Co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar, this 2014 Argentine / Spanish black comedy is composed of six stand-alone shorts united by a common theme of violence and vengeance.   In one, a waitress adds a special ingredient to an arrogant loan shark’s meal, in another two drivers on a lone highway have an argument with tragic consequences.  Six tales dealing with extremes of human behaviour.

The film that bankrupted Coppola.  Overblown and certainly over budget (production costs ballooned from $2 million to over $25 million) but a brilliantly-realised imaginative, idiosyncratic musical which looks fabulous.  Originally intended as an “antidote” to the enormous cost, pressures and production setbacks of his Apocalypse Now, Coppola has said that the films he made during the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, such as The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club and The Godfather Part III, were done to pay off the debts incurred by One from the Heart.

Featuring an original soundtrack from Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits.

A heart-wrenching drama and love story set in 1840s Germany, it portrays the fictional village of Schabbach suffering from food shortages, battered by a series of freezing winters and under the yoke of autocratic Prussian rule.  The Portuguese emperor is recruiting young Germans to colonise Brazil and the film captures the plight of hundreds of thousands of these Europeans (whose motto was: “Any fate is better than death”) who emigrated to faraway South America to escape the famine, poverty and despotism that ruled at home.

At 53 hours and 25 minutes, Edgar Reitz’s Heimat was already the longest series of feature-length films in cinema history. This is its four-hour prequel with spectacular landscapes and an ultra-high definition shooting format.

An avalanche seems a suitable metaphor for trouble that starts small, gathers momentum and ultimately threatens to wipe out the peaceful balance of an up-market Scandi couple’s ski vacation – and possibly even their marriage – in Ruben Östlund’s precisely calibrated fourth feature Force Majeure. By no means a traditional disaster movie, in which the audience’s pleasure scales in direct proportion to the pandemonium witnessed onscreen, Östlund’s unsettling psychological thriller leads with the spectacular incident and studies its disastrous consequences on each of the family members involved.

A famous movie director – a calculated self-portrait of Fellini himself perhaps – unable to find the inspiration to start his new film and harried by people in the industry, his wife and his mistress, retreats into personal recollections, dreams and fantasies.  Arguably Fellini’s masterpiece.  Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Aimée.

Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, now ruled by religious fundamentalists, proud cattle herder Kidane lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife, his daughter and their shepherd-boy. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences. Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes abruptly in this stunningly rendered film from a master of world cinema.

On this epic version of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd John Schlesinger worked with acclaimed collaborators – actors Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch; writer Frederic Raphael, cinematographer Nicolas Roeg and composer Richard Rodney Bennett – to great effect.  A sumptuous classic.

A boy believes that a new train service will create a miracle for his fractured family.  Rich, subtle, delicate and hugely rewarding film from Japan.

This film stars real-life brothers Koki Maeda and Oshiro Maeda and tells the story of two young brothers who got separated and had to live in different cities – one with their father, one with their mother and her parents – and dream of reuniting.

Two travelling salesmen who peddle novelty items feature in a series of offbeat comedy stories. The title is a reference to the 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder which depicts a rural wintertime scene, with some birds perched on tree branches. The birds are watching the people below and wonder what they are doing …

A moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers a dark family secret dating from the terrible years of the Nazi occupation. 18-year old Anna, a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, is preparing to become a nun when the Mother Superior insists she first visit her sole living relative. Naïve, innocent Anna soon finds herself in the presence of her aunt, a worldly and cynical Communist Party insider, who shocks her with the declaration that her real name is Ida and her Jewish parents were murdered during the Nazi occupation.