The Arrival (1991)
This is a weird little film about an alien vampire that is slowly rejuvenating. This has an interesting swim of strange ideas but in reality isn’t very good
The Arrival (1996)
An alien invasion and takeover film that was clearly inspired by the success of tv’s The X Files. This is a smart effort that emerges as something unworldly in David Twohy’s hands
The Art of Dying (1991)
Actor Wings Hauser directs and stars in a film in which he plays a detective pursuing a killer who is luring teenage runaways into making snuff films
The Artifice Girl (2022)
One of the best of the recent spate of artificial intelligence films. A programmer creates an A.I. for the purpose of trapping sexual predators on the internet only to be faced with ethical questions about what he has created
The Asphyx (1972)
A very underrated and almost completely ignored film from the great Anglo-horror cycle in which Victorian scientists are on a quest to capture the spirit of death
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
Film in which Sean Penn plays the real-life figure of a man frustrated by the pressures of everyday life who snaps and attempts to fly a plane into the White House
The Assessment (2024)
An hilariously black, deadpan film set in a future as a couple undergo assessment for whether they are fit to be parents. This involves Alicia Vikander moving into the house and play-acting being a child with absolutely chaotic effect
The Assignment (2016)
From Walter Hill, one of the legendary action directors, comes what is either the most edgy or tasteless concepts for a revenge film – Michelle Rodriguez is a hitman who seeks revenge after having gender reassignment surgery forced on him
The Astounding She-Monster (1958)
A cheap 1950s B alien invader film with mobsters holed up at a mountainside cabin who are then visited by Shirley Kilpatrick as a radioactive alien
The Astro-Zombies (1968)
A real Grade Z film. A mind-boggling stew involving John Carradine conducting mad science experiments, technical gaffes aplenty, spy capers featuring Tura Satana and even M.A.S.H.‘s Wayne Rogers on script
The Astronaut (2025)
Kate Mara plays an astronaut returned from a space mission strangely changed. Before you can say The Quatermass Xperiment, ‘something’ mysteriously appears to be entering the house at night
The Astronaut Farmer (2006)
The Polish Brothers are a greatly underrated force in US filmmaking. Here they make a fine film with Billy Bob Thornton as an everyday farmer who decides to build and launch his own space rocket
The Astronaut’s Wife (1999)
Charlize Theron becomes paranoid and suspects her space shuttle astronaut husband Johnny Depp of returning possessed by an alien. Essentially an SF version of Rosemary’s Baby
The Atomic Kid (1954)
Perhaps the strangest film Mickey Rooney ever made, a comedy in which he is a prospector caught in an atomic explosion and afterwards gains the ability to cause things to explode
The Atomic Submarine (1959)
A low-budget but surprisingly reasonable mix of submarine drama and 1950s alien invader film with a submarine crew tracking a flying saucer
The Atrocity Exhibition (1998)
Adaptation of the classic J.G. Ballard novel that deals with the surreal blurring and breakdown between media, architecture, celebrity and the protagonist’s disturbed state of mind
The Attic (1980)
In a similar vein to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, this a work of Gothic madness as Carrie Snodgress tends cranky sadistic father Ray Milland in a big old house
The Atticus Institute (2015)
The rarity of a really good Found Footage film. Designed to look like lost footage from 1970s psychic experiments, this concerns a scientific team who discover they are dealing with a woman who is demonically possessed
The Aurora Encounter (1985)
A low-budget cute alien film made in the aftermath of post-E.T., this purports to be based on the true story of a UFO and alien visitor who landed in 19th Century Texas
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
The Avengers (1998)
The Avengers was the height of 1960s chic. Amid the 90s/00s fad for big screen remakes of tv shows, this was a miscalculated disaster that gets everything about the original wrong from the casting to the droll humour
The Avengers (2012)
The culmination of one of the most ambitious cinematic exercises ever conducted, with Marvel weaving storylines through several films to finally merge here with flawless regard. The characters get far more depth than in all of their previous films
The Avenging Conscience or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (1914)
The first full length Edgar Allan Poe film from D.W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame. Rather than Roger Corman’s brooding Gothicism, Griffith waters Poe’s melancholia down to a banal Christian morality play
The Awakening (1980)
Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about the spirit of an Ancient Egyptian queen possessing a modern day woman. Lavishly produced with a series of novelty deaths modeled on The Omen. Also the first mummy film to actually shoot in Egypt
The Awakening (2011)
A classic British ghost story that produces an exceedingly haunted atmosphere at times, although falls apart in a highly contrived M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
The Awful Dr Orloff (1962)
The first film from prolific horror and exploitation director Jesus Franco to which he would later make four sequels. This is a blatant copy of the French Eyes Without a Face served up with little directorial flair
The Ax (2005)
Costa-Gavras, a director known for highly political films, makes a dark comedy about an unemployed man who sets out to eliminate his rival job applicants