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1.  Prince of the City (Sidney Lumet, 1981)

This epic foray into the world of narcotics, police corruption and wire taps was made 25 years before The Wire hit our screens. Treat Williams is rivetingly intense as New York cop Daniel Ciello, caught between loyalty to his dirty partners and the desire for redemption. Based on a real life internal investigation, Lumet’s film exposes in forensic detail the complex human pyramid propping up the drugs trade, from street punk to high court judge.  That this stone cold classic is currently unavailable on DVD is, well, criminal.

2.  Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalovic, 2005)

A surreal evocation of life at a girls’ boarding school, this spellbindingly beautiful French film is loosely adapted from Frank Wedekind’s 1888 symbolist novella Mine-Haha: The Corporal Education Of Young Girls. The film views events through the eyes of six-year-old Iris as she arrives at a mysterious institution bounded by an impenetrable perimeter wall. A sense of menace lurks beneath the ritualized existence of the girls, who appear to be being groomed for some unseen purpose. Dreamlike and governed by its own inner logic, Innocence is both a successor to Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and a precursor to Jordan Scott’s 2009 Cracks.

3.  Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

Evoking extremes of sex and death with a unique visual poetry, Onibaba is among the most beautiful howls of despair ever committed to celluloid. In war-torn 14^th century Japan, a woman and her widowed daughter-in-law eke out a miserable existence in a susuki grass swamp. They survive by killing samurai for their armor and disposing of the bodies in a pit.  When a comrade of the girl’s dead husband returns from the war, lust and jealousy begin to poison the women’s relationship. The black and white cinematography is breathtaking, particularly the feverish nocturnal scenes in which the girl runs, terrified, through the eerily undulating grass to reach her lover. No less remarkable is Hikaru Hayashi’s dissonant soundtrack, which deploys found sounds including pigeons chirping.

4.  Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)

This US indie, written and directed by former mathematician Shane Carruth for $7,000, is the story of two engineers in a Dallas suburb who accidentally invent a time machine in their garage.  Initially, the pair use their new toy to play the stock market, but as they explore its potential further they find themselves embroiled in a nightmarish world of endless paradox. A smart, funny and frightening film about the relationship between ethics and science, Primer picks up where the mind-bending narrative twists of Christopher Nolan’s Memento left off.

5.  The Dresser (Peter Yates, 1983)

Set in London during the Blitz, The Dresser is based on playwright Ronald Harwood’s experiences as an assistant to legendary Shakespearean actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit.  Tom Courtenay plays the eponymous “dresser”, a long suffering dogsbody to Albert Finney’s tyrannical, ailing, alcoholic actor, referred to only as “Sir”.  By turns hilarious and deeply moving, the film brilliantly captures the interdependence between the two men, who function like a married couple and increasingly resemble Lear and the Fool. You could cut yourself on the dialogue, and both Courtenay and Finney are magnificent.

>>Ten great films you may not have seen: no’s 6-10

6. Safe (Todd Haynes, 1996)

Julianne Moore plays Carol White, a privileged housewife living a comfortable but sterile  existence in the San Fernando Valley of the late 1980′s. Gradually, Carol begins to have allergic reactions to the things around her, succumbing to multiple chemical sensitivity to the point where everyday activities trigger nose bleeds, vomiting and convulsions. In desperation, she leaves her family behind to join a remote ‘healing community’ in the New Mexico desert. Although on one level Todd ‘Far From Heaven’ Haynes’ film functions as a critique of 80′s materialism, its disturbing power and resonance go deeper: it speaks of to us of an insidious physical and spiritual malaise, a contemporary nightmare in which the very fabric of modernity has turned toxic.

7. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

Though in some ways stylistically dated,  The Innocents remains as striking and downright strange today as it must have seemed upon release. Much of the screenplay was written by Truman Capote, and it shows. Based on Henry James’ novella The Turn Of The Screw, this is part ghost story, part Freudian hothouse drama. Deborah Kerr is Miss Giddens, a young governess who takes a job at a country estate, replacing a woman who died suddenly in unexplained circumstances.  Plagued by voices and visions, she soon begins to suspect that the children in her care are sharing a secret. Is she right, or is she merely projecting her own fears and desires on her young charges?  This is a deeply eerie film that finds a powerful cinematic language for the terrors of the repressed id.

