While travelling to visit their grandfather two children are told, through three beautifully observed vignettes, of a family curse that has lasted two hundred years. During the Napoleonic Wars a French soldier and a Benedetti fall in love leading to mutual tragedy, but great wealth for the family. 1903; a powerful politician separates his sister from her lover, leading to tragedy. A WW2 resistance effort goes wrong.......tragedy. find out more...

Texan rancher Bick Benedict visits a Maryland farm to buy a prize horse. Whilst there he meets and falls in love with the owner's daughter Leslie, they are married immediately and return to his ranch. The story of their family and its rivalry with cowboy and (later oil tycoon) Jett Rink unfolds across two generations. James Dean earned his second Oscar nomination in this tale of frustration and revenge, wealth and racial oppression in Texas. find out more...

Young provincial waiter Jan Dite may be short in height but his aspirations are lofty, he is determined to become a millionaire and he knows just how to do it. Continually watching and listening to his superiors and his high-flying, big-spending customers, Jan learns how to succeed by pleasing others. Based on the novel by Czech author Bohumit Hrabal, and directed by the Academy Award winning maker of ‘Closely Observed Trains', 'I Served The King' is a beguiling comedy about opportunism, identit find out more...

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...

Beautiful, but spoiled, Fanny has married Jewish stockbroker Job to save crooked brother Trippy's arse and for his money, but she soon denies Job access to the marital bed. Trippy disappears to get himself killed in WW1 and Fanny eventually divorces Job, who also goes to Europe, with their daughter.
Years later; the daughter has returned to the USA but Job has been whisked off to a concentration camp, where he goes blind. Fanny catches diphtheria and loses her beauty while her daughter find out more...

This justifiably acclaimed epic tells the fascinating story of a well-heeled German Jewish family, Jettel, Walter and 5-year-old Regina, who fled the Nazis in the late 1930s and settled as farmers in Kenya. Here they, as German citizens, eventually face internment, separation, Walter joining the British army, and a detioration in their marriage. 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...

It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...