Alberto Cavalcanti made some of the best, most enjoyable films of the 1940s and helped establish that bastion of British national cinema Ealing Studios. This new restoration by the BFI combines suspense, dark comedy and stark (for its time) violence to bring to life a story by Graham Greene. It still unsettles, even shocks, with its subversive, almost surreal spectacle of a quaint English village under Nazi attack during WW2.

Disguised as British soldiers, the invading Germans ask to be housed by the friendly locals until their behaviour arouses suspicion and the villagers slowly realise they have been infiltrated. Here is a rare chance to properly relish a visionary film, as jolting and quizzical about British life as anything by Powell and Pressburger.