A charming exploration of courtship and unspoken desire in bourgeois Japan, Yasujirō Ozu’s first colour film Equinox Flower is also his return to comedy after two decades of serious dramas. Telling the tale of Hirayama, a wealthy and respected Tokyo businessman who stubbornly refuses to accept his daughter’s choice of husband, Ozu paints in miniature a country’s changing cultural tides. An intimate family story with a certain melancholy woven through even the cheeriest scenes, Equinox Flower stands alongside Ozu’s finest work. 

A male sex worker navigates his fantasies of bikers, matadors and harem leaders in this hallucinogenic classic of queer cinema. Pink Narcissus was filmed over seven years by James Bidgood, who built the film’s elaborate sets in his small Hell’s Kitchen apartment, and who released the film anonymously after a squabble with his financier. Gloriously lavish, Pink Narcissus was a revolution in DIY filmmaking and a poignant document of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS window in gay culture.

A sensitive portrait of luminary Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, Mark of the Hand sees Williams returning to his birthplace of Georgetown after a decades-long sojourn in the UK. Meeting once again with the Warao Indians who heavily influenced Williams’ abstract expressionist canvases, he muses on a career spent in search of truth. The result is a lilting study on otherness, technology and the Warao concept of timehri, the titular “mark of the hand”, that stamps the masterpieces of art.

A remake of the 1935 film of the same name, An Actor’s Revenge is an extraordinary fusion of kabuki theatre and pop art. Kazuo Hasegawa, in his 300th role, is double cast as a local thief and an actor whose parents were driven to suicide by a trio of thugs, and who now seeks revenge. The idioms of kabuki theatre – melodrama, androgyny, elaborate makeup and wigs – are interrogated in Kon Ichikawa’s darkly amusing thriller, whose nagging queer subtext and unconventional Brechtian staging allow for deeper considerations of the precarity of the acting profession.

In Gallivant, director Andrew Kotting takes three generations of his family, including his 85-year-old grandmother and his disabled daughter Eden on a madcap, psychogeographic romp across Britain’s coastlines. Interweaving Super 8 documentary footage, polyphonic narration, and techniques from early cinema, the film's formal daring is balanced by its warm heart and utter lack of pretension. A road movie like no other, Gallivant is an ebullient celebration of the mundane and a fascinating enquiry into the bizarre land we call home.

A mesmerising journey through the Sahel and Sahara deserts, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana is the video essay as pure cinema, a floating odyssey into the sublime. In his first departure from fictional storytelling, the film establishes motifs that would go on to define Herzog’s career: lizards, blazing fires and the profoundly destructive impact of humans on their environments. With brisk narration from Lotte Eisener and a soundtrack including Leonard Cohen, the alien landscapes of Fata Morgana elucidate the fundamental strangeness of life on Earth.

Dancing mannequins, wire circus figures, a retelling of the myth of Narcissus with sentient furniture: Dreams that Money Can Buy is a Dadaist delight. An anthology film in seven parts, each directed by a different avant-garde visionary including Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder, the film stars Jack Bittner as a literal average Joe who has gained the ability to sell dreams. A veritable who’s who of the post-war art landscape, Dreams that Money Can Buy is an exhilarating exploration into the richness of our subconscious landscapes.

The jewel in the crown of British reggae cinema, Franco Rosso’s Babylon is an explosive delight, a winning merger of kitchen-sink thriller and cinema verite chic. Following Blue, a Londoner of Jamaican parentage, through his encounters with dub culture, racism and violence in pre-Brixton riots South London, Babylon’s urgeny vision led it to be banned from the New York Film Festival for being “too controversial, and likely to incite racial tension”. The power of Rosso’s film is in its verisimilitude, its radical honesty about the pleasures and pains of the immigrant experience in a country that, as a character insists, has “always been a fucking tip!”

A piercing investigation into the psychology of the nuclear family, Cries and Whispers is Ingmar Bergman at his most essential. Harriet Andersson gives a bravura performance as Agnes, a woman whose slow death threatens to unravel the dense web of secrets held in place by her callous sisters. Even without any onscreen violence, Cries and Whispers overflows with blood, both that of its shockingly lurid crimson backdrops and that of the family ties that imprison as much as they support.

Defiantly odd, Peter Greenaway’s first film is a grab-bag of interpretative richness, pitched somewhere between Monty Python and Maya Deren. A catalogue of the 92 survivors of a Violent Unknown Event of which the details are never explained, the film’s structuralist frippery and shimmeringly changeable colour schemes create a beguiling map of emotional landscapes. A document of nuclear anxiety, a parody of British public information films and a wry critique of identity itself, The Falls is an endlessly reflexive and fascinating film and an appropriately iconoclastic debut to one of cinema’s true innovators.

Completed as he was dying of AIDS, Derek Jarman’s The Garden is its own strange beast, cinema on frontiers both personal and physical. Shot in the shingle desert of Dungeness, The Garden moves through a series of surreal tableaux – Tilda Swinton as the Virgin Mary pursued by paparazzi, a wine glass orchestra – forever in search of the titular fallen utopia. A riposte to Thatcherite greed, The Garden searches for spiritual salvation in a world where both the body natural and politic has betrayed itself.

Starring opera legend Maria Callas in her only film role, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea is a deeply mysterious, minimalist portrayal of Euripedes’ 2454-year-old play. Moving the narrative focus away from Medea’s infanticide towards the loss of her homeland Colchis, Pasolini mounts a savage allegory of Western imperialism, elevated by tasteful uses of traditional Persian, Tibetan and Balkan music. A sun-bleached vision of hubris from one of the century’s foremost visual stylists, Medea is above all a love letter to its lead actress, who delivers a performance of preternatural grace.