Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

King Hu's epic swordplay saga combines ghost story, martial arts mastery and Buddhist mythology to stunning, hypnotic effect.

Adapted from Noh and Kabuki theatre, Kurosawa’s classic tale of deception sees a lord and his bodyguard disguise themselves as monks to bypass an enemy roadblock.

Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling mix of fairy story and samurai movie - a story of rival clans, hidden gold and a princess in distress - was famously a key inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars.

Kurosawa’s classic about a drifting samurai who plays two gangs off against each other, famously remade as A Fistful of Dollars.

Farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Kurosawa’s influential epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

A unit of British paratroopers in Afghanistan become caught in a minefield, unable to move or help their injured colleagues, in this unbearably tense thriller.

A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere, Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content.

Waterway hi jinks abound in this Buster Keaton classic, in which he plays the reluctant heir to his father's paddle steamer business.

Bruce Lee's second kung fu picture is a gloriously thrilling revenge saga brimming with spectacular fight scenes.

Bruce Lee plays the factory worker who takes on a drug-smuggling gang, in the breakthrough film that catapulted him to cinematic superstardom.

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

A witchfinder traverses 17th-century England executing those he suspects of witchcraft.

A deadly liquor rips through a community of vagabonds living in the junkyards of Brooklyn, in this outlandish 80s body horror.

A sleepy seaside town becomes beholden to a bloodthirsty cult, in this dreamy and atmospheric horror from the writers of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Devastatingly powerful, tense and claustrophobic war drama about the final mission of a German U-boat, from heroic start to tragic end.

Radu Jude’s follow-up to the Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a pin-sharp, caustically funny critique of workplace culture and oppression.