My Cinema Discoveries of 2025

At this time last year, I lamented the fact that I hadn't seen as many films in cinemas as I had in previous years. For various reasons, I made even fewer cinematic discoveries in 2025. I had a lot on my plate this year and I even failed to make my usual trip to Bologna in the summer, which is always a source of rich great celluloid revelations. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to get back there in the summer of 2026, but who knows. Life doesn't appear to be getting easier or less busy anytime soon. Anyway, I saw 97 older films in cinemas this year, 76 of which were on 35mm, with nine on 16mm and one on 70mm. 63 of these screenings were first time viewings, and some of the most interesting and enjoyable are listed below.

40 – Sun Valley Serenade (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This film was screened as part of a Dorothy Dandridge season, but I’d forgotten she was supposed to be in the film by the time she finally showed up almost an hour in. Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers appear out of nowhere to perform Chattanooga Choo Choo and then they promptly disappear. It’s a short cameo, but undoubtedly a highlight of this musical (the song was nominated for an Oscar), which is primarily a vehicle for Sonja Henie, who is much more comfortable on the ice than as a romantic lead. Henie plays a wartime refugee who immediately falls in love with John Payne, but the pair have no chemistry, and her single-minded pursuit of this apparently uninterested man comes off as psychotic rather than endearing. Milton Berle has a few amusing one-liners but his shtick wears thin. The whole film is elevated by the beautiful climactic number, which features Henie and a number of skaters performing on a reflective black ice rink.

39 – The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This film is notable for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it marked the first leading role of 17 year-old Anna May Wong’s career. She plays Lotus Flower, who rescues an unconscious American sailor from the sea, falls in love with him, and then gives birth to his baby after he leaves for home, leading to some very awkward scenes when he returns years later with his American bride. Frances Marion’s simple script was loosely inspired by Madame Butterfly. The existing prints run for less than an hour and the final reel is missing, so to compensate for that loss, footage of the sea was filmed in the 1980s and spliced onto the end of the print, an approach that works quite well. The other reason The Toll of the Sea is is significant is that it is the earliest surviving film shot in the two-color Technicolor process, which gives its images a unique and quite captivating hue that I enjoyed discovering on 35mm.
 
38 – Tom Thumb (George Pal, 1958) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This lively adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale cleverly creates the impression that Russ Tamblyn is small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, although the most impressive effect of all might be Tamblyn’s athleticism, which is shown off impressively in the sequence where Tom dances with all of the toys. Those toys are brought to life by the stop-motion work of director George Pal, who developed his technique through his popular Puppetoons series in the 1940s, and the craftsmanship is first-rate all over this picture, from Georges Périnal’s cinematography to Tom Howard’s Oscar-winning visual effects. Pal once dreamed of Laurel and Hardy playing the villains in this long-cherished project, but Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers do a good job as a pair of bungling and bickering crooks.
 
37 – Rich and Famous (George Cukor, 1981) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Pauline Kael caused some outrage with her review of this film when she suggested that Jacqueline Bisset's seduction by a young man played “more like homosexual fantasy.” Some accused Kael of trying to out the closeted director, but having seen Rich and Famous, I can see what she was getting at. There’s a lot about this movie that feels ridiculous and doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s largely buoyed along by the enjoyable performances from Bisset and Candice Bergen as college roommates whose lives take wildly divergent paths over the next two decades when one becomes a critically acclaimed author and the other a wealthy writer of trashy romance novels. It’s a glossy soap opera and there are stretches where I lost interest, but it has enough humour and elegance to make it worthwhile. As a sidenote, George Cukor’s last film was Meg Ryan’s first film, which feels like a weird collision of two very different eras.

36 – The Romantic Age (Edmond T. Gréville, 1949) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Edmond T. Gréville’s Brief Ecstasy was one of my favourite discoveries of 2024, so I jumped at the opportunity to catch another Gréville picture this year. This film also goes by the title Naughty Arlette, as Arlette (played by Mai Zetterling) is the consistently disruptive and flirtatious French schoolgirl whose eyes light up hungrily when Hugh Williams becomes the new art teacher at her all-girls’ school. She becomes determined to seduce him, and he doesn’t exactly put up a great deal of resistance for all his outward show of annoyance with her. This central relationship puts the film into tricky territory but everything is largely played for laughs, and Arlette gets her comeuppance with a comical spanking. Perhaps it's not a great movie, but further proof that Gréville had the knack for making films with a lively spirit and imaginative use of space.

