8½

Toni Collette’s visceral performance as an alcoholic, dependent on her devoted son (Jack Reynor), anchors this powerful Irish drama.

Simmering tensions between locals and newcomers in a modern-day Cornish fishing village reach boiling point in this hugely acclaimed British independent film.

Winner of the 2014 Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, a bold and visceral tale of canine uprising.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s stylish and transcendent story of house music is one of the great films about dance culture.

A distinctive adaptation from the writings of Charles Bukowski, Matt Dillon plays Henry Chinaski, a drunk in search of a paycheque.

A blind student’s relationship with his best friend is tested when he falls for the new boy in school, in Daniel Ribeiro’s beautifully realised romance.

Anna Karina shines in Jean-Luc Godard’s critically acclaimed account of a Parisian woman's slow descent into prostitution.

Rodney Ascher's enigmatic essay film weaves together the contrasting theories of five different narrators who believe Stanley Kubrick deliberately buried hidden messages in his 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.

Jean-Jacques Beineix’s story of a volatile, highly sexual relationship was one of the most successful French films of the 1980s.

What if an immaculate conception took place in a South London household? Idris Elba stars in a subtle, thought-provoking and original family drama.

René Laloux and Roland Topor’s surreal, psychedelic sci-fi animation imagines a world in which humanoid creatures are kept as pets by a race of giants.

Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric gothic nightmare blends operatic violence, disorienting dream logic and hyper-real visuals to create a horror classic.

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece depicting seven hedonistic days in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as he searches for the sweet life.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni deliver the finest and most nuanced performances of their careers in this understated masterpiece from director Ettore Scola.

Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a couple re-examining their emotional bonds.

Long before The Hunger Games, Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress battled it out in a televised assassination game, in Elio Petri’s cult sci-fi.

Irrepressible Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) directs this Oscar-winning film of three comic tales of love and sex in three cities.

Sophia Loren and Marcelo Mastroianni are irrepressible as a long-married couple in this exquisite and timeless comedy of our all-too-human foibles.

Fernando Trueba's deeply moving meditation on the artistic process and the nature of humanity, with Jean Rochefort as an ageing artist inspired to paint once more.

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.

One of Werner Herzog's most acclaimed and audacious films, Fitzcarraldo tells the incredible story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an opera-loving fortune hunter who dreams of bringing opera to the heart of the Peruvian jungle.

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece depicting seven hedonistic days in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as he searches for the sweet life.

Fellini's documentary indulges his long-standing fascination with clowns, with the director affectionately recreating episodes from his childhood.

Four of the greatest Italian directors – Fellini, Visconti, De Sica and Monicelli – join forces with show-stoppers Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg and Romy Schneider in a carousel of sex and satire mocking the mores of Italian '60s society.

Toni Collette’s visceral performance as an alcoholic, dependent on her devoted son (Jack Reynor), anchors this powerful Irish drama.

Simmering tensions between locals and newcomers in a modern-day Cornish fishing village reach boiling point in this hugely acclaimed British independent film.

James Marsh's excellent, Oscar®-winning documentary account of the 'artistic crime of the decade'.

Burt Lancaster stars as the Air Force general who seizes control of a nuclear stockpile to force the US President (Charles Durning) to tell the truth about the Vietnam war, in Robert Aldrich's thunderous political thriller.

Winner of the 2014 Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, a bold and visceral tale of canine uprising.

The wife of a reindeer herder acquires a potion to makes her an irresistible object of desire, but at a terrible cost, in this extraordinary vampiric fairy-tale set amongst the starkly beautiful fells of Finnish Lapland.