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

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.

Before CGI, if you wanted to film an epic battle scene, you had to stage one. Waterloo, the Soviet-Italian film by Sergei Bondarchuk, is one long battle scene, a triumph of manpower and logistics that required a cast of thousands.  To recreate the battlefield, Russian engineers bulldozed swathes of the Ukranian counrtryside, laying five miles of road and transplanting 5,000 trees. With some 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras, during filming the director was said to be in command of the seventh largest army in the world.  They certainly don’t make them like this anymore, and for good reason: a box office flop, Waterloo cost £12m, at that time one of the most expensive films in history.

But for all its epic sweep, the film’s essential drama takes place in the mind of one man. Rod Steiger’s tour de force performance as the diminutive emperor is a study in physical and mental torment. He gives us the military genius riven by self doubt, a monstrous egomaniac obsessed with his own legacy, yet also oppressed by the burden of the myth he has created. For much of the film Steiger’s face is a clammy, seething mass of neuroses; his Napoleon is a Lear-like figure, raging against storms, corralling his generals while bent double with the stomach cancer he is fighting to conceal.

By contrast, Christopher Plummer as Wellington is every inch the unflappable English aristocrat, napping under a tree as his opponent’s forces mass in the valley.  Steiger’s performance came just two years after his portrayal of another troubled soilder in The Sergeant, the story of a gay US army officer struggling with his own repressed desires.

With scenes like the charge of the Scots Greys and the desperate final stand of the French Old Guard, Waterloo is undeniably exciting, boys-own stuff in the vein of historical war epics like 1964′s Zulu.  But in some respects it also prefigures the anti-war films of the post-Vietnam era. At the height of the battle a young man breaks from his unit and runs among the troops, pleading with both sides to stop the killing.  Later, as it scans the scarred landscape, the camera picks out his corpse lying among the dead.  The film closes with a long sequence in which Wellington surveys the carnage, sombre in victory, while Napoleon leaves in his carriage, a broken man.

Mirroring the madness of its subject with its own crazed ambition, Waterloo is a forgotten classic that deserves to be ranked among the finest war films of the ’70s.

Lord Uxbridge: Er-herm. Sir.
Duke of Wellington: [waking] Ah, Uxbridge.
Lord Uxbridge: As I am second in command and in case anything should happen to you, what are your plans?
Duke of Wellington: To beat the French. [goes back to sleep]

The recent glut of vampire movies is probably enough to sate even the most ardent fang-flick fancier, but 2007′s 30 Days Of Night is one you may have missed.  Based on the cult comic book of the same name, it’s a proper grown-up horror film – an exercise in bleak, existential terror.

Once a year in the remote snowbound town of Barrow, Alaska, the sun sets and does not come up again for an entire month. A pack of vampires discover this ideal hunting ground and, as the light dwindles, they descend on the town for a feeding frenzy.  Josh Hartnett plays the local sheriff trying to keep a handful of survivors alive long enough to see the dawn.

The plot may not be original, but in the hands of Hard Candy director David Slade and with Sam Raimi on production duties, the film’s execution is a cut above. Stark, minimal and strikingly shot, its relentless air of grim isolation harks back to John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece The Thing.  It features some brilliant set pieces and camerawork, including a stunning prolonged aerial shot as the vampires first lay waste to the town.

The bloodsuckers themselves are superbly realised.  These are old-school Nosferatu – ancient, feral and demonic, their black eyes and oval faces seemingly based on sharks. They behave like pack animals, loping over the roofs of the town and screeching like hyenas as their human prey huddle together in their hiding places. It’s great to see a film so true to the unvarnished spirit of these folk monsters. Danny Huston as Marlowe, the vampire leader, is particularly terrifying.

30 Days is a viscerally brutal film with some exceptionally graphic scenes. It’s uncompromising in its intensity and does not let up. Nor does it strive for cheap effect, the script remaining lean and understated right through to the end credits. Along the way it subtly explores its themes of family, community and sacrifice, without forgetting to serve up some gratifyingly kick-ass moments, such as when bearded man-haystack Beau Brower, the town outsider, takes on the fanged tribe in his snow-plough.

In a genre currently saturated with cynical teen-market remakes and torture porn, here’s a horror film with integrity. If you think Twilight sucks, try this.

