The film version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's famous anti-war sci-fi novel. Slipping back and forth along his own life line a suburban optometrist experiences the fire bombing of Dresden and captivity on the planet Trafalmardore. A powerful and seemingly unfilmable book that turned out to be a great movie. find out more...

An epic family drama spanning three generations of a Jewish family, who moved from a rural village to the city, became wealthy, respected, bourgeois and/or radicalised and Hungarianised, set against a backdrop of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War 1, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust and the Communist era. A tour-de-force performance by Ralph Fiennes in various reincarnations, especially as the character who won a fencing gold medal for Hungary in the 1936 Olympics, in th find out more...

An award-winning and arty biopic, adapted from his memoirs, of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich, focusing on the period between the 30s and 60s and his deeply ambivalent relationship with Stalin. Worthy and with a resonant cinematic understanding of Shostakovich's opuses. find out more...

A cinephile's odyssey through a century of film clips, to take a witty and stylish look at homosexuality on the silver screen, narrated by Lily Tomlin, with interviews with the likes of Curtis, Sarandon, Hanks and MacLaine and including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Thelma & Louise and Philadelphia. find out more...

This truly exhaustive journey from the dawn of the medium through to the late sixties documents the rise and rise of Hollywood. Martin Scorsese guides us through his personal favourites and a vast selection of cult classics and recognised masterpieces. find out more...

Born in New Orleans, abandoned and adopted on the day of the end of WWI, Benjamin Button is a medical mystery. Entering life as a physically old man, over the course of his remarkable existence he rejuvenates to infancy. He has a unique, poignant, but also joyous, perspective on the world around him. Very loosely adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald's excellent short story of the same title, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is a beautifully visualised and whimsical tale that drifts through the e find out more...

1939; Edward Wilson starts a career in intelligence and covert operations as a consequence of his silver spoon background and American military involvement in WW2. 1961; now Wilson ruthlessly organises programmes that involve the deaths of many, seems incapable of having a relationship with a woman that doesn't involve destroying her, his marriage is a career enhancing loveless and hollow affair, he betrays most who know him, including his family, and this sale of his soul - all in the name of p find out more...

A biography of Aisin-Gioro "Henry" Pu Yi, who at the age of three was named the Emperor of China and died as a gardener at the Botanical Gardens of Peking. Told in an interesting flashback/flashforward style, we learn of Pu Yi's childhood, the time he spent in the Forbidden City, his term as the emperor of Japan's Manchukuo, his imprisonment by the Communists and his eventual release back to public life in 1959. A true epic with a cast of millions. find out more...

A dramatisation of Betty Page, a voluptuous young woman who grew up in a conservative religious family in Nashville, Tennessee, became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York and a nationwide erotic icon for her tongue-in-cheek fetishistic poses. To small town America, though, she was a 'moral threat' to their youth and, eventually, she became a target in a Senate investigation. Mary Herron's film is a richly evocative observation of an era and 50s America's repressive sexual and religious bel find out more...

One of Hollywood's greatest love stories with Streisand and Redford making a dashing, if unlikely couple. As college sweethearts they defy their all too obvious differences to be together, but, as the marriage progresses, Redford's easy success as a writer threatens to destroy the idyllic union. One of the most referenced final moments in film (see Sex and the City). A classic romance. find out more...