China in the turmoil of Japanese occupation is the evocative setting for this unusual and visually stunning tale. Recruited before she is truly aware of her purpose, a young woman is groomed to become an irresistible siren, an icon of contemporary eroticism to ensnare a collaborator who has wreaked havoc amongst her people. Ang Lee's stunning follow up to "Broke Back Mountain" is in essence a thriller but as with all his films it is the richness and depth of the characters that really drive the find out more...

An acclaimed and gloriously visual epic that follows the life of Avik, a young half-Eskimo boy, in his search for love and identity. It takes him across continents, through the hell of war, and into a painful reunion with Aubertine, his childhood sweet-heart. Moving, beautiful and superbly filmed. find out more...

Taken from Arthur Golden's immensely successful novel, this is a visually ravishing adaptation of lowly young geisha girl Chiyo and her transformation into Sayuri, a legendary courtesan and the focus of desire for every man of any status. Directed by the man behind ‘Chicago', the beautifully rendered glamour is hardly surprising but it does come at the expense of the tale itself, and while much of the acting is more than worthy, the use of Chinese actors to tell a Japanese tale does seem somethi find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con find out more...

Sweeping romantic drama of epic proportions. Fiennes's WWII pilot lays badly burned and in the care of an army nurse. As the unnamed, stiff-upper-lipped "English Patient" begins to recover, memories emerge of a past life as an archaeologist/cartographer in the Sahara, and a passionate affair with a married woman, Katharine. Though Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel simplifies, jettisons and changes certain elements of the original story, it remains a rich, complex, entran find out more...