The backstabbing criminals in the shadowy underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le doulos have only one guiding principle: “Lie or die.” Shot and edited with Melville’s trademark cool and featuring masterfully stylized dialogue and performances, Le doulos is one of the filmmaker’s most gripping crime dramas.

Jean-Paul Belmondo delivers a subtly sensual performance in the hot-under-the-collar Léon Morin, Priest, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of French cinema’s towering virtuosos.

"Moderate and songlike” – a musical tempo, but also an apt descriptor of this moody, deliberate drama co-scripted by Duras from her novel. Theatre giant Peter Brook’s restrained direction casts rare moments of intensity in relief, and Armand Thirard’s crisp cinematography conveys the desolation of life in a windswept town where “summer never comes.”

Edward Yang’s second feature is a mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present. Taipei Story chronicles the growing estrangement between a washed-up baseball player (Hou Hsiao-hsien) working in his family’s textile business and his girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin), who clings to the upward mobility of her career in property development.

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked Taiwan in the 1960s. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centres on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager from innocence to juvenile delinquency.

Edward Yang's extraordinary Yi Yi follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.

It is 10 years since the artist, filmmaker and animator Robert Breer died and his impact on experimental animation practice is greater than ever. After Images presents a range of work by contemporary animation artists who have built on Breer’s myriad formal and conceptual innovations, taking his lead into unexpected new directions.