What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Border (2018)

Tina is a Swedish border guard with a sixth sense for sniffing out baddies, whether they are drug smugglers or paedophiles. She can't explain her powers until she meets Vore, who has similar talents and a way of making Tina feel seen for the first time in her life. Can these two crazy kids make it work? Part romance (with a once-seen, never-forgotten sex scene), part thriller, part I-genuinely-don't-know-what-this-is, Border takes it to the limit. 

Elephant

Not long after the Columbine school massacre, Gus Van Sant and his group of amateur youngsters reimagine a school shooting by playing with time and perspective.  What could have been a technical exercise is instead an extremely moving picture of random violence and young lives cut short. A one of a kind. 

Hitchcock's Rope

The master of perviness and his famed one-location, "one-shot" thriller (not really), with James Stewart unravelling the mystery, and John Dall and Farley Granger being one of the outest gay couples in 1950s Hollywood. Follow that nosy camera around the room and marvel.  

Videodrome

TV times with James Woods and Debbie Harry in Cronenberg's icky sticky dissection of video nasties, watching the unthinkable and living through your screen. Long live the new flesh. 

The Conversation

Listen carefully... Coppola's The Conversation is a masterpiece of misdirection, with Gene Hackman's Harry Caul the essence of paranoid loneliness. Sometimes you really can't believe your ears. 

The Day I Became A Woman

How do you make a feminist film under a repressive theocracy like Iran? It's not a joke to say "very carefully", and Marzieh Meshkini has done just that. Three apparently separate stories of women and girls just trying to live their lives have more in common than we think. It sounds po-faced but it's not - these stories are funny and poignant, with some surrealism and a lot of hope. 

The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe, hardboiled detective, finds himself in laid-back 1970s California, looking for lost cat, his lost client and his lost friend. There is a plot but that's not the point in Robert Altman's vision of Raymond Chandler, brought to life by a wonderful performance from Elliot Gould. 

Duck Soup

Marx out of 10? 10 all the way for this Marx Brothers masterpiece. It's got  mangled language, pratfalls and puns a-plenty and still has time to say that war is pointless and borders are imaginary. And it's 90 years old. HONK HONK.

Titane

The best film EVER about car sex, serial killing, steroid abuse, oil lactation, self-injury and fireman discos? Well it's certainly in the top ten.
Titane is a weirdfest from start to finish, grounded by two amazing performances. French body horror at its best. Formidable. 

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

A man who doesn't want to run is being pursued by a man who doesn't want to chase him.
Sam Peckinpah kills the Hollywood Western stone-dead in this dreamy meditation  - when the West and the world are being transformed, what happens to men who can't change?