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World Cinema Classics

Discover classics from world cinema that made their mark in Britain and beyond.

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  • Downfall

    Oliver Hirschbiegel's acclaimed drama charts the final, bunker-bound days of Adolf Hitler, as Berlin and the Third Reich crumbles around him. While the film courted some controversy upon release, facing charges of humanising a monster, the film was nevetheless a huge box office success and still ...

  • Tony Takitani

    Director Jun Ichikawa brings us his award-winning film adapted from Haruki Murakami’s New Yorker tale of solitude and obsession. When illustrator Tony Takitani meets a client, Eiko, he becomes fascinated with her and imagines a life beyond his loneliness. She, in turn, is infatuated with shopping...

  • Carlos

    Adapted from a five-and-a-half-hour television miniseries, this three-hour biopic from acclaimed director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Personal Shopper) chronicles 20 years in the life of Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez aka Carlos the Jackal. Édgar Ramírez (The Bourne Ultimatum) star...

  • The Blue Caftan

    Mina (Lubna Azabal) and her husband Halim (Saleh Bakri) run a small shop selling traditional, hand-stitched caftans in Salé, Morocco. To help with customer demand, the couple hire young apprentice Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) – but complications arise when Mina notices a deeper connection forming bet...

  • Amores perros

    Gael Garcí­a Bernal stars in the savagely brilliant debut feature from double-Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Inárritu (Birdman, The Revenant). Intertwining three intense storylines on the theme of animalistic desires, it follows the respective fates of a young man caught up in the worl...

  • Peter von Kant

    Early in his career, Ozon paid homage to German great Rainer Werner Fassbinder by adapting his play Water Drops on Burning Rocks. 22 years on, Ozon revisits Fassbinder in this elegant, inventive remake of his 1972 chamber classic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant – with designer Petra here becom...

  • The Untamed

    Part potent social drama, part tentacular science-fiction enigma, Amat Escalante’s idiosyncratic film is as difficult to categorise as it is to describe. The film opens in the opaque Mexican lowlands. Veronica is a dispossessed young woman with a curious addiction. When an injury leads her to the...

  • Elite Squad

    Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion) officer, is tasked with clearing the drug gangs in the slums of Rio de Janeiro before a visit from the Pope. Meanwhile, desperate to take on a safer job so that he can be closer to his pregnant wife, he trains up two y...

  • Battle Royale

    In a world where teenagers have no respect and adults are losing control there can be only one solution: Battle Royale! Now, see what happens when you let a high school class loose on an island, arm them and then give them a simple choice... Kill your friends or have them kill you; with poison, c...

  • Le Mépris

    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...

  • Fitzcarraldo

    One of Werner Herzog's most acclaimed and audacious films, Fitzcarraldo tells the incredible story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (played by Herzog regular Klaus Kinski), an opera-loving fortune hunter who dreams of bringing opera (specifically Caruso) to a remote trading post on the heart of the Pe...

  • Baise-moi

    This film is a blunt, brash and blood-smeared revenge tale of two sex workers who decide to go on a killing spree through France. Co-directed by French feminist provocateur Despentes, and based on her book, Baise-moi does not care for cinematic slickness, instead using handheld visuals and raw la...

  • My Sole Desire

    This erotic drama stars Louise Chevillotte as Manon, the newcomer to a Parisian strip club where Mia (Zita Hanrot) also works. The two become friends then something more, as director and co-writer Lucie Borleteau (Fidelio - Alice's Story) explores female kinship and desire. Her drama goes more th...

  • Playground

    The original title, meaning 'a world', suggests that a school is a self-enclosed universe with its own customs and abuses - and a microcosm of the injustices outside. Nora (mesmerising newcomer Maya Vanderbeque) arrives in a new school, nervous about leaving her dad and yearning for the protectio...

  • A Call Girl

    Having grown up in small-town Slovenia, 23-year-old English student Alexandra moves to the capital, embracing all the excitement and anonymity the big city has to offer. She styles herself into a mid-level call girl, selling her soul in exchange for a view from above. But as her new life inside h...

  • The Lover

    Indochina, in the late 1920s. On a ferry across the Mekong, a French teenage girl meets the Chinese Man. She is fascinated by his riches and elegance, and accepts a lift in his limousine to complete their journey. Together, they enter a whirlwind of reckless, all-consuming passion, born from desi...

  • JSA: Joint Security Area

    Before Oldboy and The Handmaiden, visionary filmmaker Park Chan-wook helmed this gripping tale of deceit, misunderstanding and the senselessness of war. Gunfire breaks out in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, leaving two North Korean soldiers dead while a wounded South Korean ...

  • The Chorus

    Unsuccessful in his music career, Clément Mathieu takes up a teaching job at a rehabilitation institution for minor boys, where a ruthless headmaster reigns. Witnessing his students’ defiance deriving from their distrust of adults, Mathieu forms a choir to inspire and connect with them through mu...

  • Éternité

    When Valentine (Audrey Tautou), a young woman from a wealthy family, marries Jules (Arnaud Valois), the 19th century is ending. As the years pass, she experiences both the joys of motherhood and the heartbreak of losing loved ones. Her daughter Mathilde (Melanie Laurent) and later her granddaught...

  • Ran

    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...

  • Vigil

    A young girl living on an isolated New Zealand farm sets about protecting her family and their homestead after the arrival of a mysterious stranger.

  • Orgies of Edo

    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...

  • Sex Is Comedy

    French cinema's arch provocateur, Catherine Breillat, investigates and attempts to understand what happens on a film shoot when scenes involving physical intimacy arise. How can something as intimate as the sexual act be captured on film? How can psychological and logical reality, along with the ...

  • Water Drops on Burning Rocks

    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...