Morgiana

A teenager is taken to a Corsican villa where her fugitive mob boss father is hiding, before an assassination attempt forces them to go on the run.

This wildly violent ‘70s Japanese sexploitation film about a gambler hunting her father’s killers was a key influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill series.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a crime journalist scouring the streets of after-dark LA in a stylish thriller that examines the morals of mass media.

A bouncer is enlisted to fight off a mob boss, in this barmy, shot-on-video cult actioner from famed Mancunian hardman Cliff Twemlow.

Michael Haneke’s drama explores a teenager’s obsession with screen violence, and his inability to distinguish between reality and fiction.

A travelling mariachi is mistaken for a murderous criminal, in Robert Rodriguez’s infamous ‘no budget’ exemplar of DIY action cinema.

Tilda Swinton and Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous, operatic vision of an aristocratic family disrupted by unstoppable forces of passion.

Family secrets echo around a Spanish clan, ringing loud enough to rouse the dead, in Pedro Almodóvar's assured melodrama.

Céline Sciamma’s BAFTA-nominated film about the tentative love between a painter and her subject in 18th-century France.

Sizzling, feverish melodrama set amid Mexico City’s red-light district nightclubs

Lars von Trier’s unique and divisive dissection of the American Dream, featuring Björk as an immigrant worker finding escape in musical cinema.

Writer Nadia M Oliva tracks the development of the melodrama genre and how it plays out across film, TV and online.

Macabre and singular Czech reimagining of the classic fairy tale about a merchant’s daughter held captive by a mysterious winged beast.

This story of a professional cremator whose increasingly deranged impulses are given free reign during Prague's Nazi occupation, is a brilliantly chilling mix of Dr Strangelove and Repulsion.

An ungainly cockney chauffeur navigates the seedy streets of London, gradually falling for the elegant and mysterious prostitute who is his passenger.

Reviled upon its release, now reclaimed as a cult classic - one can only submit to the trash-tastic delights of Paul Verhoeven's erotic disasterpiece.

Saoirse Ronan gives a bracing performance as a young recovering alcoholic returning home to Orkney in this moving adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir.

Alan Parker’s elliptical, ethereal adaptation of the acclaimed, ‘unfilmable’ novel by William Wharton, about a boy who dreams of flying.

Anora director Sean Baker's visionary portrait of life in America’s underbelly, featuring an Oscar-nominated turn from Willem Dafoe.

A salesman becomes obsessed by an icy prostitute against the backdrop of a hellish Paris, in this arthouse erotica from Walerian Borowczyk (The Beast)