35 – The Naked Truth (Mario Zampi, 1957) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The Naked Truth stars Dennis Price as a muckraking journalist who digs up dirt to blackmail public figures, so four of his victims concoct plots to murder him. This is a solid comic premise that throws up a couple of amusing set-pieces, particularly as the various independent plotters have a habit of getting in each other’s way; I especially enjoyed watching Peggy Mount and Joan Sims attempt to dispose of a corpse, only to discover that they had drugged the wrong person.  Terry-Thomas is very funny as the luckless Lord Mayley, who keeps inadvertently becoming the victim of others’ plans, while Peter Sellers takes the opportunity to try on a variety of accents and disguises, at one point pretending to be an Irishman to buy explosives in a pub.
 
34 – El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1962) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I’d seen chunks of El Cid when I was a child and it was on TV for what seemed to be the whole of Sunday afternoon, but I had never been able to sit through it. In truth, I got a little fidgety during this screening, although the big screen is certainly the only way to appreciate the awesome scale of this film. Charlton Heston is not exactly the most convincing choice to portray the 11th century Spanish hero, and I found the narrative a little tiresome to follow, with its murky character motivations and longwinded conversations. What I did respond to was Mann’s direction. He stages some magnificent scenes utilising the full resources of this gargantuan production and he creates a number of arresting frames, in one case using a split-diopter to striking effect. Mann also fully understand the power a Sophia Loren close-up can bring to a picture. El Cid can be a bit of a slog but it does have a very strong ending.
 
33 – White Squall (Ridley Scott, 1996) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Along with 1492: Conquest of Paradise and G.I. Jane, this is one of the three underwhelming films Scott made after Thelma and Louise, before the success of Gladiator put him back on top. It’s easy to see why White Squall has slipped into relative obscurity. The devastating storm that imperils the ship and gives the film its title doesn’t occur until the third act, and prior to that we have to struggle through a rather flimsy coming-of-age tale that feels like it’s striving to be a seafaring Dead Poets Society – it even has a “Captain My Captain” finale – but the storytelling is disjointed and the characterisation is weak, with even Jeff Bridges struggling to bring much dimension to his role as the ship’s captain. However, when the storm does hit, it’s a genuinely impressive and terrifying spectacle, and a dazzling display of practical filmmaking on a grand scale. White Squall shimmered beautifully on this pristine 35mm print and it made me yearn for the days when Scott’s films were so polished and carefully lit, rather than the flat multi-camera digital setup he favours these days.
 
32 – The Lost Man (Robert Alan Aurthur, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Before watching The Lost Man, I didn’t know that this was a loose adaptation of Odd Man Out, but the connection started to become clear once Sidney Poitier had been wounded in a heist and had to seek refuge from the police. This is an interesting role for Poitier, playing an impassive militant crook who has planned this robbery for the purpose of funnelling money towards the black revolutionary movement, he strikes a much tougher and more complex figure than he had been in most of his films to date. The Lost Man isn’t directed with enough flair or tension to grip all the way to the finish line, but it does have its virtues. The heist itself is very well staged, and the film possesses a strong sense of location, with the score from Quincy Jones adding a good deal of atmosphere. 
 
31 – The Comedians (Peter Glenville, 1967) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Although it has a poor critical reputation, I enjoyed this Graham Greene adaptation, which places a series of interpersonal conflicts against the backdrop of Papa Doc’s brutal regime in Haiti. The film does a decent job of showing the corruption and atrocities that occurred under that regime in a frank manner, and it’s a pleasure to watch this cast of screen legends at work. Roscoe Lee Browne, Paul Ford, Lillian Gish, James Earl Jones and Peter Ustinov are all excellent in their supporting roles, and while the Burton and Taylor scenes don’t create much of a spark, the scenes that Burton shares with Alec Guinness are superb. In particular, there’s one quiet conversation they share in a graveyard towards the end that’s magnificently acted. The Comedians could have perhaps done with a slightly more exciting director, but it’s a better film than its reputation suggests.  
 