8. Pandemonium (Julien Temple, 2001)

Fresh from the Sex Pistols documentary Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple turned his lens on the fraught relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge with characteristic energy, casting John Hannah as a sour-faced Wordsworth and Linus Roach as the opium-eater plagued by prophetic visions. But there’s much more to this film than ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Romantic Poets’: while Temple has fun with Coleridge the myth, he never forgets the man, nor the fact that great artists are often useless human beings. Exploring the interlocking of political idealism with personal failure in a way reminiscent of Howard Brentons’ 1984 play Bloody Poetry, Pandemonium is an example of a thoroughly English film that nevertheless refuses to peddle British heritage as a museum culture.

9. ’4′ (Ilya Khrzhanovsky, 2005)

A grotesque foray into the scarred psyche of post-Soviet Russia, 4 goes to such extremes it sometimes defies belief.  Tradition and modernity jar against one another as Khrzhanovsky deploys a series of unforgettable images, including an interminable orgy of rotten meat, mad crones and wild animals. At times incomprehensible, the film seems to be an allegory for the self-cannibalism of a society struggling to come to terms with its own destructive history. Utterly, utterly mental.

10. L.627 (Bernard Tavernier, 1992)

This austere French police thriller offers the ultimate antidote to the posturing and cliché of the Hollywood cop movie. Rarely have we seen the prosaic world of day to day police work rendered with such unglamorous honesty. Didier Bezace is superb as Lucien “Lulu” Marquet, a veteran of the Paris Police Department re-assigned to ‘les Stupes’, the French narcotics division, and struggling to police the streets with a modicum of decency. Screenwriter Michel Alexandre was an ex-cop who had served in the drug squad, and his script, whose title refers to a provision of the public health code, upset many in the French political establishment. L.627 is a humane and sympathetic film, directed with a restraint that makes its message all the more powerful.

>>Ten great films you may not have seen: no’s 1-5

Set at the turn of the millennium, I Am Love tells the story of the Recchis, a family dynasty of fabulously wealthy Milanese textile producers.  At its centre is Emma, an impeccably glamorous and dutiful wife to Tancredi, the family’s stuffed-shirt patriarch. Their son Edo wants to set up a restaurant with his friend Antonio, a talented young chef. Meanwhile, when Emma discovers that her daughter is having a secret affair with a woman, the revelation opens a door in her own mind through which forbidden passion soon springs.

Fittingly for a film about duty and desire, Sicilian director Luca Guadagnino combines exquisite sensuality with technical discipline and narrative restraint. Much of the film is a through-the-keyhole gawk at the seductive surface beauty of the Recchi lifestyle, the camera lingering over to-die-for furnishings, mouth-watering cuisine and superlative couture.

It’s deftly handled, the unforced pulse of the editing emulating the movements of the human eye. Whether soaking in the languor of the Recchi’s swish interiors, or outdoors, floating over bodies splashed in Mediterranean light, Guadagnino has given us a hymn to the pleasures of looking.

Perhaps chief among these is the pleasure of looking at Tilda Swinton, who in her twin role as producer spent 12 years bringing I Am Love to the screen. The actress is a transfixing presence, her beauty by turns luminous and austere, her features hinting at a fiercely guarded interior life.

In part I Am Love is a paean to a fading world, an Italy in which lines of class, gender and sexuality are clearly drawn, and beautiful things and the values that go with them are passed down through generations. An impending buy-out of the Recchi empire signals that this world is giving way to a new order in which global financial markets hold sway.

Yet despite its nostalgia, in I Am Love tradition overshadows the present and stifles the future: Emma’s gilded-cage existence has robbed her of her real self.  In particular, the film seems concerned with the deadening effect of the family on Italian life, as well as with bourgeois hypocrisy, symbolised by the Recchi’s past collaboration with the Mussolini regime. Though its sympathies lie ultimately with the forces of renewal, the film’s dénouement shows the high price paid by those who decide to break free.

That the climax feels somewhat contrived is less an indictment than a reflection of the subtlety of what comes before. As for the rest, it’s a wonderfully absorbing lesson in style, grace and understatement.