When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason, in one of his most striking roles) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal, affliction he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug. His transition from loving father to homicidal despot is depicted on a scale more akin to operatic tragedy than melodrama and, on top of the inestimable pleasures of Mason's performance, a narrative that explores society's use of drugs provides an unexpectedly prophetic di find out more...

A couple of dudes sell some drugs, buy a couple of groovy looking choppers and set off on a road trip, en route meeting segments of the American counter-culture, taking a lot of drugs themselves and using far out language. 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...

Beat Generation New Yorker Lenny Bruce shocked the world, and became the blueprint for a new kind of stand up comedy, with his profanities, attitudes toward drugs, irreverence, anti-establishmentism and general anarchistic demeanour. He faced years of consequent police and legal harassment. find out more...

Barbet Schroeder made this directing debut in 1969 with this story set in the youth culture of the Sixties. Stefan, a young German student, hitchhikes to Paris to begin the search for himself with the usual assistance offered by sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. At a wild Left Bank party he falls in love with Estelle, an off-beat American girl who gives him his first joint. When the pair meet up again in Ibiza , it becomes apparent that Estelle is getting deeper and deeper into the drug scene, with tr find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con 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...

Set in Shanghai during the Chinese Revolution, the storyline explores the relationship between a missionary, Megan, and a Chinese warlord, General Yen. It's refreshing to see Capra tackling something more alien to him than the struggles of idealistic American men and he seems to have taken a healthy interest in a culture that at the time was still shrouded in mystery and secrecy. The style of the film is infused with the Orient, from its zen-like mise en scene to the director's inclusion of c find out more...

Originally banned by both the American and British censors, this has an Oscar nominated Frank Sinatra as you've never seen him before - as a strung-out junkie dealing with heroin addiction, a penchant for gambling at poker and a crippled wife, but trying to start a new life as a jazz drummer. A controversial film with an excellent jazz soundtrack. find out more...

LSD, LSD, yummy yummy! Peter Fonda's TV producer discovers the joys of the wee mind messer for the first time (yea right!) in this Roger Corman directed, Jack Nicholson scripted, 60's cult classic. Dees fillum may dishtwort yaw-warr pershepshunn.... find out more...