Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

Shunya Ito's second Scorpion film, and the most formally daring of the entire cycle. Escaped from prison, Nami Matsushima and a group of fellow inmates cross a hallucinatory landscape while the authorities hunt them, and Ito abandons realism for pure expressionism, seasons changing in a single shot, a Greek-chorus figure narrating in song.

Meiko Kaji barely speaks and dominates every frame, and Ito's imagery, the group frozen against a blood-red sky, belongs in an art museum. It is astonishing that this came out of a programme of women-in-prison quickies.

One of the most visually stunning films on this entire site.