After Renoir's reluctant addition of a couple of titles to satisfy the producers desire to expand to feature length, this masterpiece was finally released in 1946. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl briefly leaves her family and fiance and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost, but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, find out more...

The first of Visconti's series of films exploring the mechanisms of class and family in the context of historical change. Set during the 1860s Austrian occupation of Italy, Alida Valli plays Countess Lidia, a married Venetian aristocrat who falls in love with a young Austrian officer, Franz. Lidia sacrifices everything for love, but the narcissistic materialism of Franz becomes apparent, sadistically exploiting his own looks and her masochism, submitting her to one humiliation after another and, find out more...

In a remote village, due to food scarcity, everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave their home and travel to a certain mountain top to die. If anyone should refuse they would be disgracing their family within the small community. Orin is 69 and this winter it is her turn to make the journey, but she is torn by the fact that her eldest and widowed son, Tatsuhei, has yet to find a new wife. 'Ballad of Narayama' is a striking and fascinating human drama contemplating the issue of Cultural Rela find out more...

A chillingly awesome film, one of Clint's best. A dark sexual brooding drama set during the American Civil War. A wounded soldier is taken in by a crumbling girls' school and proceeds, through their sexual confusion and frustration, to manipulate the women. Their retribution is blood curdling. find out more...

'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...

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...