School of the Holy Beast

The Japanese branch of nunsploitation, and the most formally accomplished film in the whole category. A young woman enters a convent to investigate her mother's death and uncovers its corruption and cruelty, and Norifumi Suzuki stages it with astonishing visual beauty, most famously a flagellation set against a storm of falling rose petals.

Suzuki treats the exploitation content with the eye of a genuine stylist, and the anticlerical anger underneath is real. It is lurid and gorgeous in equal measure, closer to art film than to its European cousins.

The high point of the subgenre, and a beautiful piece of filmmaking.