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Gary Oldman plays Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, a wasted heroin addict, and to look the part he lived on steamed fish and melon until he ended up in hospital. Punk, plenty of heroin and two people add up to a love that only goes one way, which is down. — It’s 1977, and Sid Vicious plays bass in the Sex Pistols. Nancy Spungen has come over from America for the London music scene, and she’s the one who gets him heroin, while the rest of the band watch their bassist change. Early the next year the Sex Pistols break up on tour in the States, and Sid tries to launch a solo career from the room at the Chelsea Hotel he shares with Nancy. — Nominated for Best Make Up Artist | BAFTA | 1987

Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”) had only just won the Palme d’Or when he made his second film, casting Jeremy Irons as Franz Kafka, who pushes paper in an office by day and writes at night. Then a colleague disappears, and Prague starts to look more and more like his stories. — It’s 1919, and Franz Kafka spends his days at an insurance company in Prague and his evenings writing strange stories. When a colleague disappears, Kafka goes looking for him. The trail leads through courtyards and stairwells, and before long the city looks exactly like something he might have written. — Best Cinematography | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 1992

A century ago, a courtesan who fears for her daughter’s development crosses paths with an unbending doctor, Maria Montessori, who runs a school for children everyone has written off. The two women have more in common than they think, and this gentle but furious film will change how you see school. — In Paris in 1900, Lili, a courtesan, is raising her daughter on her own. Little Tina is slow to learn, and Lili is afraid her difficulties will close every door to her, so she takes the girl to Rome. There she meets Maria Montessori, who teaches children in a way nobody has ever tried before.

When the money for this film ran out, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan put in their own. Spike Lee directs an epic life of Malcolm X, the controversial campaigner for Black rights, and people still say Denzel Washington should have beaten Al Pacino to the Oscar. — In late-1930s Michigan, Malcolm, a preacher’s son, is top of his class until a teacher tells him that law isn’t a career for someone like him. He heads north, straightens his hair and starts hustling in Harlem’s illegal numbers game, which earns him eight to ten years behind bars. There his cellmate begins talking to him about Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. — Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Denzel Washington) | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1993 Best Actor (Denzel Washington) | Berlin International Film Festival | 1993 Nominated for Best Actor - Drama (Denzel Washington) | Golden Globes | 1993

Diana, the adored and tragic princess who was born a Spencer, spends three days of Christmas on the royal family’s estate while Charles is cheating on her. Kristen Stewart gives the performance that changed how people saw her, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood wrote the unsettling score. — Princess Diana is alone and late when she arrives at Sandringham to spend Christmas 1991 with the royal family, where every hour is planned and a different outfit is laid out for each meal. No one talks openly about her husband’s affair. Still, someone has left a book about Anne Boleyn in her room. — Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Kristen Stewart) | Oscars | 2022 Nominated for Best Actress - Drama (Kristen Stewart) | Golden Globes | 2022 Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2021

One master of surrealism takes on another as Quentin Dupieux spends seventy-nine minutes with Salvador Dalí, played here by five different actors. The result is an interview with a man who simply can’t stop performing. — Judith, a journalist, dreams of interviewing Salvador Dalí, but the painter won’t hear of a written piece and insists it be filmed on an impressive camera. Judith finds a producer willing to pay for the shoot and sets a date. Dalí talks about himself at great length, yet somehow the interview never quite happens.

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen played Nixon and Frost on stage in London and then on Broadway before Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”) made the film, which earned five Oscar nominations. It covers a few days of interviews with Nixon after Watergate, fought out like a boxing match. — Three years after Watergate forced him out of office, Richard Nixon agrees to a series of television interviews. The man asking the questions is David Frost, a presenter no American network will pay for, so he funds the interviews out of his own pocket. Nixon’s people are expecting a few easy afternoons, while Frost’s team wants nothing less than an admission of guilt, and the decisive moment doesn’t come until the very end. — Nominated for Best Film | Oscars | 2009 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Frank Langella) | Oscars | 2009 Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 2009 Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2009 Nominated for Best Editing | Oscars | 2009 Nominated for Best Film | Golden Globes | 2009 Nominated for Best Actor - Drama (Frank Langella) | Golden Globes | 2009 Nominated for Best Director | Golden Globes | 2009 Nominated for Best Screenplay | Golden Globes | 2009 Nominated for Best Original Score | Golden Globes | 2009

One of only two documentaries ever to win the Golden Lion at Venice follows photographer and activist Nan Goldin, who, after her own experience with the opioid OxyContin, took aim at the family that sells it. The Sacklers, she discovered, fund the museums where her work hangs. — In late-1970s New York, Nan Goldin photographs the people around her, and over the next decade most of them die of AIDS. Years later, once she has beaten an addiction to the OxyContin she was prescribed, she sets out to find who makes it. The trail leads straight to the museums that hang her work. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 2022 Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2023 Nominated for Best Documentary | BAFTA | 2023

