The Devils

Ken Russell's film about the 1634 Loudun possessions is filed here because of the company it keeps on video shelves, not because it belongs with them.

It is a major work. Derek Jarman's white-tiled sets make 17th-century France look like a hospital, or a bureaucracy, and Oliver Reed's Urbain Grandier is the best thing he ever did. The subject is the mechanics of a show trial: how a state that wants a man dead will use whatever hysteria is locally available.

For fifty-five years Warner would not release the full cut. Every version on sale was missing the 'Rape of Christ' sequence, which Warner itself removed before the film reached the BBFC in 1971, along with the trims the Board asked for. In 2026 Warner finally restored Russell's director's cut in 4K: it premiered at Cannes in May, opened in North American cinemas on 16 October and reaches Britain and Ireland through the BFI on 30 October. That is the version to see.