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You'd be forgiven for mistaking Jonathan Glazer as purely a master of the visual.

The London director's career was dominated for many years by his huge-scale commercial campaigns for the likes of Guinness and Stella Artois - to say nothing of his music videos for indie rock darlings Radiohead and Blur, which snagged him MTV Director of the Year 1997.

With 2000's Sexy Beast, Glazer took a flying leap to the feature film, announcing himself as a true original with plenty more on his mind. The slow-and-steady growth of his filmography since then has demonstrated the singular, kinetic vision of one of the most formally inventive and ambitious directors working today. Bold, abstract visuals and disorienting soundscapes serve to build an atmosphere of malevolence and alienation. His characters are dangerous, isolated, unable to transcend their circumstances and avoid the violence that we sense is awaiting them – but under it all is a powerful core of complex, contradictory human feeling.

Now, the director has made his highest-stakes work yet with The Zone of Interest. The Holocaust-set drama took the Grand Prix at Cannes, and stars Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, and Ralph Herforth.

Ahead of The Zone of Interest, we invite you to reDiscover two of Jonathan Glazer's best works. Double glazing, if you will.

THE LINE-UP

Sexy Beast
From 07 Jan   |   Book Now

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) - retired gangster, proper geezer - lounges stark and sunburnt against the blinding white of his Costa del Sol villa. Away from safecracking in grimy London and relaxing with his glamorous wife DeeDee, life couldn't be sweeter. But something is stirring in the Spanish mountains, and the colossal boulder that crashes past Gal and into his well-kept pool is an omen of greater destruction to come. Former associate Don Logan, the most notorious gangster in London, is here to pull him in for one last job.

Sexy Beast is a good old-fashioned heist flick invigorated with Glazer's signature intensity and confident strangeness. Every frame feels meticulously decorated, characters banter in scorching, chaotic Cockney that would make Tarantino blush, and things veer into the surreal with Lynchian dream sequences.

Ben Kingsley gives a searing, terrifying turn as the rabid Don Logan – one of the gangster movie's greatest ever villains – and Gal's fear and love for his beloved DeeDee gives real sweetness to the fast-talking fun and masculine bravado. It's ridiculous. Tremendous. Fantastic. Fan-dabby-dozy-tastic. Who wouldn't lap it up?

Under the Skin
From 14 Jan   |   Book Now

A mysterious, inhuman creature in the guise of a woman picks up a woman from the side of the road, dons her coat, and prowls the streets of Scotland in a white van, luring men to an indescribable otherworldly fate. It only gets stranger and more sinister from here.

Glazer's adaptation of Michael Faber's cult 2000 novel was almost ten years in the making, and the result is visually and aurally stunning: a sparse, voyeuristic science fiction vision that unpicks gender, humanity and sexuality with a dispassionate alien gaze.

Scarlett Johansson's glacial turn as a hunter coming to understand humanity is remarkable, and all the more so when you position it alongside her 'Sexiest Woman of the Year', Avengers-starring, box-office-bombshell status. Many of the high street interactions in the film are with ordinary people who were, at the time, unaware they were being filmed covertly – it's a testament to her embodiment of anonymity that the unwitting Glaswegians don't recognise her.

P.S. Yes, we wanted to play Birth too - but we couldn't get our hands on it! 

From beloved classics to unearthed gems, reintroduce yourself to the best films of yesterday with reDiscover — be that last decade, or last century. reDiscover is free for Picturehouse Members, and all tickets are just £8.