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...

A visually striking and powerful exploration of the "Oedipus" myth so loved by Freud, which draws on the director's own experience and the timeless themes of mythology. In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destine find out more...

Alison MacKenzie looks back on life in the New England town where she grew up around the time of Pearl Harbour. Beneath the town's placid God-fearing exterior lay any number of dark secrets involving sexual attraction and repression, illegitimacy, rape, gossip, intolerance, and class snobbery. No wonder Allison had moved to a quiet place like New York. Peyton Place had the dubious distinction of 9 Oscar nominations, but not one winner. find out more...

A chillingly effective study of mental breakdown and neurosis. Terrified by everything, but especially sex, a Belgian girl in London murders her boyfriend, and her landlord when they try to break through her barriers and help her. A grim journey into the depths of a deranged mind. Riveting. 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...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...