30 – The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

In this film, the two leads are played by first-time actors playing versions of themselves. Director Sally Potter is the filmmaker developing a new project in Paris while her London home is being renovated. There, she meets dancer Pablo Verón, with whom she starts taking tango lessons and develops a romantic relationship. In truth, the performances given by these inexperienced actors are the film’s weakest element, and the drama surrounding their romance unfolds in a series of scenes that are often flat and cheesy. However, Potter makes the most of the dance numbers, staging a number of beautiful sequences with the help of the great Robby Müller. He shoots most of the movie in lustrous black-and-white, which is often spellbinding, particularly in these dance on the banks of the Seine with the lights of the city in the background, and he also gives the film an occasional jolt of vibrant colour with the imagined scenes from Potter’s unmade film. A fun detail from the end credits: Müller's apprentice on this film was a young man named Hoyte van Hoytema.

 
29 – The Squeeze (Michael Apted, 1977) – Cinema Museum, 35mm

If I was casting the lead detective role in a 1970s British film, Stacy Keach would not have been the first name on my list of possibilities, but he is surprisingly effective as the shambling, drunken cop Jim Nabors, who needs to sober up quickly when his ex-wife is abducted and held for ransom. ‘Surprisingly effective’ is a term we could use for Freddie Starr too, an unexpected choice as Keach’s loyal buddy who provides a very good supporting performance. The Squeeze is an exceptionally seedy and bleak affair, immersing us in a series of grubby hideouts and gloomy pubs, although some its street scenes have a vivid sense of life, especially when shooting around Notting Hill. The film’s ugliest scene forces Carol White to perform a horribly protracted striptease for her captors, but the film also gives us far more Stacy Keach's naked body than you may be expecting.
 
28 – Someone to Love (Henry Jaglom, 1987) – ICA, 35mm

Someone to Love is notable for marking the last screen appearance of Orson Welles, who appears right at the end of the film, with Henry Jaglom clearly shooting fifteen minutes’ worth of the great man as he sat in a theatre and then rather awkwardly splicing it into the climax of his feature. The rest of the film is a loose, improvised affair in which Jaglom invites a large group of friends to an abandoned theatre that’s about to be torn down, and subjects them to interviews about their loves lives and the difficulty involved in finding and sustaining a relationship. These conversations are often thoughtful, probing, poignant and funny, and Someone to Love is always engaging viewing as it rambles along, before Orson pops up at the end to offer his thoughts on men, women and love in a changing society.
 
27 – The Decks Ran Red (Andrew L. Stone, 1958) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

A black-and-white film, although the title appears in a dripping red font, suggesting much bloodshed ahead. Inspired by a real 1905 incident, The Decks Ran Red is set on a ramshackle freighter where a couple of sailors (Broderick Crawford and Stuart Whitman) concoct a plot to scuttle the engines and murder everyone on board before submitting an insurance claim of a million dollars on the stricken ship. Having just been flown in to replace the previous captain, who died in mysterious circumstances, James Mason stands in their way, and the stage is set for a very involving thriller. Stone uses the layout of the ship intelligently to ramp up the cat-and-mouse tension – in some ways, this feels like a forerunner of Die Hard or Under Siege – but what’s most memorable about The Decks Ran Red is the complete absence of music. Instead we just get the sound of the ship and the sea as backdrop to the action, and it’s extremely effective.
 
26 – Hard to Handle (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

James Cagney is in his element as the fast-talking publicity hound Lefty Merrill, who is always chasing the next big score. The film opens at a dance marathon where Lefty is anticipating a big payday, but his partner flees with the prize money, leaving him with heavy debts to pay. The big opportunity he spies is in the grapefruit racket, which is an amusing irony, as that was the fruit he shoved into Mae Clarke's face in The Public Enemy two years previously. Hard to Handle is a sprightly pre-Code comedy driven by a terrifically dynamic Cagney and a scene-stealing Ruth Donnelly as his prospective mother-in-law, but it also works as a sharp portrait of widespread Depression-era desperation and those who were quick to exploit it.
 
25 – Now Barabbas Was a Robber (Gordon Parry, 1949) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

An early screen appearance from Richard Burton is the main draw of this low-key British drama, but Burton – saddled with a limited character and a shaky Irish accent – is actually one of the least compelling characters on show. Adapted from William Douglas Home’s stage play, Gordon Parry’s film looks at prison life from a variety of perspectives. These men are serving time for a variety of crimes – which we glimpse in flashbacks – and some of them have years left to run while others can see freedom coming into view, but the most compelling characterisation belongs to Richard Greene as a man waiting for execution and forming a bond with the guards and chaplain watching over him. The film has a clear point of view on the inhumanity of capital punishment, but Now Barabbas Was a Robber is not strident or polemical. It’s an empathetic, character-driven piece, populated by a collection of excellent British character actors.
 
