During a hot and sultry 1935 summer an embryonic relationship between rich Cambridge graduate Celia (Knightly) and the housekeeper's son Robbie (McEvoy) is left in tatters when Celia's precocious sister falsely accuses James of molesting another young girl. The accusation, based on the misperceptions and childish hurts of a fevered imagination, leads to James's arrest and imprisonment. As the movie progresses, from an English manor house to the war-ravaged wastes of northern France and to bli 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...

British journalist George sneaks into Nanjing during the Japanese atrocities of 1938. Unfortunately, the Japanese catch him and just as they are about to send him to meet his maker fate intervenes in the form of local commie chief Chen, who rescues George and packs him off to an orphanage to assist red US nurse Radha. Fleeing from the nationalists' attempts to conscript orphaned boys into their army, they make a hair-raising three-month journey - the first 900km on foot - across the snow-bound L find out more...

Robert Jordan is an idealist and with his skills as a demolition expert he finds himself with the opportunity to marry both by helping the anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Amongst the band of freedom fighters Robert joins is Maria, an innocent but impassioned and beautiful young woman. As the group draw towards their ultimate mission so Robert and Maria's friendship develops into something far deeper, intensified by their uncertain fate. For The Whom the Bell Tolls was showered with O find out more...

The fates of Henry - a cynical American correspondent who has lost his soul - and Teresa, one of the Republic's censors and in charge of overseeing the news that journalists can send abroad, cross in Gernika. 

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Gilda is a woman devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, there is no place she is unprepared to journey, no idea she is unprepared to try. Into this hedonistic world comes Guy and Mia and a passionate ménage a trios develops between them. Unlike Gilda however, Guy and Mia are driven by more than just their own pleasure and as the Spanish civil war breaks out both leave Paris for the battle fields of Spain. Six years later, and with the war in Europe almost at an end, Guy returns to still occupied Fr 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...

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...