Center Stage

Terence Davies’ mosaic of childhood, imagination, time and memory is one of the greatest cinematic experiences.

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen made his cinema debut with this provocative portrait of Irish republican prisoners defying the British government.

Fernanda Torres ignites this Oscar-winning drama from Walter Salles, a triumph of hope over tyranny.

A powerful historical drama inspired by the true story of the Red Orchestra Nazi-resistance group and two courageous resistance fighters.

Milos Forman’s provocative biopic starring Woody Harrelson as a notorious pornographer turned unlikely hero and champion of free speech.

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren star in one of the most controversial films in cinema history, presented here in an entirely new cut compiled from the original rushes.

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.

Jackie Chan's mind-blowing, high-octane extravaganza of death-defying stunts and action comedy.

Jean-Jacques Annaud's powerful, intimate, and sensual adaptation of the best-selling novel by Marguerite Duras.

Gorgeous romantic melodrama from queer cinema master Stanley Kwan about the haunting power of lost love starring the late Cantopop singer Anita Mui.

Sumptuous historical drama starring Isabelle Adjani and Daniel Auteuil; a thunderous yarn full of dastardly plots, familial hatred and perverse desire

1980s borstal drama – billed as the female Scum – featuring Amanda York and Kathy Burke as inmates in a ruthless women’s prison.

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.