This legendary silent film, much admired by the Surrealists, is a spellbinding brew of ingredients that don’t naturally mix, at least not in modern cinema. Combining the scholarly and the outlandish, the fact-based and the supernatural, Häxan is simultaneously a documentary on witchcraft and a collection of wildly fanciful visions.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Joe Strummer always cut an incongruous figure as a punk. While the rest of the self-styled last gang in town were suitably weaselly and malnourished (Jones and Topper) or remote (Simonon), Strummer, well-built, full of face and with a mockney accent that belied his boarding school past, seemed too old, too worldly-wise for such a nihilistic movement.
Review by Sean Price

The opening scenes of Jens Lien’s debut feature The Bothersome Man tick all the boxes in the now-familiar category marked ‘surreal/ existentialist’. A lone stranger. A world familiar, but not quite like our own. Plenty of empty silences, meaningful glances and quiet desperation. Scattered touches of delicate whimsy, and a handful of random absurdity (in this case, two men playing badminton in an open field). A lot of none-too-subtle social commentary.
Review by Tom Huddleston

La Noche de los girasoles (Night of the Sunflowers) starts with two separate stories that are interwoven: the discovery of a cave that may or may not drastically change the fortunes of a small northern Spanish village, and the murder of a girl found in some nearby sunflower fields.
Review by Kim Nicolajsen

Five years after the widely praised Lantana, Ray Lawrence returns with an adaptation of a short story by American writer Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ – which he relocates to the outback of his native Australia.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

The Caiman, Nanni Moretti’s follow-up to 2001’s The Son’s Room, is both a scathing political indictment of Silvio Berlusconi, and a bittersweet, nostalgic film about loss; the two are deeply intertwined in the Italy of the last decades.
Review by Sarah Cronin

The truth is that Bad Timing, billed as ‘a terrifying love story’, is an uncomfortable experience filled with pain, obsession and bitterness. And, with its alienated characters, fractured timeframe and plenty of sex, quintessential Roeg cinema.
Review by Ben Cobb

The heavy stylisation is perfectly matched by Vincent Price’s wonderfully hammy performance – spouting lines like, ‘the knowledge of terror is vouchsafed only to the precious few’ as only he can.
Review by Paul Huckerby

All the more amusing that the British censor of the time banned it with the legendary words ‘If this film has a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable’, a phrase which has since almost become more famous than the film.
Review by CB

Showing as part of the Roman Polanski season at the Barbican, the Polish director’s first feature is a landmark of sixties cinema, an outstanding debut that more than holds its own among the New Wave masterpieces of the time.
Review by Virginie Sélavy