2012, as predicted by the Mayans, is the year the world will end. Solar flares have boiled the Earth’s core, unleashing a cataclysm of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that threaten to ravage the planet’s landmass like so much pie crust.  Down on ground zero is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a divorced LA writer whose camping weekend with the kids turns into an epic battle to get his family to safety.

At the helm of this juggernaut is Hollywood’s  master of disaster Roland Emmerich, the man behind box office leviathans like Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC.

Sadly, the most spectacular thing about 2012 is quite how, armed with a blank-cheque budget, Emmerich has managed to mould his earth-shattering subject matter into something so prosaic and uninvolving.

The wheels start to come off early on, as the Curtis clan make their escape by car and plane from a crumbling LA.  In the hands of a Spielberg this would be heart-in-mouth stuff, as all around the fleeing family roads rupture, skyscrapers buckle and chasms gape.  But this is conveyor-belt calamity: as the world gives way beneath them, a hair’s-breadth from death, all Cusack and co can muster is a series of goofy “woooah!” reaction shots. There’s no real sense of danger or consequence. Even the CGI seems phoned-in.

Like its predecessors, 2012 invites us to take a perverse pleasure in witnessing the flimsy constructs of our civilisation topple, symbols of a global system as vulnerable to the avarice of bankers as it is to terrorist attack. Like the resurgence of the horror genre, the return of the disaster movie signals a new age of anxiety for modern audiences. It’s as if we feel ourselves to be living in a world of perpetual imminent collapse, captive to the opaque whims of government and insecure in the knowledge that the rich will always sell us out.

Sure enough, in 2012 the world’s elite buy themselves tickets to safety, leaving the rest of humanity to face unthinkable carnage. To offset this disconsolate message, the film feeds us a miniature morality play – apocalypse is the occasion for Cusack’s failed American father to gain redemption by saving his family from dysfunction and the rival claims of an interloper (his wife’s plastic surgeon boyfriend, played by Thomas McCarthy).

Along the way, Emmerich throws in some spurious emoting, as characters we barely know or care about say tremulous long-distance goodbyes to family members, mere moments before being swept to their deaths by gargantuan walls of water.

John Cusack looks decidedly sheepish throughout and decides to keep his head down as much as one can when one is the protagonist of a blockbuster. Meanwhile Woody Harrelson hams it to high heaven as a crazed conspiracy theorist, and Danny Glover as the President seems content to offer his services as a poor man’s Morgan Freeman.

Insulting in its emotional cheapness and bogus morality, 2012 is the end of the world as a sanctified Disney ride. Worse still, it’s a barely competent exercise that fails to deliver the goods even on its own terms.

Still, the sea looks cool.

Maverick Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 arthouse horror flick is like no other experience in cinema.  This celluloid cataclysm is amateurish, demented, incoherent, ludicrous, and jaw-droppingly self-important – yet somehow you cannot take your eyes off it for a moment of its two hour running time.

Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a lengthy business trip to find that his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), has been having an affair and wants a divorce.  Scenes of increasingly hysterical marital meltdown follow as the couple wage a war of emotional attrition over the head of their young son in a claustrophobic Berlin flat.  It’s like Kramer vs Kramer on mind-twisting psychotropics.

Yet both Mark and his wife’s lover must contend with a third, secret love interest: gradually they discover that Anna has spawned and nurtured a diabolical creature in a derelict flat on the other side of the city. Worse still, it’s much better in bed than either of them, and she is prepared to kill in order to protect it. 

Possession offers a unique cocktail of elements in collision. To his general directorial ineptitude, Zulawski adds poker-faced pretentiousness, one of the most incomprehensible scripts ever written, and risible dialogue riddled with quasi-philosophical balderdash.  The acting, with the exception of the astonishing Isabelle Adjani, is execrable and unintentionally hilarious.  The young Sam Neill – never the most towering of talents – is here criminally mis-directed, pushed so far beyond his limits he virtually exits the stratosphere.

And Possession is funny. Gut-creasingly funny. Witness the scene where Mark tracks down and confronts his wife’s lover, Heinrich, an outrageously camp Steven Berkoff type played with delirious pansexual loucheness by German actor Heinz Bennent. The following is typical of their exchanges as they careen around one another like a pair of loons:

Heinrich: There is nothing to fear except God, whatever that means to you.
Mark: For me God is a disease.
Heinrich: That’s why through a disease we can reach God.

