Series: BFI Film Classics

Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch’s hallucinatory noir, is one of cinema’s most original and despairing portraits of Hollywood’s dream factory. A backstudio film, Mulholland Drive follows bright-eyed actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who arrives in Los Angeles and becomes caught in a mysterious conspiracy of power with Rita (Laura Harring), an alluring amnesiac. Justus Nieland’s timely study approaches Mulholland Drive...

The Night of the Hunter (1955) was Charles Laughton's only film as director. Part expressionist horror movie, part luminous fairy tale, it contains some of the most haunting images in cinema. Willa (Shelley Winters), her throat cut and hair streaming out like seaweed, sitting upright in a submerged Model-T Ford. Her children, framed by looming animals, in a downriver flight...

Declared obscene in Japan, where it has never been shown in its entirety, Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses, was shown uncut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976: thirteen screenings were required to satisfy audience demand. The unprecedented explicitness with which the film presented sexual acts inevitably caused widespread controversy. But this is not a film which...

This is an examination of The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton's only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model-T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

Fifty years after its release, The Sound of Music (1965) remains the most profitable and recognisable film musical ever made. Quickly consolidating its cultural authority, the Hollywood film soon eclipsed the German film and Broadway musical that preceded it to become one of the most popular cultural reference points of the twenty-first century. In this fresh exploration, Caryl Flinn foregrounds...

The multiple award-winning Doctor Zhivago (1965) is one of America's finest films of all time. Ian Christie contextualises the film as an epic Russian love story and a Cold War classic, charts its production and reception, including the contribution of designer John Box, and discusses the unique history of the Bruce Pasternak novel it is based on.

A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring films of modern cinema — its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, Roger Luckhurst examines its origins as a monster movie script called...

How did a low-key prison drama which was considered a box-office flop on its original release become one of the most popular movies of all time? Mark Kermode traces the history of this unexpected audience favourite, from its source in Stephen King's novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, through the icy corridors of Ohio's Mansfield Reformatory (whose imposing gothic architecture...

A visually stunning and heartfelt riposte to the emotional sterility of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Douglas Trumbull's eco-themed Silent Running (1972) became one of the defining science-fiction films of the seventies. Bruce Dern excels as lonely hero Freeman Lowell, cast adrift in deep space with three robotic 'Drones' who become his 'amazing companions' on a journey 'beyond imagination'. Mark...

The War of the Worlds was one of a handful of high-prestige science fiction productions in a low-budget era, and initiated modern cinema's reliance on screen-filling special effects. Barry Forshaw analyses and celebrates this key science fiction film of the 1950s, exploring its literary origins and numerous film progeny.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, is one of the masterpieces of 1990s Hollywood cinema. One of the first films to use a science-fiction premise as the basis for romantic comedy, it tells the story of a splenetic TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray at his disreputable best), who finds himself repeating...

A new kind of film emerged from Hollywood in the early 1940s, thrillers that derived their plots from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction but with a style all their own. Appearing in 1944, Double Indemnity was a key film in the definition of the genre that came to be known as film noir. Its script creates two unforgettable criminal...

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman — Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony...