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...

Giuseppe Tornatore directed this grand-scale portrait of life and love over several decades in the small town in Sicily where he was born. We see a number of important historical events through the eyes of young Peppino, watching the fortunes of his town and his family rise and fall. While open to accusations of nostalgia, superficiality and indulgence the film is something of a feast for the senses.
A rambunctious family saga the kind they don't, and probably shouldn't, make any more. find out more...

This is Hannibal's beginning, the reason why he became what he is, a brilliant young man traumatised by a personal tragedy at the hands of the Nazis and consumed by revenge. Slick, bloody and pretty daft what really lets Hannibal Rising down is that it's pretty dull, some savage editing and snipping half an hour off the running time would have helped a lot, it still wouldn't have been good, but it might have been considerably more fun. find out more...

Based on the novel 'Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn' by Andrzej Mularczyk this film tells the horrific story of the 1940 Soviet NKVD's massacre, and subsequent cover-up, of an estimated 22,000, mainly Polish, military officers, police and intellectuals. Rarely does a film about the horrors of organised genocide achieve in its representation such an honest and harrowing account of crimes against humanity. find out more...

David Hare's brilliant screenplay is both a comment on the desperate results of a casual sexual encounter, the passion of a moment snatched in war-time France - the intensity of which can never be matched again, and a commentary on the post war decline of Britian. A brilliant movie! find out more...

The film version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's famous anti-war sci-fi novel. Slipping back and forth along his own life line a suburban optometrist experiences the fire bombing of Dresden and captivity on the planet Trafalmardore. A powerful and seemingly unfilmable book that turned out to be a great movie. find out more...

Against a backdrop of snow and racism in the immediate post-war USA, a young ethnic Japanese is charged with murdering a fellow fisherman off the Pacific coast. By clever use of flashback a tale of love won and lost is revealed. Superb cinematography makes this enigmatic tragedy from the director of "Shine" truly memorable. find out more...

Based on the real life story of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing, the film portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team of code-breakers at Britain's top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. A beautifully put together drama that sadly largely fails to deal with Turin the person and the tragedy that an ungrateful state bestowed upon him.

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