Bruce Lee’s only directed feature is an amusing actioner with cartoony characters, an ultra-thin plot and pacing issues, culminating in one of the most iconic showdowns in martial arts cinema.
A free-form experiment that sees the filmmaker putting together a feature out of decades of behind-the-scenes footage from around the world—its fragmented moments of joy, anger, trauma and empathy reveal a common humanity even as they refuse to mark time and its deconstruction.
A young black woman in search of her white biological mother gives Leigh’s heartwrenching if occasionally amusing film the kind of narrative and thematic gravitas rarely experienced in such stories about families in crisis, featuring an all-timer performance by Brenda Blethyn.
Weir’s exceptional early career effort is a dreamlike tale about the baffling disappearance of several girls on a school outing as it enigmatically explores what it means to exist, even as forces threaten to erase—or accelerate—one’s fate.
Delon’s star-making turn draws us into a tricky narrative about an even trickier trickster, as themes of impersonation and immorality are explored in this elegant adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’.
Complex, abstract and utterly existential, Resnais’ first feature in colour deals with the past, present and future as battlegrounds of half-truths, and edited in a fragmented ‘shards-like’ style, as a woman’s ex-lover pays her a visit.
A textbook example of how to produce a handsome adaptation of an iconic novel, Polanski fashions a naturalistic if elegiac tale featuring an excellent Nastassja Kinski in a breakthrough performance.
Lynch’s feature-length prequel to his ‘Twin Peaks’ series is a psychedelic head trip into the lower rungs of hell, backed by an extraordinary if unexpectedly emotional performance from Sheryl Lee, as the narrative traces the final days leading up to her character’s demise.
Erice’s allegorical work puts you in a trance-like spell with its picturesque cinematography and disquieting mood setting as a child is haunted by James Whale’s ‘Frankenstein’ in 1940s rural Spain.
Ichikawa’s marvellous coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games is one of the all-time finest sports documentaries, at times poetic and abstract, and always interested in the bodies, faces and movements of athletes and spectators rather than who wins or loses.
