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.

Warner has never released the full cut. What you can usually see is missing several minutes the BBFC removed in 1971 and Warner has declined to restore since. That the definitive version of a canonical British film remains unavailable in 2026 is itself a scandal worth knowing about.