Its deeply suspect gender politics notwithstanding, at the heart of Possession is a great concept – a film about sexual possessiveness and marital trauma set against a backdrop of demoniacal madness and body horror.   Alas, Zulawski seems to have made it while absorbed entirely in a private world of opaque meaning.  The film seems to be a cathartic outpouring of his feelings about his own divorce  coupled with a comment on his ill-treatment at the hands of the Polish authorities, washed down with half-baked Cold War metaphors and lashings of sixth-form existentialism.

But what single-handedly entitles Possession to its status as a lost classic is an extended scene in the Berlin subway, when the evil that has taken seed in Anna finally erupts (see YouTube clip below).  What follow are three of the most intense and harrowing minutes in all of cinema.  The physical and emotional commitment shown by Adjani is remarkable.

Almost as unforgettable is a scene in which we finally witness the creature, brilliantly designed by E.T. creator Carlo Rambaldi. The disturbing sight of Adjani locked in coitus with her demon lover is one of the great horror movie images.

These scenes, as well as the sheer unrelenting pitch of hysteria that permeates the film, invite comparison with the likes of The Exorcist, the Polanski of Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, early Cronenberg, and even Lars von Trier’s recent Antichrist.

Combining moments of unhinged genius with some of the most woefully misconceived and self-indulgent film making ever, Possession is mandatory viewing. Just don’t forget to look out for the man in the pink socks.

“I believe this may just be my masterpiece,” declares ruthless Nazi-hunter Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) as he brands another victim at the close of Inglourious Basterds. It sounds like Tarantino cheekily reviewing his own film – and for much of the proceedings it’s tempting to agree with him.

Witness for example the superb opening sequence: in occupied France in 1941, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the notorious ‘Jew Hunter’ of the Waffen-SS, interrogates a French dairy farmer who is hiding a Jewish family underneath his floorboards.  It’s one of those pieces of protracted cat-and-mouse dialogue that Tarantino is famous for, and here he achieves a new mastery. He ratchets up near-unbearable levels of tension with some deliciously crisp writing, while imbuing the scene with genuine emotional depth.

From here the plot sets out on a familiar revenge trajectory: four years after witnessing the slaughter of her family by Landa, Jewish refugee Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) attracts the unwelcome romantic attentions of German war hero Fredrick Zoller. When Zoller arranges an illustrious film premiere at the cinema she now runs, Dreyfus seizes her chance to wipe out the top brass of the Nazi high command – perhaps even, it is rumoured, the Fuhrer himself.

The premiere also attracts the attention of the eponymous Basterds, a group of Nazi-scalping Jewish-American guerrilla soldiers led by Raine, who team up with British agent Lt Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and undercover German screen diva Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). As plans are hatched to infiltrate the screening. multiple suicidal plot threads interweave, converging at the film’s close in an inevitable orgy of destruction. It’s like a coked-up, alternative-reality Valkyrie, blessedly freed from fidelity to fact or the observance of good taste or proportion.

The film’s second great set piece is a scene in the basement of a French tavern. It’s the familiar Great Escape-style scenario involving Allies in German uniforms fluffing their accents, but characteristically, Tarantino engages the patrons in a pop culture guessing game. As the protagonists down pale ales with the names of movie stars plastered to their foreheads,  the scene riffs off themes of roleplay and double-bluff, building with terrible inevitability to one of Tarantino’s trademark Mexican stand offs. Once again, its cracklingly intense – the direction razor-sharp, the dialogue pitch perfect.

Inglourious Basterds is all about catharsis. Nostalgic for a world of long-lost moral certainties, the film revels in the opportunities for guilt-free Nazi blood-letting. But it’s for crimes against cinema, as much as those against humanity, that Tarantino’s Nazis have to pay. Casting a Jewish film buff and her black projectionist lover as agents of corrective vengeance, the movie becomes an act of revenge for the perversion of Tarantino’s beloved art form by Goebbels’ propaganda machine. Inglourious Basterds is a celebration of cinema as the liberating vehicle of democratic energies, and its plot revolves around the – literally – explosive possibilities of the medium.

Where Basterds triumphs is in the perfect balance it strikes between its pastiche elements and old-fashioned virtues like gripping storytelling and characterisation. The Basterds themselves are wonderfully drawn and gloriously cast, a rat pack of lantern-jawed, likeable psychos straight out of the pages of a Sven Hassel paperback. Every one of the principal actors does a fine job, but it’s Austrian Christoph Waltz in his first American film who steals the thing, delivering as SS chief Hans Lander an absolutely mesmerising performance that drips with a camp, skincrawling menace.

