The moody 28-year-old Mifune is the violent gangster whom boozy doctor Shimura diagnoses as suffering from TB ('a hole in the heart,' says the sour 'angel', ruefully). The movie breathes the polluted air of post-war pessimism, dissipation and poetic fatalism, symbolised in the shots of the oily, malaria-ridden swamp of a Tokyo dockside, but it is dramatically qualified by Mifune's suggested redeemability and Shimura's stoical humanism. Fascinating, highly enjoyable and filled with great scenes - find out more...

find out more...

Previously unreleased in the UK, this is a truly experimental film with echoes of the director's later work; The Idiots and Dogville. Starring the director as the lead and using no camera crew, the story follows a doctor attempting to stop the spread of a plague who only succeeds in spreading it further. find out more...

Stunningly filmed in black and white, this classic slice of surrealist cinema is both touching and terrifying. A doctor, tortured beyond sanity after disfiguring his only daughter, sets out to give her back what he has taken away, at the expense of a succession of suitable young donors. A darkly disturbing marvellous movie. find out more...

A small girl dies of a genetically inherited brain condition and an ageing pervert is killed in a squalid basement flat in Reykjavik, the latter a case to which dogged detective Erlendu is assigned. His investigation, at times, takes him back to crimes thirty years in the past and into a sordid Icelandic underbelly of deprived urban estates, impoverished rural communities, marital infidelity and drug addiction. An atmospheric, genuinely different, murder investigation/puzzle with some truly left find out more...

A woman living in the modern world gets struck by a C20th disease, an allergy to all things environmentally unfriendly, and is forced to seek sanctuary in the Texas desert with the evangelical and the afflicted. A tale of our possible future? Psychological suspense, horrifying and occasionally comic. find out more...

A deaf-mute needs to find the money for his sister's kidney operation and in his desperation he resorts to kidnap. This one action plunges both him and his girlfriend into the dark world of black market organ trading and by extension, ruthless retribution. Sympathy For Mr Vengeance is a hard, dark and brutal thriller. Atmospheric and unredemptive. find out more...

Adrien Brody plays an amnesiac Gulf War veteran, who's either had part of his brain blown away, is a restless spirit or an angel, take it your own way, sentenced to life in a mental institution for a brutal killing he may, or may not, have done. There he is subjected to barbaric drug and sensory deprivation treatment during which he finds himself in 2007 with a girl, Keira Knightley, he met once in the past, a future, moreover, in which he discovers he has been dead for 14 years. How did he die? find out more...

David Aames has it all, but true love still eludes him, one night he believes he may have found the woman of his dreams but fate is about to deal him a brutal blow. David's rarified existence comes to a shuddering halt when he accepts a lift from an insanely jealous lover and as reality and fantasy begin to blur he is in danger of losing his sanity. Vanilla Sky is a remake of the Spanish film "Open Your Eyes" and despite my scepticism it is a gripping piece of cinema, impeccably performed, direc find out more...

After waking from a coma following a car crash, Hiroshi suffers from amnesia, barely recognising his own parents he re-enrols in medical school in an effort to re-establish some normality to his life. When he begins an anatomy course he is horrified and shocked to discover that he recognises the female cadaver he has to work on as his ex-girlfriend who died in the accident that hospitalised him. Vital is a hard film to categorise but as it comes from the imagination of Tsukamoto (of Tetsuo fame) find out more...