Five milestone scenes from a couple’s life – from that giddy first meeting through to marriage, birth, infidelity and annulment – are painfully played out in reverse chronological order in François Ozon’s keen examination of the theatrical nature of relationships. With the benefit of hindsight, t...

Fassbinder wrote the script for his first full-length play when he was 19, the same age as Franz (Malik Zidi) when he is picked up by the worldly Léopold (Bernard Giraudeau), and seduced into a relationship that soon sours. As Franz’s naïve fiancée Anna and Léo’s former lover Véra turn up at thei...

Based on Moravia’s novel, Jean-Luc Godard’s sardonic look at the world of filmmaking boasts superb performances by Michel Piccoli as a compromised writer, Brigitte Bardot as his bored wife, Jack Palance as a manipulative producer and Fritz Lang as himself, about to film Homer’s Odyssey in Cinecit...

Claude Chabrol's elegant adaptation of Flaubert's classic, with Isabelle Huppert in superb form as his tragic heroine, Emma.

Isabelle Huppert stars as the wife of a concert pianist who discovers some unusual secrets about her husband's past, in Claude Chabrol's deliciously icy mystery.

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...

Eager to reconnect with his teenage daughter, André (Depardieu) takes her on holiday to the tropics. But when a local boy catches her eye, Véronique attempts to pass off her father as her lover in a misguided effort to impress. André gamely cooperates in the charade, but the lies – and gossip – s...

Luis Buñuel's Oscar-winning black comedy follows a group of wealthy friends who, for increasingly absurd and fanciful reasons, cannot manage to have a meal.

Jeunet and Caro's endlessly inventive and wildly enjoyable post-apocalyptic black comedy, about a sinister butcher and the circus clown who becomes his nemesis.

When British diplomat Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) suspects his wife (Charlotte Rampling, playing it totally straight) of infidelity, he is stunned to discover that the ‘other man’ is a chimpanzee. On a whim, he invites his hairy rival to move into the luxurious family home – more out of curiosi...

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...

When naïve teenager Camille (Charlotte Gainsbourg in one of her earliest roles) comes across Joëlle (Anouk Grinberg), a young woman who has just been unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, the two soon form a fast friendship. Guiding her new friend through the darker side of sex and men, Joëlle...

The most beautiful lives are those we invent”, announces the main character, as he reflects on his life as an imposter, masquerading as a hero of the French Resistance. While there were many people who belatedly reimagined a courageous backstory under Nazi occupation, Albert Dehousse (played by L...

When the father of a stereotypical middle-class French family brings home a pet rat, he triggers a surge of orgies, incest and murder within his prim and polished suburban home. François Ozon (Swimming Pool) displays hints of Luis Buñuel and John Waters in his anarchic takedown of the middle-clas...

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 ...

Thomas is obsessed with the idea he was swapped at birth with his neighbour Alfred during a hospital fire. Believing the wealthy and privileged Alfred has lived the life he should have had Thomas is heart broken by the loss of his sister and plots his revenge, imagining himself to be the secret a...

Throughout the 1980s, Shohei Imamura (The Pornographers, Profound Desires of the Gods), a leading figure of the Japanese New Wave era of the 1960s, cemented his international reputation as one of the most important directors of his generation with a series of films that all competed at Cannes to ...

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...

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...