Fascinating, factually based story of an anti-social double murderer, Robert Stroud, who used his years in the world's toughest prison to transform himself into a world-renowned ornithologist. Superb performances all round but Karl Malden is particularly riveting as the sadistic prison governer. find out more...

Guinness restores the morale of British PoWs by building a bridge which is of military value to the Japanese, and then attempts to thwart the RAF's destruction of it! A classic film which swept 7 Oscars including "Best Picture". find out more...

Colditz was the P-O-W camp where the Germans put the bad boys, the prisoners, Brits of course, who repeatedly tried to escape. This is their story; a first class tale with British stiff-upper-lips to the fore, nationalistic but heroic. find out more...

Curtis and Poitier both bagged Oscars for their portrayal of two chain-gang prisoners, one black, one white. Forced to make their escape still manacled together, their fight for freedom through the swamps makes a powerful metaphor for the rampant racial hatred of the times. Great support cast too. find out more...

The greatest prisoner of war adventure of them all. Behind the barbed wire fences of Stalag Luft the Allies plan a mass break-out by digging three tunnels. Discovery by the Germans when only one is completed means the chances of escape are thin. Yet 76 make the attempt in this epic adventure.

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'The Round Up' takes place within a detention camp in the remote Hungarian countryside, after the collapse of the 1848 revolution against Austrian domination. A formal variation on the main patterns of ritual power, director Jansco deliberately side-steps revolutionary heroics and focuses on the persecutions and de-humanizations, which always accompany conflict, and makes 'an almost abstract statement of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed'... there are only losers and survivors. find out more...

Bresson's remarkable and detailed account of the brilliantly conceived escape of imprisoned and condemned to death real-life resistance fighter Andre Devigny. The intensity of the direction is augmented superbly by the music; Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Superb. find out more...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...