Peter Yates' Oscar-winner is a heart-warming coming-of-age story that has also taken its place as the greatest sports movie about cycling ever made. Four friends graduate from high-school and find themselves looking at an uncertain future in small-town America. Dave's passion is cycling and his dream is to be a world-class champion like the Italians he idolises. His passion for cycling takes on new meaning when he and his friends face a team from the local college in the town's annual bike ra find out more...

One of the best films to come out of the British cinema for a long time. The story of the peroxided bar girl Ruth Ellis, who murdered her upper class lover and became the last woman to be hanged in the UK. A study not just of her personality and the tragic love affair which ended in this crime of passion, but of the seedy mood of repression and austerity in class ridden 50s Britain. Miranda Richardson is outstanding in this compelling movie. 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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A lovingly created homage to the melodramas of the 1950s sees Frank and Cathy Whitaker's picture perfect marriage masking a relationship based on lies. A blossoming friendship with the black gardener and a husband whose fallen in love with another man leave Cathy shunned by her friends and neighbours, her outwardly idylic world finally revealed for the sham that it is. Far from Heaven looks stunning, the recreation of the period nothing short of immaculate, but I have never been a fan of 1950s m find out more...

Ian McKellan stars as James Whale, the avowed homosexual and eccentric director famed for his monster movies of the 1930s. Concentrating on a fictionalised version of the latter years of Whale's life, the film explores an unusual but close relationship he develops with a gardener (a muscle-laden Brendan Fraser). His loving maid (Lynn Redgrave) remains convinced he is doomed to hell for his openly sexual lifestyle and tries in vain to change his behaviour. Memorable performances from all the lead find out more...

Goodnight And Good Luck takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America, chronicling the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Murrow, his news team and, indeed, CBS itself made a defiant and impassioned stand against McCarthy's increasingly delusional, corrupt and fear-fueled rants and this, George Clooney's second turn in the director's chair, is a beautifully suc find out more...

This thoughtful, feelgood fantasy-comedy-drama is Hollywood at its best. Nineties teenager Tobey Maguire and his wild child sister Reese Witherspoon get the culture shock of their lives when they're sucked through the TV into '50's sitcom Pleasantville. Given that in Pleasantville there's never been passion, hatred, war, tears, rain, or even colour, the residents get quite a surprise too when real life starts creeping into their perfect, monochrome world. Thought-provoking and thoroughly enterta find out more...

From the New York art scene of the 1940s to the heady heights of international adulation a stunning drama about one of the foremost artists of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Such a volatile, passionate and influential character as Pollock has always been ripe for dramatisation and Ed Harris has achieved a mesmerising film, both in front and behind the camera; powerful, touching and damn it... educational! find out more...

Set in the 50s, and adapted from the critically acclaimed 1961 book of the same name by Richard Yates, this is a tale of a couple trying to free themselves from their conformist suburban Connecticut lifestyle, where living the 'American Dream' has become akin to a lifeless existence. find out more...

Fascinating, factually based story of an anti-social double murderer, Robert Stroud, who used his years in the world's toughest prison to transform himself into a world-renowned ornithologist. Superb performances all round but Karl Malden is particularly riveting as the sadistic prison governer. find out more...