Vivre sa vie

Věra Chytilová's first feature is an important work of women's cinema, which contrasts the parallel stories of a gymnast (filmed as documentary) and a housewife (told as fiction).

Věra Chytilová's symbolic retelling of the Adam and Eve story is a ravishing tapestry of ideas, textures, and visual tropes.

A rich sadist kidnaps a woman to subject to his elaborate S&M games, but she soon turns the tables... Piero Schivazappa's erotic thriller explodes with eye-popping psychedelic production design.

Josh Appignanesi's art-world psycho-thriller blends reality and fiction to delirious effect, in its tale of an exhibition curator pursued by a mysterious figure.

Sophia Loren searches for the husband she lost at the Russian Front (Marcello Mastroianni) in this sweeping romance epic with echoes of Doctor Zhivago.

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

Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of writer's block with this magnum opus about a film director experiencing his own creative crisis.

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.

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.

Psychodrama with a vengeance: Anna Karina stars in Fassbinder’s first international co-production; another deadly assault on the institution of marriage.

Godard's case study of an Italian girl's inner struggle to reconcile her revolutionary intent with her ingrained bourgeois tendencies.

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's radical film deconstructs both a factory strike and the Hollywood western - simultaneously.

The first film in Jean-Luc Godard's 'radical' period finds the director rejecting established notions of narrative and authorship to present a dialectic response to the events of May '68.

Godard recreates the trial of the Chicago Eight (charged with protesting the 1968 Democratic Party convention) in typically playful, anarchic and confrontational style.

Jean-Luc Godard brings his firebrand political cinema to the UK, exploring the revolutionary signals in late '60s British society, in this experimental documentary.

Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary debut feature, an insouciant and iconoclastic crime film that paved the way for the French New Wave.

Shinya Tsukamoto's sequel has the Iron Man transforming into a cyberkinetic gun when a gang of vicious skinheads kidnap his son.

Shinya Tsukamoto's wild cyberpunk tale of a businessman's agonising transformation into a walking scrap heap is a jaggedly dehumanised vision of the future.

Ground-breaking documentary that uses archive film to tell the story of the British Deaf community’s fight for civil rights.

Věra Chytilová's dark, post-communist comedy. After a veterinary surgeon is sexually assaulted by two men, she uses her particular expertise in castraton to exact her revenge…

Věra Chytilová's first feature is an important work of women's cinema, which contrasts the parallel stories of a gymnast (filmed as documentary) and a housewife (told as fiction).

Věra Chytilová's symbolic retelling of the Adam and Eve story is a ravishing tapestry of ideas, textures, and visual tropes.