Ralph Thomas's very watchable adaptation of Dickens's tale of revolutionary France. Bogarde plays the melancholy, self-pitying lawyer Sidney Carton, who finds his metier in the daring rescue of a French nobleman. Bogarde's laconic delivery makes the film. Excellent. find out more...

Inside this conventionally structured biopic resides an extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. William Wilberforce was the parliamentary spokesman for a group of radicalised young Evangelists (and Quakers), who despised the money politics and corruption of late 18th Century UK politics and who fought for many reformist policies, the most notable of which was the one this film annotates, the abolition of slavery, a process that took years of political skulduggery and the slow passage of find out more...

It's 1794 and Depardieu plays Danton the revolutionary, who returns to Paris from self-imposed exile confident in the peoples' support and that he can help bring peace to the revolutionary turmoil and stop The Terror. But first he must confront his former ally Robespierre, who is intent on victory and soon rounds up Danton and his followers, tries them before a revolutionary tribunal and dipatches them to the guillotine. Bye bye Danton. find out more...

Sofia Coppola brings to the screen an undeniably sympathetic addressing of the short life and times of France's last queen, creating a ravishing picture of Marie's life. This visual feast is an entertaining slice of historical re-jigging, telling the tale of a naive and opulent monarch in a time of revolution, one who breathed in full the last gasp of a dying age of decadence. But historical accuracy or analysis - forget it. find out more...

The film is entirely extracted from the diary of Grace Elliot, a doughty royalist residing in France during the turbulent and uncertain period of the Revolution. What makes it of historical interest is that her ex-lover and close friend, le Duc de Orleans, a cousin of the king, was of a different political hue, a revolutionary idealist who believed in parliamentary democracy, but who was swept aside in the violent class upheaval that marked the end of the feudalistic Bourbon court. A sumptuous c find out more...

Benjamin Martin is a war hero who has renounced his past in favour of a quiet, productive life with his not inconsiderable brood, but then the American Revolution and those bloodthirsty British spoil everything. As a history lesson The Patriot is heading for a straight fail, but hey, you ain't watching it for that, so as an epic period romp, with some great action sequences, it does the business nicely. Three cheers for......God Save the Q.......nope, sorry, wrong patriot. find out more...