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...

Immaculate costumes, a brilliant script and two star-crossed lovers in a battle of wits in this tale of the unconsummated romance between Thailand's reformist King Mongkut (Rama 4) and Anna Leonowens, his son's English tutor. All this set a backdrop of court intrigue against the still running Rama dynasty. Very good. find out more...

David Lean's epic romance set against the turbulant backdrop of the Russian revolution. One man's struggle for moral political and personal survival amidst the complex web of intrigue and tangled loyalties that accompanied the fall of the Tsar.

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One of the very finest epics produced, equally impressive in terms of script and spectacle. Heston is aptly heroic as the 11th Century patriot destined to die in the fight to evict the Moors from Spain, Mann's direction is stately and thrilling and Miklos Rosza's superb score perfectly complements the crisp and simple widescreen images. Sobriety and restraint, in fact, are perhaps the keynotes of the film's success, with the result that a potentially risible finale, in which Cid's corpse is born find out more...

Centred on the intrigues leading up to and following the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, this historical drama begins with the arranged, loveless wedding of the Roman Catholic Marguerite de Valois, sister to the eccentric King Charles IX and daughter of the scheming Catherine de Medici, and the Huguenot Henri de Navarre. Despite Catherine's hope that the marriage may unite France, the mutual hatred felt by Catholics and Protestants soon degenerates into carnage and Margot, who has learned find out more...

It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to 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...