24 – The Frontier Experience / The Boy Who Liked Deer (Barbara Loden, 1975) – BFI Southbank, Digital/16mm

For many years, Barbara Loden has been discussed as the director of a single film, 1970’s terrific Wanda, but that’s not the whole story. These two shorts were made as educational films for the Learning Corporation of America, and they are both made with great care and intelligence. Written by Joan Micklin Silver, The Frontier Experience tells the story of a pioneer family living through their first year in Kansas in 1869, with Loden taking the lead role as the mother who has to keep the family together during a harsh winter. Loden’s direction is simple but potent, expressing the loneliness and desolation of this family’s surroundings. Her other short The Boy Who Liked Deer packs a real punch. It’s the story of a teenage tearaway who thinks nothing of the consequences of his behaviour, until he sees the impact that his vandalism has on both his teacher and his beloved deer. It’s a smartly made and very moving piece of work.
 
23 – Movie Movie (Stanley Donen, 1978) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

It’s not hard to see why Movie Movie was a flop in 1978. Making a picture celebrating decades-old film styles was always going to be a risking proposition in the 1970s, but doing so after Star Wars had changed the whole landscape killed any chances of Movie Movie finding an appreciative audience stone dead. What’s most interesting about Movie Movie is the way it predates Airplane with its absurdist spoof humour; Donen gleefully sends up every cliché of the boxing melodramas and the Busby Berkeley-style musicals of the 1930s. Dynamite Hands and Baxter's Beauties of 1933 are presented as a double-feature (with a fake trailer for a film called Zero Hour in between), and most of the same actors appear in both films, with George C. Scott having a grand old time as boxing trainer Gloves Molloy and dying impresario Spats Baxter. The gags come thick and fast but the actors play it dead straight, and the craftmanship on show in both films is pretty dazzling, with Donen flexing some of those old musical muscles in the second feature, which boasts a show-stopping appearance from Ann Reinking.
 
22 – Latino (Haskell Wexler, 1985) – ICA, 35mm

How remarkable it is that LucasFilm only produced two movies in 1985, and they were Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters Haskell Wexler’s Latino. Having made the documentary Target Nicaragua: Inside a Secret War in 1983, Wexler revisited Nicaragua for a dramatic feature that again explores America’s role in the Contras' war against the Sandinistas, with US Green Beret Eddie Guerrero (played by Robert Beltran) slowly starting to question his orders as he sees what is happening on the ground. The film is dramatically a little thin and it could use a more compelling screen presence than Beltran in the lead, but Wexler’s determination to places us in the centre of events and capture a real sense of authenticity onscreen is impressive. Latino is an admirably angry and potent piece of filmmaking.
 
21 – A Place to Go (Basil Dearden, 1963) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I spent part of this year thinking about the work of Basil Dearden as I contributed an essay on him to the book Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1963. One film that fell outside the purview of that piece was A Place to Go, but it’s another reminder of the vital perspective that this still-underrated director always brought to his films. A Place to Go is a drama about a family living in East London in the early 60s, and the narrative is concerned with young wide boy Mike Sarne falling in with a criminal element, but Dearden’s real interest clearly lies in the social changes that were occurring in this area at the time. This was the era of slum clearances, with families being forced out of the dilapidated homes they had lived in for years and being moved into brand-new high-rise flats, and Dearden captures the poignancy of this progress, particularly through a tender performance from Doris Hare as the mother crestfallen to leave her home of thirty years. A Place to Go was shot on location, and it’s an invaluable snapshot of how the streets I'm so familiar with once looked.
 
20 – The 16mm Films of Harry Hill (Harry Hill, David Leister, Peter Orton, 1996-1999) – BFI Southbank, 16mm

Over the course of three years, Harry Hill made these films in his garden with his friends and family serving as the cast. They were mainly used as filler for the intermissions as his live shows but they have rarely been seen since, so it was a treat to discover them at this special screening. I particularly liked The Boy with the Big Face, in which a boy is slapped by a lollipop lady’s sign and his resultant massive round head makes him the target of mockery from his peers. Another highlight is Jaws 5, in which Harry finds the shark from Spielberg’s Jaws washed up on the beach and sends him on a stand-up tour of English clubs in an attempt to revive his career, while Spielberg himself is on the hunt in a shark detector van. As you’d expect from Hill, these shorts are silly, slapdash and frequently hilarious.
 
