A group of friends get together for a dinner party on the day of a comet's passing and slowly strange things start happening. [Highly recommended lesser-known gem]

I’d been obsessed with this film from the first time I saw it in the 1970s. In it Terence Stamp plays a mysterious man called The Visitor who arrives at the home of a haute-bourgeois Italian family and seduces everyone in the house—the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, and the maid—and brings them out of their depression and complacency in

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.

‘What comet?’ ‘Thomas! Do you never look up? They call it Hale–Bopp. It’s been on the news.’ ‘Hale–Bopp,’ said Thomas. ‘I see. I never watch the news.’ He raised the planisphere towards the editor. ‘I have no interest in astronomy. This comet could crash through the window and land on the carpet and I’d have nothing to say about it.’

“You start to realize that ‘something bigger than you are’ is usually just some kind of stupid mass hallucination. Or a giant scam.”