David Bowie cemented his unearthly persona in Nicolas Roeg’s startling cult film; playing an alien stranded on Earth while on a mission to find water for his own world, he initiates a plan to amass a fortune to help save his home planet.

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 ho...

When they stumble across the tomb of the evil sorceress, Queen Tera (Valerie Leon), a team of British archaeologists bring her sarcophagus back to London, in an attempt to uncover whatever secrets she holds. However, when Tera's spirit possesses the daughter of one of the archaeologists (also Val...

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...

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...

When he is banished from the village, Paul Carson (Christopher Matthews) winds up at Castle Dracula, where unbeknownst to him, the Lord of the Undead (Christopher Lee) has been reanimated. Searching for Paul, his brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) storms Castle Dracula with his fiancée, unaware of t...

Conservative executive Harold Pelham (a harrowing and atypical performance by Roger Moore) is involved in a car accident and declared momentarily dead. When he's eventually released from the hospital, Pelham discovers that an exact double of him has recently been seen in places that he's never be...

Two worlds collide in this melodrama set in Victorian Brighton: a repressive household, run by a tyrannical chemist, and a sleazy tavern, presided over by a passionate landlady. The chemist's son (Gordon Jackson) finds himself, understandably enough, in thrall to the landlady (Googie Withers). Hi...

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...

Two young English nurses, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) embark on a cycling holiday in the French countryside. They happen upon a mysterious man, Paul (Sandor Eles), who seems interested in them. Cathy is intrigued by the man, but suspicious Jane wants to continue on the jour...

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 ...

The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early '80s feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental na...

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...

The debut feature by future Hollywood star director Tony Scott is a dark, surreal piece about a couple who accidentally kill a young man while out driving their car. Taking him home, the woman treats the boy as if he were her own - and as if he were still alive. She finds happiness by talking to ...

The Moon Over the Alley reunited Duffer writer/directors Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq, with this strange London-set musical, again scored by Galt MacDermont (Hair). The film explores the problems facing the multicultural residents in a Notting Hill boarding house of the early 1970s, desti...

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 ...

Tilda Swinton stars in a playful and ingenious cine-essay from art critic John Berger (Ways of Seeing) and author/filmmaker Timothy Neat.

A private detective (Fairport Convention musician Dave Swarbrick) investigates the case of a young woman held captive by her drug-addict mother. This is just one of many witty, imaginative reframings of the Brothers Grimm fairytale in this beguiling feminist film. The wildly diverse episodes show...

The idyllic, rural past of a Suffolk village comes to life through the memories of an old man who tends a country graveyard, in this extraordinary film directed by David Gladwell. Although best known for his celebrated work as editor on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. and O Lucky Man!, Gladwell has, unti...

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s. The second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen, both of whom are recognised as seminal figures ...

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...

Musician Davy Spillane stars as a reluctantly-married young traveller in this Irish road movie written by Neil Jordan. Michael and his wife Angela are tasked with smuggling goods back over the border from Strabane, but their road trip seems doomed at every turn - weighed down by history and pover...

Friendship (Tilda Swinton) has been sent to Earth on a peace mission. Heading for MIT, she inadvertently lands in Amman, Jordan during the 1970 ‘Black September’ war and is ushered to safety by journalist Sullivan (Bill Paterson). Holed up in a hotel as the conflict rages outside, the pair enter ...

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...