“The film is a series of very curious, strange and macabre unbelievable incidents,” said director Ken Russell of The Devils in 1971. "The point of the film really is the sinner who becomes a saint." The tribulations surrounding its release, still fresh in Russell's mind, could easily have been described as curious and strange too. The long-overdue arrival on DVD of his career landmark is important. The Devils is one of the most astonishing and powerful British films.

The death of Peter Cook on 9 January 1995 was my JFK moment. I'll never forget what I was doing when I heard the news. I was driving from London to Granada Studios in Manchester to interview comedian Caroline Aherne. At the time she was married to the New Order bass guitarist Peter Hook, so when the radio announced that Peter Cook was dead my ears did a double take.

The chance to see all 14 of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's full-length films and a selection of his shorts during the BFI’s season is unique. Conviction and mysticism are central to his films. Whether it’s the suffering principle of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) or the 17th-century hunts of Day of Wrath (made in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943), his characters are driven by passion and certainty. Most often they are women.

Among the many singularities of Pasolini’s films, the proportions of his narrative structure have to be the strangest. Here we, like the young Jason who grows before our eyes, get a six-minute introductory lecture from the hero's foster centaur which tells us what to look out for in the obscurities that follow: all is sacred, nature is never natural, myth and ritual are a living reality, this is a story of deeds, not thoughts.

Risks are everywhere. Crossing the road, cycling, not handling food properly, leaving a car boot unlocked, grain pits, night-time darkness – they all bring risks. Thankfully, government agency The Central Office of Information helped make us aware of the hazards. This two-DVD set – the sixth in the BFI’s collection of COI films – is mind-boggling company. Dealing with the multifarious risks seen here would leave no time to get into danger. You’d have to live in a bubble.

Days of Heaven made Terrence Malick’s legend. Released four years after his relatively conventional lovers-on-the-run debut Badlands (1974), it gave a similar story transcendental themes and images of painterly gorgeousness. Then he directed nothing else for 20 years. Choosing not to engage with interviews or celebrity, like Pynchon and Salinger he vanished into mystery and silence. Relative productivity since means this Malick-approved new print is issued in the wake of his fifth film, The Tree of Life.

When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline. There were exceptions, of course, one of the most important being Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded in 1951.

It is all in black and white, and undoubtedly very beautiful. Delphine Seyrig, the flighty, baffled siren at its heart, is undoubtedly very beautiful. The setting, which could be Versailles or a château in the Loire (it was in fact filmed at palaces in Bavaria), is undoubtedly very beautiful. The 1950s society mannequins, men in black tie, women in Coco Chanel, who're mysteriously occupying a central European spa hotel are undoubtedly very beautiful. It was undoubtedly directed, in 1961, by the then more or less unknown Alain Resnais and scripted by the better-known Alain Robbe-Grillet (author of Le Voyeur, 1955, and La Jalousie, 1957). Beauty agreed, it must be admitted that Last Year in Marienbad also remains as impenetrable on its rerelease as it was 50 years ago.

It is all in black and white, and undoubtedly very beautiful. Delphine Seyrig, the flighty, baffled siren at its heart, is undoubtedly very beautiful. The setting, which could be Versailles or a château in the Loire (it was in fact filmed at palaces in Bavaria), is undoubtedly very beautiful. The 1950s society mannequins, men in black tie, women in Coco Chanel, who're mysteriously occupying a central European spa hotel are undoubtedly very beautiful. It was undoubtedly directed, in 1961, by the then more or less unknown Alain Resnais and scripted by the better-known Alain Robbe-Grillet (author of Le Voyeur, 1955, and La Jalousie, 1957). Beauty agreed, it must be admitted that Last Year in Marienbad also remains as impenetrable on its rerelease as it was 50 years ago.

Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected.