The Rocky Horror Picture Show was first released in 1975, after 18 months as a stage musical. Since then, as anyone who is not a five-year-old or dead knows, it has acquired immense cult status and has fostered a thriving leathergoods industry (actually, I made that last bit up, but I thought it sounded good).
Its basic idea is one of doe-eyed innocence (personified by Susan Sarandon as Janet Weiss and Barry Bostwick as Brad Majors) meeting unspeakably decadent, transgressive sexuality. Our protagonists, on the way to visit an old professor, find themselves stranded, late at night, in a car that won't go. Seeing a light from afar, they head towards it, blithely unaware that its source is a domain of spiritual darkness. Well, not really. The house is owned by one Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry), a lust-addled scientist trying to create the perfect specimen of manhood (or do I mean 'masculinity'? Either way, the result is the same) - the eponymous Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). Despite themselves, Janet and Brad are drawn into the hyperbolic sexuality which infuses the house...and their innocence melts away like hot wax.
Did I mention that Frank N. Furter and his minions are from outer space? That's why they get to wear all that make-up and leather and those fishnet stockings, and have rampant sex and sing a lot. Damn those aliens.
If you haven't seen this film, don't tell anyone. Just see it, now. If you have (of course you have; everyone has), see it again. It's hilarious and imaginative and the music should be shower-fodder for weeks to come.

Everyone who's seen Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes remembers the surreal, 17-minute ballet sequence. When The Red Shoes proved a success, Powell and Pressburger set to work on something much more daring: an entire film that would combine music, dance, colourful trick photography and (in this case) song, the way that the 17-minute ballet had. It would be their last unqualified success.
Tales of Hoffmann is a free adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's opera, in turn based on the bizarre fairytales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In the film version Hoffmann himself tells us the stories of his three lost loves: Olympia, a magically animated doll he encountered in Paris; Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan; and Antonia, a dying singer imprisoned on one of the Greek islands. As he finishes the story he realises he was doomed to lose in each case but he also realises what he gained in exchange.
Just after Tales of Hoffmann was released in the USA, Cecil B. DeMille sent Powell and Pressburger a fan letter, in which he complained that although he loved opera he had never been satisfied with any stage production. "The only satisfactory frame of mind to bring to the theatre," wrote DeMille, "was to say to oneself, 'Well you can't have everything.' Your production of Tales of Hoffmann has proven that you can have everything. For the first time in my life I was treated to Grand Opera where the beauty, power and scope of the music was matched by the visual presentation."