19 – Park Lanes (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2015) – Barbican, Digital

One Sunday this past February I spent the day watching people work. Park Lanes is a documentary filmed in a Virginia factory where bowling lanes are constructed and assembled, and it has been made to reflect the structure of a working day. The film runs for eight hours, beginning with workers arriving at the factory, observing their various tasks, watching them take their lunch break, and then back to work before they head home at the end of the day. Why would anyone watch this, you ask? Well, it’s pretty absorbing viewing. Once I got into the film’s rhythms, I found it to be transfixing, and aside from a few minutes when I nipped out to grab another coffee and use the toilet, I was happy to sit there for the whole duration. Park Lanes allows us to see every step that goes into the making of a bowling lane, and you come away with a real respect for the people who do this intricate work every day.
 
18 – Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988) – ICA, Digital

After waiting years for the opportunity to see the work of Theo Angelopoulos on the big screen, I frustratingly couldn’t make it to as many of the ICA’s retrospective screenings as I wanted to, and I struggled to connect with some of the films I did see. The Travelling Players is brilliantly crafted, although its dense interweaving of Greek history left me feeling confounded for much of it. Landscape in the Mist is the one that really clicked with me. The story is simple, following two children as they travel to Germany to seek the father they have never met, encountering both kindness and cruelty from adults along the way. As ever, Angelopoulos composes magnificent long takes, but there’s an emotional reach to this film that I didn’t get from many of his others, particularly in the unforgettable ending.
 
17 – Improper Conduct (Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal, 1984) – ICA, 16mm

A curious thing happened when I bought my ticket for a film called Improper Conduct at the ICA. The film advertised was a 1994 drama about sexual harassment in the workplace, but when the screening started it quickly transpired that we were instead watching a documentary about Fidel Castro’s persecution of intellectuals, dissidents and homosexuals. The film consists of interviews with those who fled Castro’s regime and are now residing in the US or Europe, and their testimonies of the repression, fear and torture that they experienced in Cuba carry a powerful emotional charge. It’s an exceptional and completely enthralling documentary, and it's was a particularly revelatory discovery considering I had no idea of this film’s existence before the screening started.
 
16 – The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Vincente Minnelli, 1962) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

For the character of a Latino ladies’ man – a role once played by Rudolf Valentino – Vincente Minnelli wanted Alain Delon, which makes sense. MGM wanted Glenn Ford, which makes much less sense. The miscasting of the the stolid 46 year-old Ford as an avowedly neutral playboy who faces a crisis of conscience as war rages around him is just one of the missteps that this drama makes. Ford stars alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Thulin (looking unhappy, and dubbed by Angela Lansbury), but the one actor who really makes an impression is Lee J. Cobb, who rants and raves forebodingly and introduces the concept of the four horsemen before promptly dying in the prologue. Stuck with a story and a leading man he didn’t care for, the director said he simply focused on making the film as visually stunning as possible, and every scene is shot with astonishing flair and vibrancy, with Minnelli's masterful blocking of crowd scenes in particular standing out. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a notorious critical and commercial flop in 1962, but it was a sensational experience to discover it on this gorgeous 35mm print.
 
15 – Way Down East (DW Griffith, 1920) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Way Down East runs for almost two and a half hours, and in truth, there’s a solid twenty minutes of mugging from one-note supporting characters that I could have easily done without, but whenever Griffith ignores the comic relief and focuses on his star Lilian Gish, the film is magnificent. In this moralistic melodrama, Gish plays the poor girl from the country who travels to the home of a rich relation in search of support, winds up being tricked into a sham marriage and impregnated by a dastardly cad, and is subsequently left to fend for herself through one tragedy after another. The film is full of floridly overwritten title cards, but one of the most simple leads into the film’s climax: "Then the storm." Watching Gish clamber about on ice floes in sub-zero temperatures is a incredible way for this film to end, especially when you read about the gruelling experiences she had doing it for real.
 
