3 You Must See

Marina de Van’s deeply personal debut about a young woman's addiction to self-mutilation stretches the body horror genre in new ways.

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

A housewife-turned-cop is sucked into a high-profile case that has polarised the local community in this taut, north India-set thriller.

A seductive neo-noir and cult classic centring on lesbian desire in dangerous circumstances.

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

Maggie Gyllenhaal gives a career-best performance as a kindergarten teacher who finds herself in an ethical quagmire after discovering the poetic talents of a precocious student.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s extraordinary interpretation of John Milton’s classic tale, starring Florence Pugh.

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

Florence Pugh's first film teams her with Maisie Williams as teenage friends at a school cursed by mystery sickness.

A pair of detectives clash trying to solve the brutal murders of two women, in Bong Joon Ho’s masterful blend of true crime and dark social satire.

Acclaimed Korean actor Kim Hye-ja is outstanding as a mother who will do anything to protect her son, in Bong Joon Ho’s fourth feature.

Bong Joon Ho's Oscar®-winning box-office sensation is a darkly comic, twisty rollercoaster ride.

Gaspar Noé's retina-searing shocker about an assault and its revenge, told in reverse chronology and starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel.

Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic, unflinching journey through life and death, a defining work of New French Extremity set in neon-soaked Tokyo.

Gaspar Noé's visually dazzling feast of music and mayhem reveals a director at the height of his provocative filmmaking powers.

This rollicking take on Dumas’ swashbuckler, packed with lavish spectacle and high-stakes drama, slayed all Hollywood films at the French box-office.

Jean Cocteau’s ravishingly restored 1946 film is a cinematic classic.

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

A potent and blood-soaked tale of saints and sinners set at the height of the Sino-Japanese war.

A man is injured in an oil rig accident, leaving his wife wracked with guilt, willing to do anything to restore her marriage and relationship with God

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

Gripping portrayal of wartime aviation drawn from the real-life experiences of Czech RAF gunner Richard Husmann.

The world is gripped by a mysterious and incurable plague, in this chillingly prescient anti-war, sci-fi allegory.

Razor-sharp, darkly comic portrait of one ordinary Sunday gone spectacularly wrong.

David Robert Mitchell’s remarkable, terrifying shocker is a fresh and stimulating meditation on sexual paranoia, steeped in horror cinema history.

Richly atmospheric, gloriously morbid and menacing Gothic chiller about a child killer in 19th century Germany.

A chemical leak causes a zombie outbreak amid the picturesque landscapes of the Lake District, in this superbly chilling undead classic.

Neglected since its release in 1971, Bushman follows a Nigerian student in San Francisco but is interrupted by the arrest of its leading man.

Charles Burnett's brilliant drama about an African American family reeling from a a surprise visit from an old friend, played by Danny Glover.

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

Haneke’s most controversial film is a terrifying home invasion thriller.

Michael Haneke's Cannes prizewinner, set in a pre-WW1 German village, explores the oppressively strict social conditions that gave rise to Nazism

Isabelle Huppert’s turn as a woman disturbed yet consumed by her own desires has lost none of its gut-punching torment, in Haneke’s unsettling drama.

François Truffaut’s French New Wave landmark is one of the greatest movies about adolescence.

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

Not all is as it seems in Hirokazu Koreeda’s powerful drama told from shifting perspectives.

An official finds his home under surveillance and his marriage facing turbulence in this Orwellian portrait of life in Communist-era Czechoslovakia.

An incontestable masterpiece of silent cinema, Carl Dreyer's moving biopic features one of the most powerful performances ever captured on film.

A scabrous study of desire, the subconscious and anti-clericalism - Buñuel and Dalí’s provocative first film is a classic of Surrealist cinema.

A family finds a stranger floating naked in their swimming pool in this sensual, sun-baked drama starring Christopher Abbott

A ménage à trois stirs passion and jealousy beside a secluded pool in this sultry, French cult-thriller.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s darkly comic and utterly compelling story of teenage infatuation in a run-down swimming pool.

A washed-up boxer (Stacy Keach), and young hopeful (Jeff Bridges), navigate dreams and despair in John Huston’s gritty boxing drama.

Alex Cox’s Mexican film follows the journey of a highway patrolman whose idealism eventually gives way to inevitable corruption.

British visionary Donald Cammell directs this kaleidoscopic, highly stylised thriller about a series of brutal murders in an isolated community.

The troubled lives of four desperate people unfold over the course of a single day, in this melancholy masterpiece about the human condition.

Twenty-five years old and newly restored, Gary Oldman’s BAFTA-winning debut as writer-director remains a magnificent achievement.

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.

