A Chinese soldier's tale; Guzidi was a child of poverty who became a successful guerrilla soldier and then officer in the Liberation Army. After a fierce battle with the KMT Guzidi and his remaining 46 troops are sent to a front line defensive position, where they are abandoned by the main army corps to a fight to the death. After a heroic act in the Korean War Guzidi, riddled with guilt and loss of meaningful identity, fights a long battle to atone for the loss of his company by gaining recogni find out more...

'Azumi' is a frantic CGI-assisted Japanese period drama from cult director Ryuhei Kitamura starring pop siren Aya Ueto as a teenage assassin who begins the film as the only girl among 10 warriors who have been trained from childhood by Jiji, a grey-bearded samurai. One day, Jiji tells them they must pass a final test before they embark on the mission they have prepared for all these years. He pairs them up and the five that survive, led by Jiji, descend from the mountain that is the only world t find out more...

Two brothers, in itself a metaphor, get drafted into the Korean Civil War. The more macho elder one is determined to become a hero in order to win his bookish brother a ticket back to mum and this leads both to him turning into a monster and a serious split between the two. Against the bitter backdrop of a violent war many loyalties are called into question, to brother, family, friend, nation, ideology, nationality and to fellow soldiers, and many are betrayed. This is an awesome, if emotionally find out more...

Three young Hong Kong hustlers move to Saigon to try and profit, smuggling penicillin and gold, from the war, but their friendship is tested to the limits through greed, betrayal and lust, amid the horrors of a war-torn Vietnam. Comparable to the 'Deer Hunter', this violent epic is the most ambitiously personal and political of John Woo's films, but still comes packed with guns, explosives and balletic action. find out more...

Knowing that his father had been some sort of WW2 war hero writer James Bradley set out to discover the truth about him and the fellow marines who raised the flag over Iwo Jima for the now infamously 'fraudulent' photgraph. We follow this ironically socially heterogeneous group of men through the horrors of one of the most bloody battles of WW2, interspliced with the early return home of three of the 'heroes' to act as politically manipulated cheerleaders for further fundraising to continue the find out more...

This lavishly photographed and costumed action-drama-epic sticks to what we know of Genghis's early years, although that's not much, telling the story of how a young tribal boy overcame many obstacles, including slavery, to become a legendary conqueror. The widescreen suits this 'big sky' country and there is something remarkably authentic about the yurts and the costumes. Chosen for marriage, at the age of nine, by a female child, Borte, while he thinks he's doing the chosing, she becomes one o find out more...

The period between the end of the Han Dynasty and the beginning of the Three Kingdom Periods is deeply engrained into Chinese myth, think of our own Arthurian legends, though Woo adapted this film from the historically accurate 'Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms' rather than the romantic 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms' (one of the 'Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature'). find out more...

400 years after the Republic's birth Rome has become the wealthiest city in the world, home to over 1 million people and the epicentre of one of the greatest empires history has ever known, but with this phenomenal success has come corruption and excess, the very principles of Rome's founding fathers are under threat and its time as a Republic is drawing to a close. Rome is a magnificent and full blooded dramatisation of the Empire's rebirth. find out more...

Episode 7: Pharsalus; once again Caesar and Pompey find their fortunes reversed; Atia enlists Octavia to ask another favour of Servilia. find out more...

Episode 9: Utica; Caesar returns to Rome in triumph; Vorenus braces for a showdown; Servilia attempts to unearth a secret about Caesar. find out more...