14 – Pirosmani (Giorgi Shengelaia, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Niko Pirosmani was a Georgian painter whose work was only celebrated after his death. While he was alive, he worked mundane jobs and painted scenes from everyday Georgian life, often trading his artwork for food and board, which is why they frequently decorated taverns. In Giorgi Shengelaia’s Pirosmani, which unfolds in a series of elliptical, understated scenes, we see how this man’s sole purpose was to live and paint. He had no instinct for money, and in fact his attempt at running a grocery store unravels in a comical fashion because he keeps giving food away to those who need it. Pirosmani is modestly scaled and presented in a straightforward manner, and it is a moving celebration of a man went unrecognised in his own time but is now widely celebrated as one of his nation’s greatest artists. My favourite scene comes towards the end, when he is locked in a room and told not to leave until he has finished a painting; the villagers continue with their celebration, completely forgetting about him, and when they finally unlock the door they find he has created something astonishing.
 
13 – Time of the Heathen (Peter Kass, 1961) – Close-Up, Digital

For much of the first hour of this film I was intrigued but it didn’t seem to be doing anything I hadn’t seen plenty of times before. It’s the story of a drifter named Gaunt (John Heffernan) who flees into the forest having been falsely accused of a rape that he actually witnessed, and when he runs he takes the woman’s mute son with him. Time of the Heathen was obviously shot on an extremely low budget, and there are limitations in the filmmaking and acting that are familiar from films put together on a shoestring, but Peter Kass has an extraordinary ace up his sleeve. An opening title card tells us that the story is taking place four years after Hiroshima, but I had forgotten that by the time Kass staged the hallucinatory and nightmarish sequence of wartime horror that gives the final third of the film an apocalyptic mood. Far from being something that felt familiar; by the end, I was convinced that I had never seen anything quite like The Time of the Heathen. 
 
12 – On Approval (Clive Brook, 1944) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

This was the only film ever directed by the actor Clive Brook. After watching On Approval – which Lindsay Anderson called “The funniest British comedy ever made” – his failure to progress in this field feels like a terrible loss. It’s a battle of the sexes comedy with two mismatched couples forced to spend a week together in Scotland, and the actors take great pleasure in delivering the script’s rapid-fire bitchy dialogue: "You needn't try to lock your door, Maria. Only the rain will want to come in." The material is already very funny, but what really elevates the film above the standard romantic comedy fare is Brook’s inventive filmmaking. He sets the tone at the start of the picture with a ridiculous newsreel prologue, and there is so much fun to be had in his framing, pacing and visual gags. Quite why Brook never again stepped behind the camera, or even acted in movies again for almost two decades, is beyond me.
 
11 – Unfinished Business (Gregory La Cava, 1941) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Another gem from Gregory La Cava, who surely stands as one of the most under-appreciated directors of his era. This is a dazzling film in both its formal elegance and how strikingly mature and progressive it is in the way it navigates the complexities of doomed relationships. Irene Dunne plays Nancy, who is seduced and then abandoned by Preston Foster, for whom she maintains an unrequited love, and then impulsively marries his drunken brother Robert Montgomery. As is so often the case with La Cava – who favoured a loose, improvisational style – the performances feel alive and the characters bounce off each other with a thrilling ease. The story takes a number of surprising and dramatic turns, and there are marvellous moments scattered throughout the picture. My favourite directorial touch occurs during a party, where news of a scandal is whispered across the room, the camera following the thread of this tale as it spreads from one person to another like a virus.
 
10 – Strongroom (Vernon Sewell, 1962) – BFI Southbank,  35mm

This low-budget British drama begins with a simple heist plotted for a Saturday morning, just before a bank closes its doors ahead of the bank holiday weekend. Of course, it all goes awry, but the way things go cataclysmically wrong is handled perfectly by director Sewell. He creates a situation where the criminals are desperate to get back into the bank but are prevented from doing so, and where a couple of the bank’s employees are trapped in the vault, trying to maintain their rapidly diminishing air supply, and over the course of eighty taut minutes he squeezes maximum tension out of this scenario. There are terrific character turns all the way down the cast, but Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn are particularly good as the bank manager and his secretary, who have always had a cold, formal relationship, but find a different connection in these grave circumstances. It’s a riveting thriller, with a gut-punch of an ending.
 
9 – The Liberation of LB Jones (William Wyler, 1970) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The great William Wyler ended his career with this film, and I’m always a little anxious about  seeing one of the masters of Golden Age Hollywood trying to engage with the gritty realities of the New Hollywood era. His adaptation of Jesse Hill Ford’s 1965 novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones tackles racism in Tennessee, with Roscoe Lee Browne starring as the funeral director who seeks a divorce from his wife after accusing of having an affair with a white police officer, an action that has horrific consequences as the cop tries to cover up this scandal. A brilliant Lee J. Cobb and Lee Majors plays the bigoted local lawyer and his idealistic nephew respectively, while Yaphet Kotto is an ex-con out for revenge. Wyler takes a forthright, clear-eyed view of this material, and The Liberation of LB Jones is one of the most uncompromising films about race from this era, with some of the violent acts still carrying a shocking power.
 