A young London-based writer begins a double life as a sex worker to research his debut novel, in this gripping psychological drama.

Bullied for her sexuality, Dublin schoolgirl Lily turns to her gay best friend for support in this vibrant coming-out, coming-of-age drama.

A British-Palestinian drag performer catches the eye of a strait-laced white man in Amrou Al-Kadhi’s stunning, semi-autobiographical debut.

Three expectant mothers on a maternity ward recall their personal and sexual experiences in Mai Zetterling’s bold, subversive debut.

In Mai Zetterling’s scathing rebuke of European entitlement, a man returns to his childhood home and confronts his repressed memories and desire.

Three stage actresses starring in Aristophanes’ classic play Lysistrata start to draw parallels with their own lives in Mai Zetterling’s feminist comedy.

Bresson’s superb final film and Cannes winner is a Tolstoy adaptation relating how a prank with a forged bank note leads to tragedy.

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

Yasujiro Ozu's elegiac final film charts the inevitable eclipse of older generations by irreverent youth.

A fishing family tries to escape poverty and exploitation by becoming the owner of its own boat in Luchino Visconti's work of uncompromising realism.

Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s epic drama follows a mother and her five sons who move from a small town to Milan, changing their lives forever.

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

Christopher Walken is the dogged drug-lord determined to keep his empire together, in Abel Ferrara's brutally gritty crime thriller.

Barbie creators Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach hit their stride with this critical smash about an awkward girl and her complex passions.

Chantal Akerman reads letters sent to her from her mother in Belgium, against a tableau of shots of 1970s New York.

From director Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) comes a satire on the hypocrisy of the art world, starring Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West. Winner of the Palme d'Or.

Set against the backdrop of 50 years of Yugoslavian history, this moving tragic-farce by Emir Kusturica earned him his second Palme d'Or.

The late, great Harry Dean Stanton's finest role came as the near-mute Travis, on a journey across America to reunite his family, in Wim Wenders' moving tale of loss and redemption.

Godard's playful tribute to the Hollywood pulp crime movies of the 1940s, executed with typically Gallic cool.

Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone are members of a criminal gang that tears itself apart after a heist goes wrong, in Antonia Bird’s stylish thriller.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke star as criminal brothers whose botched heist leads to escalating turmoil, in Sidney Lumet's twisty thriller.

A bureaucrat’s life finds new meaning in Kurosawa’s classic original, the source for Bill Nighy’s brilliant drama, Living.

In director Wim Wenders' (Paris, Texas) most metaphysical work, a guardian angel desires nothing more than to be human.

Abel Ferrara's disturbing character study of a corrupt N.Y.C. cop and his slide into insanity, starring Harvey Keitel in a career-best performance.

Academy Award and Palme d'Or-winning adaption of the Orpheus myth, incorporating the music, costume and dance of Brazil’s Rio Festival.

A young Rastafarian toaster (rapper) aims for success at a Reggae Sound System competition.

Menelik Shabazz (Burning an Illusion) shines a light on the music genre often dubbed ‘romantic reggae’; a uniquely black British sound that developed in the late 70s and 80s against a backdrop of riots, racial tension and sound systems.

The first part of Ingmar Bergman's 'Faith Trilogy', about a writer (Björnstrand) who joins his daughter, son and son-in-law on holiday, where tensions soon arise.

Two sisters, one ailing, the other with her young son, check into a hotel in a foreign city readying itself for war, in Ingmar Bergman's nightmarish vision of emotional isolation.

Ingmar Bergman's highly personal treatise on the torments of faith, in which a widowed village pastor struggles to deal with his parishioners and ex-lover.

A stylish, sensuous film about a young man’s journey into an unusual form of escort work.

Gripping account of repressed sexual desire in a masculine environment, with British newcomer Harris Dickinson as a virulently macho Brooklyn teen.

Blistering thriller of a teen groomed to work for a brutal, organised drugs network.

François Truffaut’s French New Wave landmark is one of the greatest movies about adolescence.

François Truffaut’s hugely popular classic depicts one of cinema’s most captivating love triangles

Happily married Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) has his life is thrown into turmoil when Mathilde (Fanny Ardant) - an old flame - moves into the house opposite.

With a blazing star performance from Hanna Schygulla in the title role, this was the greatest critical and commercial success of Fassbinder’s career.

Jeanne Moreau plays a jaded brothel madam caught up in the violent sexual awakening of Brad Davis' naïve young sailor.

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, this unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

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

Victor Sjöström is magnificent as the crabby professor taking a nostalgic road trip with his daughter-in-law, in Ingmar Bergman's elegiac masterpiece.

Ingmar Bergman’s scandalous tale of two lovers enjoying the freedom of youth.