Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

Luchino Visconti's final film is a brilliant and disturbing drama set against the opulent backdrop of decadent, late 19th-century aristocracy.

A widowed doctor has gruesome plans for his new wife in this lush, Hitchcockian Italian gothic horror.

Florence Pugh shines in this exceptional British debut of a young wife's need for freedom, whatever the cost.

An unnervingly brilliant portrait of the ways in which the Pinochet dictatorship realised its brute force and pervasive influence, from debut director Manuela Martelli. Winner of the 2022 BFI London Film Festival First Feature Competition.

Peter Greenaway became a director of international status with this witty, stylised, erotic country house murder mystery.

Ingmar Bergman’s best-known film is a brilliant allegorical drama starring Max von Sydow as a knight trying to elude his own death.

Takashi Miike burst to international prominence with this deeply disturbing tale of a deadly young woman who turns the tables on her middle-aged suitor.

Andrey Zvyagintsev (Elena, Leviathan) delivers a masterpiece in this caustic look at contemporary Russian society, a failed marriage and the disappearance of a child. A major prize winner at both Cannes and BFI London Film Festival.

Technology and sexuality meet in head-on collision in David Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of writer J.G. Ballard’s transgressive 1973 novel.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as doppelgängers in this dark, pulsating thriller from Denis Villeneuve.

Park’s wilfully grotesque fable about an abductee trying to fathom the mysteries of his past.

Todd Solondz’s outstanding sophomore feature is a darkly comic portrait of suburban teen angst.

Before Caligula, Italian provocateur Tinto Brass directed this controversial and transgressive drama, inspired by the true story of a Nazi-run brothel in 30s Berlin.

Stranded in a surreal winter landscape, a drunken applejack salesman must become North America's greatest fur trapper in Mike Cheslik’s gloriously anarchic slapstick comedy.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cannes prize-winning directorial debut offers a unique take on the classic vampire story.

Ayoka Chenzira’s vital coming-of-age comedy about three Black women living in Brooklyn learning to embrace life and exercise their agency.

A ferocious dystopian nightmare, this was the first film directed by a Black British woman to receive a UK theatrical release.

A philosophy professor and an artist reach a crisis point in their marriage, in Kathleen Collins’ groundbreaking masterpiece.

Bridgett M. Davis’s comedy about an aspiring young Black actress who lands her first major role, but there’s a big problem: it requires a nude scene.