8 – Hurlevent (Jacques Rivette, 1985) – ICA, 35mm

Jacques Rivette’s work has seen a notable increase in visibility in recent years thanks to a number of restorations – I now have blu-rays of the long unavailable Out 1 and L'Amour fou sitting on my shelf, which is something I scarcely could have imagined just over a decade ago. One of the most obscure works still in need of rediscovery is Hurlevent. For this screening the ICA imported the only 35mm print they could find, and presented it with live subtitles. It’s a little surprising that this film is so little-known, because it’s certainly one of his shorter and most accessible films, and in fact it is an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Rivette focuses on the first half of the book and takes a stripped down approach to the aesthetic style, but he has such a keen sense of the shifting dynamics between these characters, and his incorporation of some brilliantly crafted dream sequences is incredibly powerful. One hopes this film receives the same treatment as the rest of Rivette’s oeuvre soon. It deserves to be much more widely seen and acclaimed.
 
7 – Westward the Women (William Wellman, 1951) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

Robert Taylor stars as the man tasked with guiding 100 women from Chicago across unforgiving terrain to California, where they are promised as brides to the men who have settled there. This premise may seem to give the women little agency in their own affairs, but Wellman’s film finds ways to enrich their characters and push them beyond the boundaries of what might be expected of a traditional woman’s role in a 1950s western. This is a tough and gripping film and at times the characters’ journey appears to be a hopeless one. We lose a number of them along the way and Wellman ensures we feel the impact of their loss, while the ones that finally make it to their new lives in California have been forever changed by their odyssey. Wellman stages some fine action set-pieces – including an attempt to get the wagons down a rocky ridge that’s reminiscent of The Wages of Fear – and his decision to forbid cinematographer William Mellor from extensive use of filters emphasises the harshness of the barren wilderness they are wandering through.
 
6 – Last Summer (Frank Perry, 1969) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

I’ve been a fan of everything I have seen directed by Frank Perry, but I was wondering when I would ever get the opportunity to see Last Summer, a film that appears to have slipped out of circulation entirely. So while many people were clamouring to see the original print of Star Wars at this year’s Film on Film festival, I was overjoyed to see Last Summer in the programme, being screened from one of the few 35mm prints that still exists. There’s a distinct end-of-the-sixties vibe to this film, as a group of teenagers, free of adult supervision, spend their summer days enjoying their freedom and trying to get laid. The two boys (Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison) are easily controlled by the confident and manipulative Sandy (Barbara Hershey), and they form a tight-knit trio, which is thrown off by the arrival of the awkward outsider Rhoda (Catherine Burns). The film’s carefree tone gradually darkens, leading to a very sad ending. The performances are strong, but the film is stolen by the Academy Award-nominated Burns, whose monologue had the entire BFI audience holding its breath.
 
5 – Ludwig (Luchino Visconti, 1973) – BFI Southbank, 35mm

The BFI’s Luchino Visconti retrospective was named Decadence and Decay, and that’s an apt way to sum up this epic film. Ludwig is a portrait of Ludwig II of Bavaria, who is better known by the sobriquet The Mad King. In Visconti’s depiction, he doesn’t come across as entirely mad, at least not initially, just a man who has been thrust into a role he is ill-equipped for and uninterested in. Ludwig would rather build castles and fund his favourite artists (notably Richard Wagner) than deal with affairs of state. Seen in its full 237-minute version on a lush 35mm print, Ludwig is slow and stately, but I found it entirely absorbing and occasionally surprisingly funny – there’s a hilarious segment where Ludwig essentially holds his favourite actor hostage, forcing the exhausted thespian to perform classic roles on demand, and I love the scene where Romy Schneider searches for Ludwig in his many castles and can only cackle at the ridiculous opulence of it all. As the king, Helmut Berger has a suitably detached and haunted quality, growing increasingly wild-eyed and paranoid, bearing his blackened teeth, in the film's second half as the cabinet plots his removal. As ever with Visconti, Ludwig is overwhelming in its aesthetic splendour and indulgence.
 
