Appallingly violent vigilante satire from Audition's Takashi Miike. The opening scenes, with the film's title spelt out in semen and the head baddie puffing smoke through his slashed-open cheeks, promise OTT entertainment. But as the plot unfolds, only the strongest stomach will handle the scenes of torture, mutilation and rape between the black laughs.

Brian Cox delivers a towering performance as a paedophile ex-Marine in director Michael Cuesta's finely judged and exquisitely filmed drama from 2001. Co-starring screen novice Paul Franklin Dano as the teenager lured into Cox's orbit, L.I.E. refuses to make simplistic moral judgements in its exploration of this topical yet taboo subject.

Luc Besson oversaw this brain-batteringly stoopid collision between hopped-up, old-school kung-fu flick and Lock Stockish Brit gangster movie. Jason Statham just about gets his mouth around some sub-Tarantino dialogue as an ex-special forces getaway driver caught up in bad business involving a slave ring in Nice. Risible.

Ice-cold thriller with a downhome feel from the Coen brothers

The first in Takashi Miike's career-making Triad Society Trilogy. Set in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, rogue cop Kippei Shiina puts himself between local yakuza and a gay Taiwanese mob; cue cocaine-fuelled blow jobs, anal rape and old ladies having their eyeballs plucked out. A Hollywood remake seems unlikely.

Underrated 1989 adaptation of Jay McInerney's seminal NY nightlife novel, riddled with "Bolivian marching powder", period electro-pop and a brave (though criticised) performance from Michael J Fox as a broken-hearted magazine fact-checker who's burning the candle at three ends. Kiefer Sutherland's a bad influence. Dryly comic, painfully candid.

Sam (Jonathan Pryce) dreams of love and escape from his clerical job in a monolithic bureaucracy, but finds himself sucked ever deeper into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Michael Palin and Robert De Niro play brilliantly against type, while Terry Gilliam's dystopian vision broke the mould. Dazzling, disturbing, darkly comic and downright essential.

Paul Schrader's simmering 1991 study of a drug dealer's midlife crisis remains the script closest to his own heart. A maturer Travis Bickle, Willem Dafoe's loser is confused when "employer" Susan Sarandon goes legit, and panic-stricken when an ex-girlfriend dies and gunplay's required. Meditative rather than action-packed, it's grown over time.

The umpteenth retail release for this era-defining cash-cow of Scottish junkies, and the cracks are now beginning to show. Yes, it's a beautiful burst of propulsive film-making, but after the likes of Jesus's Son and Requiem For A Dream, it seems a little too eager to please, a little too chipper, too Ewan McGregor to be wholly credible.

With a moody slow-mo intro, followed by a wickedly funny history of methamphetamine and capped by an intriguing roll call of deviant speed-freaks, the first 15 minutes of The Salton Sea promises, and delivers, far more than the rest of the movie can handle. Val Kilmer is the widower hunting his wife's killers among Los Angeles' drug detritus.