Top 50 most watched films on BFI Player so far in 2018

Director: Kieran Evans

In modern Liverpool, a couple meet and begin a transgressive, sexually charged affair set against a background of crime and encroaching danger.

Director: Richard Kwietniowski

John Hurt stars in Richard Kwietniowski’s comedy of fame and obsession about an older man (Hurt) who becomes infatuated with a young Hollywood actor (Jason Priestley), and proceeds to track him down.

Director: Matteo Garrone

Matteo Garrone’s unnervingly authentic Naples crime drama won the Grand Prix at Cannes before inspiring a hit TV series.

Director: Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway became a director of international status with this witty, stylised, erotic country house murder mystery.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Moira Shearer’s ballerina is torn between love and her career in Powell and Pressburger’s hugely influential melodrama.

Director: Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang’s expressionist dystopia is one of the first science fiction feature films, and is arguably the most influential.

Director: Radley Metzger

A decadent couple and their son invite a circus stunt-woman back to their castle for an evening of erotic games, role-play and revelations.

Director: Peter Greenaway

Martin Freeman’s hearty turn as Rembrandt anchors one of Peter Greenaway’s most accessible films, charting the creation of the Dutch master’s key work, ‘The Night Watch’.

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cannes’ Grand Jury Prize was awarded to this unnerving drama about a man who claims to be able to kill people with a ‘terror shout’ learned from an Aboriginal shaman.

Director: David Lean

The first of David Lean’s two Dickens adaptations is one of the finest British literary interpretations and one of the most acclaimed of all British films.

Director: Dario Argento

Dario Argento’s hugely influential thriller, about a murder witness who becomes amateur detective, added sex and style to the murder-mystery and kick-started Italy’s ‘giallo’ genre.

Director: Andrew Bujalski

Andrew Bujalski’s hilarious and surreal comedy about the birth of computer culture, set in an early 1980s conference where primitive programmers take on chess masters.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica’s story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a classic of post-war Italian cinema.

Director: Peter Greenaway

One of Britain’s most inventive filmmakers, Peter Greenaway, tackles the story of arguably the most influential filmmaker in cinema history, Sergei Eisenstein.

Director: Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold’s highly acclaimed film, winner of top prizes at Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival, is a haunting drama about a woman confronting past demons.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, this unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

Director: Philip Ridley

Stunningly photographed drama about a young American boy caught up in the nightmare of a sinister rural community.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning star in a taut political thriller about radical environmentalists planning to commit an act of eco-terrorism.

Director: Fritz Lang

Peter Lorre is unforgettable as the compulsive child murderer on the run from both police and criminals alike, in Fritz Lang’s seminal crime film.

Director: Werner Herzog

One of Werner Herzog’s most acclaimed and audacious films, Fitzcarraldo tells the incredible story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an opera-loving fortune hunter who dreams of bringing opera to the heart of the Peruvian jungle.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini’s landmark of Italian neorealism, often cited as one of the greatest films ever made.

Director: Michael Beach Nichols

What would you do if a Nazi moved next door? This chilling documentary follows the white supremacist takeover of a tiny Dakotan town.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

A constant fixture in critics’ polls, Yasujiro Ozu’s most enduring masterpiece is a beautifully nuanced exploration of filial duty, expectation and regret.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni’s mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman (Richard Harris).

Director: Carl Th. Dreyer

An incontestable masterpiece of silent cinema, Carl Dreyer’s deeply moving biopic features one of the most powerful performances ever captured on film.

Director: Sidney J. Furie

The coolest spy of all – Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer – makes his brilliant big screen debut in this landmark British spy thriller.

Director: Takashi Miike

Takashi Miike burst to international prominence with this deeply disturbing tale of a deadly young woman who turns the tables on her middle-aged suitor.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s classic about a handsome, enigmatic stranger (Terence Stamp) who arrives at a bourgeois household and seduces an entire family.

Director: Rodney Ascher

Rodney Ascher’s enigmatic essay film weaves together the contrasting theories of five different narrators who believe Stanley Kubrick deliberately buried hidden messages in his 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.

Director: Carol Reed

Carol Reed’s timeless classic, one of the greatest British films, lavishly marries a perfect script, an unforgettable theme tune and the star power of Orson Welles.

Director: Stéphane Brizé

When a happily married man decides to volunteer at his son’s school, he begins to form a romantic bond with a teacher in this intimate French drama.

Director: Abel Ferrara

Christopher Walken is the dogged drug-lord determined to keep his empire together, in Abel Ferrarra’s brutally gritty crime thriller.

Director: Ted Kotcheff

In this classic, broiling Australian thriller, an exasperated schoolteacher finds himself stranded in the dusty outback town of Bundanyabba, where the growing isolation and unhinged locals begin to eat away at his sanity.

Director: Ivan Sen

An Aboriginal cop returns to his hometown to solve the brutal murder teenage girl, uncovering a web of corruption and a growing body count, in Ivan Sen’s acclaimed Australian riff on the western genre.

Director: David O. Russell

David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) made his feature debut in 1994 with this biting black comedy, which caused a stir with its incestuous subplot and portrayal of adolescent restlessness.

Director: Wim Wenders

Acclaimed director Wim Wenders, with the help of Dennis Hopper, transforms Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘Ripley’s Game’ into a gripping European noir.

Director: René Laloux

René Laloux and Roland Topor’s surreal, psychedelic sci-fi animation imagines a world in which humanoid creatures are kept as pets by a race of giants.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard’s playful tribute to the Hollywood pulp crime movies of the 1940s, executed with typically Gallic cool.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

More Godard. This time his extraordinary debut feature, an insouciant and iconoclastic crime film that paved the way for the French New Wave.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’ scary, witty tale of a dysfunctional Greek family is original, ingenious and sadly relevant as a study of parent-child relationships

Director: Walerian Borowczyk

An outrageous classic of erotic cinema, Walerian Borowczyk’s playful and subversive fantasy finds a horny heiress courting the ravenous desires of a wild beast.

Director: Courtney Hunt

Nominated for two Oscars (best actress – Melissa Leo – and best original screenplay), Frozen River is a riveting thriller that raises questions about the borders we construct, between countries, communities and each other.

Director: Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel’s provocative classic about a bored and neglected housewife (Catherine Deneuve) risks her reputation to take up a daring new hobby.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Anna Karina shines in Godard’s critically acclaimed account of a Parisian woman’s slow descent into prostitution.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Godard conducts an autopsy of love and the creative process, as a boorish film producer dismantles a seemingly strong marriage.

Director: Sandra Goldbacher

Anna Friel and Michelle Williams star as two troubled girls whose tumultuous friendship takes many twists and turns.

Director: Ryan Fleck

Ryan Gosling received his first Oscar nomination for his performance as an inspirational inner city high school teacher, in this moving story of redemption in an unforgiving world.

Director: Walerian Borowczyk

Walerian Borowczyk presents four stories of sexual taboos throughout the ages, in his highly controversial classic of 1970s erotic cinema.

Director: Im Sang-soo

An enigmatic housemaid and her wealthy, totalitarian employer begin an affair that will have disastrous consequences for them both.

Director: Wim Wenders

Our most played film of the year so far is Wim Wenders’ moving tale of loss and redemption. The late, great Harry Dean Stanton had his finest role as the near-mute Travis, on a journey across America to reunite his family.