One of the most spectacular epics of all time, even by the standards of Hollywood, the famous twenty minute chariot race alone took three months to shoot, and, along the way, Ben is given a helping hand and converted by Jesus. An unmissable slice of movie history. Won Best Picture at 1959 Academy Awards. find out more...

Harold Pinter's debut as a film director sees Alan Bates reprise his role as Ben Butley, a university don, as he struggles to stay on top of his increasingly chaotic career. The film portrays Butley's anxieties as a teacher no longer convinced that his role in life is worthwhile, with his passion for the profession falling victim to cynicism and a moral malaise. The film's strength lies in its dialogue, with the vicious banter between warring academics showing their intelligence, and the frustra find out more...

The beautiful Venice waterfront scenery and frustated emotions abound in this cinema classic from Thomas Mann's novel. Dirk Bogarde is an ageing gay man who fantasises whistfully about a young boy who is in the same hotel on the Lido. A revealing tale as much about old age grieving for lost youth as it is about obsession and homosexuality. find out more...

A suburban lady of indiscriminate age (and a ferocious sex drive) and her repressed brother have taken a very strong shine to the new lodger, even to the extent of turning a blind eye when he commits murder. Entertaining Mr Sloane is a screen adaptation of a Joe Orton play, a man who wilfully subverted the kitchen sink drama into pitch black satire, and though the production now shows its age, this is still a weird, wonderful and twisted tale. find out more...

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie vies with a rival drag-queen for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda in this unflinching and often brutal portrayal of Japanese gay subculture. Matsumoto achieves a line between pathos and hilarity that makes Funeral Parade of Roses utterly unique; a feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange). In addition this psychedelic era film is a gay play on the O find out more...

As an intellectual challenge, two young students strangle their "inferior" classmate, hide his body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to test the "perfection" of their crime. In attendance are Mr. Henry Kentley and Mrs. Anita Atwater, the victim's father and aunt; Kenneth Turner, the victim's love rival and the deceased's fiancée. The guest of honour is the student's former lecturer whose flippant repartee regarding social caste has been interpret find out more...

In first century Rome, two student friends, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue about ownership of the boy Gitone, divide their belongings and split up. The boy, allowed to choose who he goes with, chooses Ascilto. Only a sudden earthquake saves Encolpio from suicide. We follow Encolpio through a series of adventures, where he is eventually reunited with Ascilto, and which culminates in them helping a man kidnap a hermaphrodite demi-god from a temple. The god dies, and as punishment Encolpio becomes imp find out more...

It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

Based on a Tennessee Williams play and touching on all manner of depraved horrors. Taylor plays the girl driven to madness by what she's witnessed and Clift is the shrink being pressured to lobotomise her, but Hepburn steals the show as the unnervingly genteel aunt trying to sweep everything under the carpet. find out more...

Absorbing, atmospheric portrayal of a suave, decadent man's decline and fall when his man-servant wreaks subtle havoc from below the stairs. Class-warfare at its unsettling and British best! find out more...