Then, two thirds of the way in, Tarantino comes close to ruining it all. He suddenly feels it necessary to pile on the high farce, tilting the film toward the tiresome genre-parody of other recent outings like Death Proof.  The more he does this, the less you care.

Yet despite Tarantino’s best efforts to sabotage it, Basterds survives by dint of the sheer kinetic force of its deranged denoument. At this stage in his career, Tarantino finally has the finesse to surpass the pulp source material he’s imitating. In places, both the direction and the writing are worthy of the Cohen brothers at their best. Indulge its considerable weaknesses, and there’ some scintillating film-making here with a wit and energy few can touch.

The brainchild of Duncan Jones, aka Zowie ‘my dad’s David’ Bowie, Moon is one of the finest directorial debuts in recent film history. It’s also a career-defining movie for Sam Rockwell, who is a revelation as moon miner Sam Bell, the sole human presence on a lunar base maintained by a computer.

On the far side of the moon, Lunar Industries employee Sam oversees the harvesting of the Helium-3 isotope, which has become humanity’s primary fuel source. Four enormous automated machines, each named after one of the Gospels, rumble over the lunar surface, chewing up rock.

Sam is nearing the end of a three year haul, just two weeks from fulfilling his contract and going home. Long-haired, bearded and a little cracked, he talks to himself as he counts down the days, with only the occasional video message from his wife and daughter to sustain him. His sole companion is the base computer, GERTY, a descendant of 2001’s HAL, voiced by Kevin Spacey.

When Sam crashes a moon buggy while attempting a routine repair, he wakes up in sick bay with no recollection of the accident. Disobeying company orders he sets out on a salvage mission and drags a body from the cockpit – only to find that he has rescued his own clone. Now he really is talking to himself. But these are two very different Sams: one the kooky veteran moon-dweller and the other, himself as he was three years ago – a crew-cutted space jock with anger management issues.

The exchanges between the older, wiser Sam and his headstrong younger self – such as the scene in which he teaches his double the ‘Zen’ of ping-pong – are beautifully done. The Sams bicker, fight and sulk like twin siblings, but between them they gradually uncover the truth: they are just the latest in a series of clones manufactured by their employer,  and their selfhood and sanity hangs on the recycled memories of the original and replays of long-obsolete family messages.

This gives rise to the existential dilemma on which the film pivots. Moon asks the question: how much can you take away from a person before they cease to be a person at all? It also has timely things to say, in the age of Facebook, about how dependent we are on mediated experience and received narratives to create meaning and define our identities.

The character Sam Rockwell creates is full of beautifully observed idiosyncrasies. By the time his world begins to unravel, you care desperately about him. This performance combines with the gritty pathos and humane wit of the script to produce one of the most achingly sad films in years – a heartrending essay in loss.

But it’s the restraint it exercises that makes Moon so powerful. At every juncture, the film refuses to indulge itself or to sentimentalise. Jones resists milking the script for cheap emotional pay offs - as he so easily could, for example, in the scene where the ailing Sam makes a long distance phone call home from the lunar surface. Instead, it’s a masterpiece of understatement. As he makes a series of crushing discoveries about his family, Rockwell silently lets them register on his face before saying simply: “That’s enough”.

Anyone who grew up in the ’70s will recognise Moon’s vision of the future. Largely CGI-free, it takes its aesthetic from period films and TV series – from Silent Running to Space 1999 – and from Andre Tarkovsky’s existential space drama Solaris, as well as the obvious sci-fi landmarks by the likes of Ridley Scott and Kubrick. The scenes on the moon’s surface have a grainy quality reminiscent of vintage NASA footage, while the technology – all trundling box buggies throwing up moon dust – has a prosaic, Corgi-toy functionality. The grinding tedium and loneliness of lunar living are brilliantly evoked.

This sense of belonging to a golden era also applies to Moon‘s directorial style. Though never ponderous, the film takes such a spare, slow-burning approach to storytelling, and employs such economy of means, it harks back to a time when less really was more.

Moon takes on an almost metaphysical quality as the film nears its end, and the denoument includes a moment where Sam effectively experiences his own simultaneous death and rebirth, recalling the star child scene that closes Kubrick’s 2001. The story of the castaway who comes face to face with himself is in the long tradition of the ‘Robinsonade’ stretching back to Defoe’s original Crusoe. Moon takes this idea, makes it literal, and runs with it. And in using the clone theme to explore the relationship between experience, memory and identity, it picks up where Bladerunner left off.

But Moon is no replicant. It wears its influences proudly, but it’s the product of a singular talent, a mainstream film of rare integrity. In fact, justly revered as its landmark forbears are, none of them have quite the emotional gravity, the humanity, of Moon.

(Spoiler alert)

Whatever you think of Antichrist, you’d be hard pressed to deny that Lars von Trier’s choice of music for the opening scene is a masterly stroke. Soundtracked by the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo, the prologue depicts, in exquisite slow-motion monochrome, the death of a toddler in a fall from his bedroom window as his parents make love in the next room. It is breathtaking: you cannot but be gripped by the gorgeous play of lenses on objects, the rhythm of the editing as the film breathes in time with Handel’s sorrowing score. 

Yet given its harrowing subject matter, there’s something almost indecent about this stylised beauty, which has the airbrushed quality of a Calvin Klein ad. It’s one of a number of scenes that take the film perilously close to kitsch. This is something Handel himself would have understood – the drippingly sensual, pleasure-from-pain aesthetic of the Baroque exulted in such paradoxes. Handel’s aria reminds us that, long before Antichrist, Western art trod a thin line between sublime transcendence and the shabby emotional voyeurism of which von Trier is regularly accused.

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play the unnamed couple struggling to come to terms with their son’s death. She, an academic, is experiencing acute anxiety attacks as part of what her doctor calls “atypical grief”.  Her husband, a therapist, insists on taking charge of her treatment himself. He demands that she face her fears, and asks her to name the place she feels most vulnerable.

Her answer: Eden, an isolated cabin in the woods where she spent the previous summer alone with her little boy, attempting to finish her thesis on ‘Gynocide’ – a study of the witch-hunts used for centuries as a means of exerting patriarchal control over women’s bodies. As the couple cross a bridge to enter the woods, it’s clear that, like the ‘Zone’ in Andre Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, Eden is a state of mind, a psychological landscape they must negotiate if they are to free themselves of their burden of guilt and grief.

As well as referencing Tarkovsky, Antichrist owes an unmistakeable debt to Nick Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which also begins with the death of a child at home.  Like Roeg, von Trier employs radical visual and aural techniques to evoke the psychological states of his characters: destabilising perspectives, CGI doctoring, eerie off-camera noises and tremulous, misted close-ups. The film is shot with a stunning, dreamlike lucidity by British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, a veteran of Dogme films who recently won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.  Most important of all, Don’t Look Now and Antichrist share the same central theme – the terrifying intrusion of the supernatural into a rationalistic worldview.  Like Donald Sutherland’s character John Baxter, Dafoe desperately attempts to protect his wife from what he insists is a mental imbalance, while shoring up his own belief system against mounting evidence to the contrary.

“Nature is Satan’s church,” says Gainsbourg mid-way into the film, as a relentless rain of acorns ominously pounds the roof of the cabin. From here on in von Trier cranks up the weirdness: lichen grows on Defoe’s hand as he sleeps; the woods themselves seem to seethe with a dread malevolence, until the film begins to resemble an arthouse Evil Dead.  As the therapy sessions continue, we learn that Gainsbourg has begun to internalise the very narrative she set out to critique – namely that women, as vessels of nature, are themselves evil. Then Defoe discovers disturbing evidence of low-level child abuse that is corroborated by the toddler’s autopsy report. It seems that, shut away in the woods that summer with only her child and her research for company, his wife suffered some kind of mental breakdown. 

Yet while it offers abundant explanations for its characters’ behaviour, Antichrist wilfully blurs the line between psychology and the occult.  Gainsbourg’s mental state is increasingly suggestive of possession; we get the feeling she is channelling the pain of her historical ‘sisters’, whose partially submerged bodies litter the forest floor like white roots. When, as the film nears its climax, Dafoe seeks refuge in the woods, nature conspires with her against him. The doe, fox and raven that earlier visited Dafoe in a series of hallucinatory episodes have by now become her ‘familiars’.

