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...

The Netherlands towards the end of WWII and Jewess Rachel Stein must abandon her hiding place and make a break for freedom. After escaping the massacre of a boat load of refugees fleeing toward Allied lines, Rachel, alone, bereft and terrified, joins the Resistance and, using her feminine wiles and intelligence, infiltrates the lair of those responsible for her grief. Black Book is a cracking thriller; tense, gripping, and full of irony, Dutch resistance heroes aren't all models of virtue and we find out more...

The original television series version following the crew of a German WW2 U-Boat as they live together, hunt Allied shipping and are preyed on themselves. The tension, claustrophobia and their fear leap out of the screen and totally avoids any sense of nationalism in what would have been fatal for this superb production.
Awesome.

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Germany 1945; in a bunker complex buried deep within the bowels of Berlin find out more...

Donald Sutherland is superb as the ruthless German agent trapped on a remote Scottish island while trying to escape a closely pursuing British intelligence. Falling in love with the mistress of the island he is caught between conflicting loyalties. If you haven't seen this already...watch it. Brilliant stuff. find out more...

In the Western Desert of 1942, a battle-weary army officer is driving an ambulance to the safety of Alexandria. One of his passengers, a stray South African, saves the group from enemy capture, but an uneasy feeling begins to grow that he may in fact be a German spy. Superb war movie with a Stella cast - sorry couldn't help the pun! find out more...

Guillermo Del Toro's blockbusting tale of a young girl struggling to make sense of the violent world around her was a big 2006 arthouse hit. Continuing his exploration of the impact of the Spanish Civil War on his generation (it was also the backdrop for his excellent ghost story, The Devil's Backbone) Del Toro's fantasy mixes strong horror with fairytale-style aesthetics to great effect, making Ofelia's escape into an imaginary realm a poignant response to the cruel realities of her existence. find out more...

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place – and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released. Sixty find out more...

It's 1942 and eight-year-old Bruno knows nothing of Germany's Final Solution and the Holocaust, only that his father was promoted and he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area. Here there is nothing to do and no one to play with, that is until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of a wire fence, and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel takes him from find out more...

A timeless ant-war parable that looks at public reaction when the hair of an American war orphan mysteriously turns green. This makes him an object of ridicule in his small town, where the locals call for the boy's head to be shaved. There is an interesting coda to this wonderful and unusual film: Producer Dore Schary and director Joseph Losey made it for RKO before the politically conservative Howard Hughes took over. Hughes hated the film's pacifist message, and did his best to sabotage it find out more...