The first half of the film charts El Topo’s fall, which dates roughly from the moment he grandiloquently proclaims, ‘Soy Dios’, by way of justification for castrating the colonel. Taking oneself for a god may be a natural hazard of riding about in the desert in black leather avenging the downtrodden, especially when the opposition is so flatteringly mediocre.
Review by Stephen Thomson

After years of disappointing transfers which drained the original print of colour and used optical fuzzing to cover over the film’s frequent recourse to nudity, Jodorowsky’s legendary third feature gets a UK DVD release and we can finally experience, albeit on the small screen, the glory of his first foray into cinemascope.
Review by Jeff Hilson

Forty years later Fando & Lis is still as inflammatory as cinema can get. It’s a scream, a punch in the guts, an eye-gouging journey through what looks like nothing less than the lowest circles of Dante’s Inferno.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

This Is England is Shane Meadows’ fifth proper feature film and his first period ‘costume’ drama (albeit skinheads in the 1980s) and perhaps he is treading over the same ground and themes (same people just shorter hair and bigger boots) but, unlike Calverton Colliery, there’s plenty more coal in this mine.
Review by Paul Huckerby

It’s difficult to think of another artist whose work has taken the same trajectory as that of the enigmatic Scott Walker (né Engel), from teen pop idol to avant-garde composer, from low to high art, from the universal appeal of the pop song to the altogether more uncompromising abstractions of industrial noise.
Review by Sean Price

Fifty years from now the sun is dying. In a desperate bid to save the Earth eight astronauts have been sent into outer space on board the ominously-named Icarus II. Their mission is to safely deliver a nuclear bomb – the ‘payload’ – into the heart of the dying star in the hope of kick-starting it back in to life. A sci-fi outing from the Boyle-Garland team.
Review by Sarah Cronin

A unique figure in early American cinema, director Tod Browning is best known for his stupefying Freaks and for his standard-setting Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Between 1919 and 1930 he made eleven films with another rather singular Hollywood figure, actor Lon Chaney. Dubbed ‘the man with a thousand faces’ for his mastery of startling make-up effects, Chaney shared with Browning a fascination for the bizarre and the unconventional…
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Although Yasuzo Masumura was a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, his work has been incomprehensibly neglected in the West. This is a man who was a precursor of the Japanese New Wave and a pioneer of the kind of extreme cinema that has made Takashi Miike famous, a wildly imaginative filmmaker who has no less than 58 films to his credit and is responsible for some of the most savagely beautiful, erotically-charged images ever committed to celluloid, and yet he has been treated until now as little more than a footnote in film history.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

This is one of the early B-movies that Seijun Suzuki made for Nikkatsu studios before he found his stylistic feet with Youth of the Beast in 1963. A rebellious youth tale, it portrays the head-on collision between traditional and modern Japan as young orphan Sadao is revealed to be the long-lost heir to the respectable Matsudaira clan.
Review by Virginie Sélavy