The documentary won the Oscar and a jury prize at Sundance, and years later Gus Van Sant turned the same story into a feature with Sean Penn. Days after winning his election, Harvey Milk recorded a tape to be played only if he were murdered. A year later, it was played. — In early-1970s San Francisco, Harvey Milk opens a camera shop on Castro Street, runs for city supervisor and loses. He tries again and loses again, and only wins at the fourth attempt, becoming the first openly gay politician elected to office in California. Less than a year later he is shot dead at City Hall, and the gunman goes on trial. — Best Documentary Oscar | Academy Awards | 1985 Special Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 1985

Fanny Brawne sews dresses and John Keats writes poems, but the people around them only count one of those as art. Jane Campion (“The Piano”) tells the story of their unhappy love from Fanny’s side, and takes the title from the sonnet he wrote with her in mind. — In Hampstead in 1818, eighteen-year-old Fanny Brawne is the most fashionable young woman for miles around. When the young poet John Keats moves in next door with his friend Brown, Keats starts teaching her how to read poetry, while Brown, who can’t stand her, mocks her at every turn. But Keats’s poems don’t earn him a penny, and marriage is out of the question. — Nominated for Best Costume Design | Oscars | 2010 Nominated for Best Costume Design | BAFTA | 2010 Nominated for Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2011 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2009

Hollywood adored Judy Garland as a girl but had no use for the grown woman, and by the late sixties all she has left is a run of shows at a London club. Adapted from a stage play, it stars Renée Zellweger, who won an Oscar for the part and sings every song herself. — Judy Garland is middle-aged and nobody will hire her any more, so she plays small venues and takes her children, Lorna and Joey, on the road with her. A hotel turns her away over unpaid bills, and she leaves the children with her ex-husband, Sidney Luft. Then a promoter calls with an offer of five weeks of shows at the Talk of the Town, a club in London. — Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Renée Zellweger) | Oscars | 2020 Nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling | Oscars | 2020 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Renée Zellweger) | BAFTA | 2020 Best Actress - Drama (Renée Zellweger) | Golden Globes | 2020

Forman shot the opera scenes in the Prague theatre where Mozart staged “Don Giovanni”, and the story that won eight Oscars belongs not to the genius but to his envious rival. Salieri hears God in Mozart’s music and can’t believe it comes from a giggling brat. — Antonio Salieri, court composer to the emperor in 18th-century Vienna, once promised God his chastity in exchange for talent. Then Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrives from Salzburg, loud, vulgar and forever giggling, and Salieri, the only one who can hear how great the music is, begins to wonder whether God is testing him. — Best Film | Oscars | 1985 Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (F. Murray Abraham) | Oscars | 1985 Best Director | Oscars | 1985 Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1985 Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1985 Best Sound | Oscars | 1985 Best Makeup | Oscars | 1985 Best Production Design | Oscars | 1985 Best Film - Drama | Golden Globes | 1985 Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 1985

Tara Wood never asked Tarantino for an interview, so he doesn’t say a single word. Instead, Samuel L. Jackson, Lucy Liu, Kurt Russell and Christoph Waltz trace the eight films he has directed, from the video store all the way to Hollywood. It’s a career told entirely in other people’s voices. — Quentin Tarantino spent his youth arguing about films with anyone who walked into the video rental store, until he finally sat down to write a screenplay of his own. Many films and a quarter of a century later, the people who worked with him tell his story. Sooner or later, though, they have to start talking about Harvey Weinstein.

When Jane Birkin, the famous model and actress, confided to Agnès Varda (“Cléo from 5 to 7”) that turning forty terrified her, Varda answered with a film. The playful portrait that came out of it captures a bond between an actress and a director quite unlike any other. — Jane Birkin sits down in front of the camera without make-up and asks to be filmed as if she were as transparent and anonymous as anyone else, which is the one thing this kaleidoscopic study won’t do. Instead it drops her into a Renaissance portrait, a thriller and a black-and-white comedy, and straps her into Joan of Arc’s armour. Woman, mother, muse, idol: every one of them goes by her name.

Eliza Kubarska, a director who is also a climber, follows in the footsteps of Wanda Rutkiewicz, the legendary Polish Himalayan mountaineer, with unique tapes that no one had heard before. Rutkiewicz recorded them before she left for Kangchenjunga, and she never came back. — In May 1992, Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first Pole ever to stand on top of Everest, leaves the last camp on Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas and heads for the summit. Above 8,000 metres, Carlos Carsolio finds her sitting in the snow without a tent, but he can’t persuade her to come down. No one ever sees her again. Three decades later, boxes full of her letters, film reels and photographs turn up. — Best Documentary | Eagles - Polish Film Awards | 2025 Nominated for Best Editing | Eagles - Polish Film Awards | 2025

Shia LaBeouf is John McEnroe, screaming at umpires and hurling his racket, and across the net at Wimbledon in 1980 stands the ice-cold Björn Borg, chasing his fifth title in a row. It’s two ways of living locked in one legendary match, with Stellan Skarsgård looking on from the stands. — Everyone is holding their breath before the 1980 Wimbledon final, in which the defending champion takes on a young American. Björn Borg, who has won here four years running, doesn’t so much as flinch, while John McEnroe argues with the line judges and plays on raw emotion. The whole world watched that match, yet nobody saw the week leading up to it.

