Ulli Lommel

If you’re used to the lush Sirkian Technicolor of Fassbinder’s later films, this feature debut might come as something of a bracing shock. Its monochromatic minimalism and coolly detached subversion of gangster-film tropes are served up with an extra dose of nihilism, because, well, it’s Fassbinder.

Effi Briest tells of a seventeen-year-old girl who is married off by her parents to a wealthy Baron more than twice her age. Lonely and dissatisfied, she seeks solace in the companionship of her husband's friend, Major Crampas.

Part fiction, part document of the early 1980s New York punk scene, a journalist begins a volatile relationship with a rock star in this vérité drama.

In this surreal drama, a young woman faces the darkness of her past, and uncertain future, as she struggles to find her own identity.

Chinese Roulette, set in an isolated house during a weekend break, is like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None without the murders - a tense psychodrama in which infidelities are revealed and families breakdown. At its centre is nouvelle vague icon Anna Karina, a rare outsider alongside the familiar Fassbinder faces.