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

Toru Takemitsu’s Requiem for String Orchestra was originally written in memory of Fumio Hayasaka, the composer who provided the scores for many of Kurosawa’s films, including Rashomon and Seven Samurai.

Following the devastation in Japan, on March 17 the New York Philharmonic under Music Director Alan Gilbert performed the work as a dedication to the Japanese people.

But while dated graphics and derivative gameplay may soon consign it to the bargain bins, what makes Homefront remarkable are its right-wing undertones and its links with what might be termed the military-entertainment complex.

Homefront is the brain-child of John Milius, a larger-than-life screenwriter, producer and director who became a notorious figure in 1970’s Hollywood. It was Milius who inspired the Coen Brothers to create the character of Walter Sobchak, the gun-toting, bowling-obsessed ‘Nam vet in The Big Lebowski. This is the man who penned Dirty Harry’s catchphrase “Make my day’; who co-wrote Apocalypse Now with Coppola; and who catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger to fame with Conan the Barbarian.

“Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos…”

Known for his Hawkish views, Milius has cultivated a fascination with guns and the military ever since chronic asthma prevented him from joining the Marine Corps in the late ‘60s.  He is said to have personally introduced Charlton Heston to the National Rifle Association. A cartoonish figure much given to provocative liberal-bating, Milius is a mass of paradoxes: a self-professed ‘libertarian zen anarchist’ and surfing nut (remember ‘Charlie don’t surf’ from Apocalypse Now?); a Nietzsche-quoting Jew who longs for the return of a warrior culture.

Having recently produced the HBO series Rome, Milius was drafted in as a story consultant on Homefront to provide the game with a compelling narrative setting. The result is a neo-con nightmare: set in 2027, Homefront sees the US in decline, weakened by a spiralling oil crisis and an Asian bird flu epidemic, and abandoned by its allies. Out of this power vacuum, an aggressive new superpower arises in the form of the newly united Greater Korean Republic. The Koreans manage to land troops in Hawaii and soon, great swathes of the US are living under foreign occupation.

Milius is fond of turn-the-tables scenarios like these, in which Americans get to play underdog in a to-the-death showdown against a foreign aggressor. The Homefront concept is essentially an update of Red Dawn (1984), Milius’ movie about a bunch of Colorado high school students who form a guerrilla resistance movement when their home town is invaded by Soviet airborne troops. Red Dawn, which stars Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, carries the dubious distinction of being labelled the most violent film ever made by the Guinness Book of Records, boasting a rate of 2.23 acts of violence per minute. A remake, due out in 2011, has been subjected to last minute delays so that the enemy can be changed from China to North Korea, a la Homefront.

Log in, sign up, and ship out!

Milius is also an advisor for a military think tank, the Institute for Creative Technologies, which is based at the University of Southern California, the college Milius attended in the ‘60s when he was part of a filmmaking brat pack that included George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and Francis Ford Coppola.

Founded by the US Army in 1999, the ICT aims to bring together the creative talents of Hollywood and Silicon Valley to develop interactive training aids for soldiers serving in the field.  This means US tax dollars can be used to pump-prime the development of commercial off-the-shelf war games which, upon release, contain a hidden military training mode unlockable by rookie troops. One early example was Full Spectrum Warrior, released by Homefront developer THQ in 2004. In September 2008, the game was released as a free download sponsored by the US Army.

The logic is that most army recruits are young men who grew up with videogames, which makes them the perfect platform from which to train, and even recruit, new troops. It’s a trend which has culminated in the success of the ‘propogame’ America’s Army, which today is used as a major recruitment tool by the Pentagon, having been downloaded 40 million times since its launch.

“Press x to jump in mass grave”

The pre-release hype surrounding Homefront has relied to a very large extent on Milius’ potent, if implausible, vision of the near-future. The game’s opening sequence tells the story in a highly emotive montage: we see labour camps and summary executions on the streets; within the first minute, a man in aviators and a camouflage hat has delivered the inevitable line: “The only good communist is a dead communist!” 

Its not hard to detect a strain of jingoism and anti-Asian sentiment here. Homefront carries a powerful ideological subtext, prophesying the doom of an America ‘gone soft’, a country whose supposed excessive liberalism has sown the seeds of its own destruction.  And as ever, the threat comes from the East – whether in the form of contagious diseases or sabre-rattling dictatorships.