Val Kilmer is Jim Morrison, who starts The Doors in Los Angeles in 1965 and three years later is drunk at nearly every show. Kilmer sang most of the vocals himself, and after two hours of Oliver Stone (“Natural Born Killers”) you’ll still be calling for an encore. — It’s 1965 in Los Angeles, and Jim Morrison is a film student with a notebook full of poems. He starts a band with a keyboard player he has only just met and two more musicians, and they call themselves The Doors. They land a regular gig at the Whisky a Go Go, where Morrison does things on stage that will soon get them thrown out.

The dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch was meant to be the subject of this film, but she died before Wim Wenders could start shooting. So he made it not with her but for her: a tribute in four choreographies to a woman who said that we must dance, dance, or else we are lost. — The dancers of Pina Bausch’s company perform her work. They dance “The Rite of Spring” on a stage covered in earth and “Café Müller” among rows of wooden chairs, while in “Vollmond” water floods the boards. Then they carry these pieces out into the city, into its parks and under its railway. — Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2012 Best European Documentary | European Film Awards | 2011

People still argue about the way Helmut Newton photographed women, so here the women in his pictures get to speak. Grace Jones and Isabella Rossellini remember a man who made them feel strong, while Susan Sontag, on archive tape, calls him a misogynist. It’s an argument you won’t settle. — A few weeks after Kristallnacht, a Jewish teenager leaves Germany, makes his way to Singapore and eventually settles in Australia. He is Helmut Newton, the photographer Vogue will sign to a contract, and the fashion world is still arguing about how women look through his lens. Here the models themselves describe the shoots, and each story reveals a slightly different man.

For eighty minutes the camera stays with a single oak and its many tenants, a squirrel, a jay and some mice among them, each with business of its own. The filmmakers spent a whole year with the 210-year-old tree and tell its life in images alone, without a word of dialogue. — A squirrel races along the branches of an old oak and spends the whole autumn burying acorns in the ground, while field mice make their home down among the roots. The tree has stood in Sologne for 210 years and shelters many species. In winter it falls quiet, and in spring it fills with life again. — Nominated for Best Documentary Film | César Awards | 2023

Nick Cave never stops inventing as he plays a version of himself in his own life story, while the filmmakers cut in recordings of the musician talking to a psychoanalyst. Somehow all that make-believe ends up telling more truth than a conventional documentary. — Nick Cave goes through his twenty-thousandth day, one that seems to have been written in advance rather than simply filmed. There’s work at the desk, dinner with his family and a new album to record with the band, while on drives around Brighton, figures from his past keep turning up in the passenger seat. — Golden Athena - Music & Film | Athens International Film Festival | 2014 Best Director | Sundance Film Festival | 2014 Editing Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2014

Allison Janney won an Oscar as the mother of Tonya Harding, the skater America turned into a punchline, and Margot Robbie lands the triple axel. Everyone remembers Tonya’s controversial career differently, and they all tell their version straight to camera. — In Portland, Oregon, LaVona puts her little daughter, Tonya Harding, on the ice and drives her through gruelling training. Tonya grows into one of the best skaters in America, but the judges mark her down because of her image. Her husband regularly hits her, and she keeps going back to him. She becomes the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, and a few years later a friend of her husband’s comes up with an idea about what to do with her rival. — Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Allison Janney) | Oscars | 2018 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Margot Robbie) | Oscars | 2018

François Ozon turns Fassbinder’s famous play and film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” on its head by making the lead a man, a director in Cologne who falls for a beautiful young man at first sight while his assistant looks on in silence. Hanna Schygulla, once the lover, now plays the mother. — In Cologne in 1972, Peter von Kant is a celebrated director who spends his days writing scripts in his apartment, receives only a chosen few and is waited on by an assistant who never says a word. Then an old friend turns up with a beautiful young man named Amir, and Peter promises to make him a star. — Official Selection | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2022 Nominated for Most Promising Actor (Stefan Crepon) | César Awards | 2023 Nominated for Best Actor (Denis Ménochet) | César Awards | 2023 Official Selection | Berlin International Film Festival | 2022

Think “Trainspotting” for our times, set to wild Irish-language rap: three Belfast rappers realise the most provocative thing they can shout is their grandparents’ language. Michael Fassbender has a supporting role, it won an audience award at Sundance, and the tracks will stay with you for weeks. — Years after the Troubles, three young men in Belfast start rapping in Irish. The authorities would much rather not hear the language at all, but the city starts listening, and within a few months these provocative rappers have become a political symbol. Their own families would much prefer they hadn’t. — NEXT Audience Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2024