Wolfen

A detective investigates a series of killings in a demolished New York neighbourhood and finds the predators are not men and not quite wolves.

Michael Wadleigh, who made Woodstock, directed only this one fiction feature. The film uses a solarised thermal point of view for the creatures, decades before it became standard, and the Bronx locations, genuinely derelict, are the real subject.

Its idea is ecological and political: the wolfen are an older intelligence that has always lived in the margins humans abandon, and they take the poor and the addicted because nobody counts them. A Native American ironworker delivers the film's thesis.

It was released the same year as the two great transformation films and was buried by them, unfairly. It is a slower, stranger, sadder thing than either.

Albert Finney is the detective.