Ken Russell

A classic rock opera about a boy who is traumatized by the death of his father. He is "cured" several years later, only to be hailed as a "Messiah."

Research scientist Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) believes other states of consciousness are as real as everyday reality. Using sensory deprivation, then adding powerful hallucinogenic drugs, he explores these altered states ... and endures experiences that make madness seem a blessing.

In 1816, a sprawling villa in Switzerland is the setting for a stormy night of horror and madness. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Shelley's fiancée Mary Godwin, her stepsister Claire Clairemont and Byron's friend John Polidori spend a hallucinogenic evening confronting their fears and share the terrifying fantasies that chase them through the castle that night.

The story opens with the super-star actor Rudolph Valentino in his coffin, dead at the age of thirty-one. As one by one the women in his life come to pay homage to "The Sheik," Valentino's rise from tea dance gigolo to screen idol unfolds in a series of extravagant flashbacks - highlighted by beautifully rendered sepia-toned recreations of his silent films. Freely mixing fact and fiction, director Russell, a man of ideas as well as baroque images,...

Harry Palmer has left the British Secret Service and become a private detective. One of his first assignments is to deliver an apparently innocent thermos flask to an old friend in Helsinki. Palmer is suspicious of the flask and his friend's motives.

Set in an English mining community on the crest of modernity, this traces the shifting currents of desire that link the emancipated Brangwen sisters to a freethinking dreamer and a hard willed industrialist, as well as the men's own erotically charged friendship.

Ten of the world's best-known film makers were given a free hand to make real any vision.