4 – City of Pirates (Raúl Ruiz, 1983) – ICA, 35mm

Raúl Ruiz reportedly embarked upon City of Pirates after feeling that his previous film The Three Crowns of the Sailor had been too commercial. No chance of any such description being applied to this film. Ruiz wrote the script using a technique of automatic writing immediately after he had woken up, and the film feels like something that has sprung up unfiltered from the subconscious. There is a narrative of sorts running throughout the picture, in which Melvil Poupaud makes his screen debut as a 10 year-old who claims to have murdered his own family and ends up proposing to Anne Alvaro, but the film unfolds with a languid dream logic. Ruiz incorporates so many different cinematic techniques to give every scenes a startling look, and seen on a beautiful 35mm print, it was easy to succumb to the strange and overwhelming atmosphere of curiosity and dread that the film conjures up. I can't recall the last time I saw a single film that made me gasp so frequently at the brilliance and imagination of its compositions.
 
3 – Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978) – ICA, 35mm

Doomed Love could be seen as a ‘Late Style’ film, given the fact that director Manoel de Oliveira was around 70 years old when he made it, but the fact that he went on making films for another 34 years somewhat confuses that definition. There is a stately quality to this film, which achieves, better than almost any other film I can think of, the effect of reading an epic 19th century novel. Inspired by events that occurred in his own family’s history, Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1862 novel Amor de Perdição tells the story of two young lovers, whose passion for each other is thwarted by their feuding families. De Oliveira leans heavily on the use of a narrator to relay some of these facts to the audience, but his careful blocking and beautifully lit compositions draw the viewer in. The version we saw was the 262-minute theatrical presentation rather than the (heavily criticised at the time) 287-minute television version, and I was completely under its spell for the entire running time, right up to the heart-stopping final moments.
 
2 – Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, 1966) – BFI Southbank, 16mm

A unique cinema experience for a one-of-a-kind film. Chelsea Girls consists of twelve reels capturing Factory regulars as they sit around and talk, but the reels are projected side-by-side, with the sound muted on one reel at a time. In his dismissive review, Roger Ebert wrote, "Like so many other elements of Andy Warhol’s world, it has little intrinsic worth. You must have the faith before you go into the theater; you must be, as the used car dealers say, 'pre-sold'." But as someone who has been bored by some of Warhol’s experiments in the past, I found this surprisingly fascinating viewing. It’s a testament to the natural charisma of many of the participants that they manage to captivate for almost three and a half hours, even when they are doing next to nothing. These vignettes are often mundane but occasionally quite funny and frequently compelling, with the unpredictable Ondine – the self-styled “Pope of Greenwich Village” – introducing a genuine sense of tension into his climactic encounter with Ingrid Superstar.
 
1 – La Région centrale + *Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow, 1971 / 2002) – ICA, 16mm

How often do you emerge from a cinema with your head spinning, having just witnessed something that felt genuinely new? This year I had that experience twice over a single weekend. Prior to the ICA’s weekend celebrating the work of Michael Snow, I had only seen one of his films – the entrancing Wavelenth – and Snow’s fascination with the possibilities of camera movement is expanded upon in La Région centrale. For this film, Snow decamped to a mountain in northern Quebec, where he set up a camera attached to a robotic arm pre-programmed to move in a variety of ways. The resulting film is an extraordinary thing to experience. It’s disorienting, thrilling and completely captivating across three hours. La Région centrale reconfigures your conception of cinematic space, and what’s remarkable is how it never feels redundant or repetitive, even though all you’re looking at is shots of the rocks or the sky as Snow’s camera lurches in a multitude of directions.
 
The following day I re-encountered Snow, but this time he was marching into the digital age. Snow was in his 70s when he made *Corpus Callosum, but he embraces the new creative options offered by digital technology with an almost childlike enthusiasm. As his camera tracks laterally across scenes of work and domestic life, Snow distorts the image and adds graphics to create a series of surreal visual gags; his actors shrink and expand, items explode and disappear at random. In the most remarkable sequence, Snow presents us with a family sitting in a garishly decorated living room, and as he manipulates the image in countless ways, he leaves us wondering what on earth is real and where the artifice ends, which is a question that resonated particularly powerfully at a time when our faith in the truth of what we see has become so compromised. Watching Michael Snow’s films with a packed audience restored my faith in cinema to expand my horizons and continually question what is possible in this medium. It's an experience I will always cherish.