The Wild Woman is a familiar (if rather dated) archetype of Feminist discourse, and Gainsbourg’s derangement is like a more extreme version of the protagonist’s meltdown in Margaret Atwood’s 1979 novel Surfacing. But what makes Gainsbourg’s character ‘antichrist’ – at least in her own mind – is not her alliance with nature or the occult, but her culpability in the death of her child. This is civilised society’s ultimate taboo, the worst – and paradoxically most ‘unnatural’ – offence a woman can commit. Her guilt accuses her of prizing her own sexual fulfilment over the safety of her child, so that when she metes out punishment, she targets first her husband’s and then her own genitals. The violence Gainsbourg wreaks is harrowing. As she crushes her husband’s groin and then masturbates him to an unconscious, bloody climax; drills through his calf with a millstone; and performs a self-clitoridectomy with a pair of rusty scissors, her actions approach the demonic. They also speak of a bottomless despair.

To some extent we are invited to see Gainsbourg’s hysterical frenzies of violence as an anguished response to male absence and abandonment.  Dafoe is guilty of both arrogance and detachment in his emotionally distanced and controlling response to his wife’s grief.  He turns her into a patient, when we sense that what she needs most is emotional reassurance, intimacy and love.  Nevertheless, such psychological backgrounding remains hopelessly inadequate to ‘explain’ her behaviour.

Antichrist is probably von Trier’s most personal film. Gripped by clinical depression during production, he has spoken of its completion as a form of therapy. Like its predecessors, Antichrist has been widely accused of misogyny. But von Trier’s latest film is much less vulnerable to this charge than is the ‘emotional pornography’ (Bjork) of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark.  In these earlier films, von Trier behaves much more like Dafoe: staying at a distance, manipulating his subjects from behind the camera with a cold-eyed clarity. In the terrible intimacy of Antichrist, there is no hiding place for a voyeur director.  In fact, Gainsbourg has said that while making the film she felt strongly that she was von Trier.

But to understand a film like Antichrist, we need to consider it in the context of von Trier’s wider preoccupations.  Like French novelist Michel Houellebecq – another enfant terrible of his genre – von Trier is in revolt against his own permissive upbringing and the values of his nudist Communist parents. He has a peculiarly Scandinavian sense of the frailty and limitations of rational humanism and social planning. His target is liberalism rather than conservatism, and as far back as The Idiots his films have been subversive attacks on liberal orthodoxy. But where his earlier work – from Breaking The Waves through to Dogville and Manderlay – pivots on the tension between society and the individual, in Antichrist we have merely man and woman, the original social unit.

A refutation of the hippy concept of nature as a benign force, von Trier’s Eden is a fallen kingdom where chaos reigns. Defoe’s clinical training blinds him to the unpredictable currents pulsing under the surface of reality. When Dafoe reminds Gainsbourg of the tens of thousands of innocents sent to their deaths in witch hunts engineered by men, her strange answer is: “Sometimes I forget.”  It’s as if the liberal consensus view of history is simply a convenient, comforting narrative with which to fend off more disturbing possibilities.   This is the real nightmare of Antichrist – that the rational constructions on which we rely for a secure view of the world are merely that: flimsy constructs that, once relinquished, leave us face to face with ancient fears and our own destructive impulses.

Antichrist is riddled with ambiguity and paradox. It’s a film which often seems to ask us to believe several contradictory things at once, and to interpret phenomena on multiple levels – as coincidence and symbol; as simultaneously real, psychological and supernatural. There are as many obstacles to interpretation in the film as there are aids to it. As in his earlier work, von Trier refuses to allow the viewer to be a passive recipient of the narrative. Instead, he makes viewers work hard, challenging them to participate in ‘editing’ – or making sense of – the film, and he does this so provocatively that at times it threatens to short-circuit the film itself.  As well as recklessly abusing the director-viewer relationship, von Trier’s films everywhere risk kitsch and ridiculousness. This applies even to the puzzling epilogue of Antichrist, in which Dafoe, living on berries as he makes his way back to civilisation, has a vision of hundreds of women walking uphill out of the valley, in what seems to be a processional of the spirits of Gainsbourg’s ‘sisters’.

It’s no wonder that von Trier’s films produce an ambivalent response in the viewer. He is himself conflicted – one might even view the couple in Antichrist as warring components of his own soul or psyche. Perhaps the epilogue, with its attempt at redemptive, eulogising closure, can be read as von Trier’s attempt to reconcile – to bring peace to – the forces he has unleashed on the screen.