Videogames and politics have traditionally given each other a wide berth. But as games become increasingly cinematic and story becomes an ever important component of the gaming experience, there’s a risk that insidious ideological messages could leech into videogame content. If Homefront is a sign of things to come, gamers might be advised to question not just the quality of the game they’re buying, but whose view of the world they’re buying into.

Remembering one of the great creative geniuses of the twentieth century, who has died aged 69. This performance of ‘Upon The My Oh My’ is from the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1974.

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.

By rights, given its shared authorship and ideological baggage, Q should make for a lousy book. So it’s all the more remarkable that it should turn out to be one of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable novels of the decade.

Set during the extraordinary period of religious unrest triggered by Martin Luther in 1517, Q describes the moment when the Protestant struggle to liberate faith from Catholic doctrine exploded into a revolutionary attempt to realise the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

The plot tracks a 30-year cat-and-mouse game played out across Germany, the Netherlands and beyond by two men: our hero, a radical Anabaptist who travels under many names, and the eponymous Q, a shadowy Papal informer spying for the Inquisition.

Along the way we encounter a larger-than-life cast of religious zealots, apocalyptic visionaries and heretical free spirits. The book resurrects a number of historical figures from the proto-communist Anabaptist movement, notably Thomas Muntzer, the radical preacher who led the ill-fated Peasant War which Engels saw as a forerunner of revolutionary class conflict.

Thomas Muntzer as depicted in Werner Tubke’s painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1975-87)

But while Engels revisited the theological conflicts of the Reformation from the perspective of 19th century Marxism, Q unearths these half-buried histories in a spirit of post-modern mischief. As our battle-weary protagonist survives a series of doomed revolts, each more bloodily suppressed than the last, he gradually realises the primacy of word over sword as an instrument of resistance.

At this point the novel’s backdrop changes, besieged German city-states giving way to the whispering back-alleys of Venice, the Babel-like crossroads of the world (and thus an analog of the internet). Rabble-rousing in market squares is eschewed in favour of huddled rendezvous in bookshops and printing presses. Then as now, Q seems to suggest, the viral potential of ideas is what the powerful fear most.

Yet nowhere do these ideological subtexts obstruct Q’s effectiveness as a novel. Neither didactic nor over-simplifying, its dramas are human before they are political. The authors have a canny feel for the paradoxes and self-destructive impulses of revolutionary movements, and much of the book reflects on the fine line between utopian zeal and tyranny.

Stylistically, Q is a bold, refreshing and irreverent take on the historical novel, mixing erudite fact with action-packed fiction, and littering period vernacular with modern slang and swearwords. With a direct, sinewy prose, against the odds the four authors manage to sustain a consistent and convincing narrative voice.

Q exults in the sights, sounds and swarming humanity of the cities of the European Renaissance. It’s a giddying tour of pubs, brothels, slums and marketplaces, flitting between the high and low culture of the age, from brooding palaces to the bawdy, proletarian life of the streets. The descriptions of Venice in particular drip with atmosphere.

This is not to say that the novel is not flawed. In places it is self-indulgent, in others clunky and verbose, and at over 600 pages it’s seriously overlong. Q simply gets better the longer it goes on; if you can stick with it past the first 100 pages, chances are you’ll be gripped.

Part thriller, part picaresque historical fantasy, part heartfelt novel of ideas, Q is a unique and audacious achievement.

Staying on a folk tip, here’s Richard Thompson at the 2006 Cambridge Folk Festival playing his glorious love-and-death ballad ’1952 Vincent Black Lightning’. Hunter S Thompson said of the Vincent Black Shadow (of which the Lightning was the stripped down racing version):

“If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society.”

Incidentally a certain Dick Gaughan recorded a cover of  this on his 1996 album Sail On.

Dick Gaughan once said of ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’: “This is the perfect song. It says everything it is conceivably possible to say about anything.”  I first heard it several years ago on the car radio, when the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro selected it as one of his Desert Island Discs.  The track,  from Gaughan’s classic 1981 album Handful of Earth, takes its beautiful lyrics from the Robert Burns poem ‘Song Composed in August’. This performance is taken from the 1983 BBC documentary Gaughan.