever. Pushing the boundaries still further, A Hole in My Heart is transgressive, sometimes opaque and deliberately fragmented, sometimes ...

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 ...

It is 1892, and Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) is enjoying the company of his lover, Bosey, and other young men in a brothel. While he does so, workers put on an elaborate production of Wilde's banned play, Salome. In the play, King Herod begs his stepdaughter to dance for him, however, her mother ...

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...

Blind Beast is a grotesque portrait of the bizarre relationship between a blind sculptor and his captive muse, adapted from a short story from Japan's foremost master of the macabre, Edogawa Rampo (Horrors of Malformed Men). An artist's model, Aki (Mako Midori), is abducted by Michio (Eiji Funako...

George Dumurrier (Sorel), a doctor based in San Francisco, is accused of murdering his wife (Marisa Mell) to solve his extramarital and financial affairs. When he and his lover run into her doppelgänger Monica at a high-class strip club, he is both shocked and beguiled, but desperate to uncover t...

Joe Orton’s delicious tale of suburban perversity, in which a lascivious landlady and her gay brother attempt to seduce the titular tenant, who happens to be a psychopath, was first staged in 1964 and adapted for the BBC in 1968. Two years later Douglas Hickox directed this feature film version, ...

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. The ceremonial gowns and make-up ...

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...

Set in Victorian England, The Nightcomers follows two orphans - Flora and Miles - as they are left by their tutor in a mansion, under the care of the elderly housekeeper Mrs Grose, the governess Miss Jessel, and the groundskeeper Peter Quint. When Grose attempts to have the master of the house fi...

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.

After receiving an anonymous tip, a policeman ( Edward Woodward ) travels to the Scottish island of Summerisle to search for a missing girl. When he arrives, the Islanders, most of whom seem to be practising pagans, claim to have never seen or heard of the young girl. The mystery leads to our pro...

Peter Sellers gives a rare - and remarkable - dramatic performance as Benjamin Hoffman, a lonely middle-aged businessman who blackmails a beautiful young secretary (Sinead Cusack) into spending a week with him. But what begins as a seemingly sinister ordeal will slowly reveal itself to be an unco...

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...

Transience and desire, and the silence and concealment surrounding sexuality, love, death, AIDS, and the fear of bereavement, are all touched upon among a rush of abstract and allegorical connections in this artist film from 1990 by Anna Thew.