Part 1 of Wajda's trilogy of wartime films, the hopeful one, is set in Wola, a working-class area of Warsaw in 1942, and deals with the graduation of a bunch of semi-delinquent street kids, through individual acts of defiance and courage, into a youth resistance group. The heroism is not simple, neither loyalties nor self-sacrifice are assured, but united they will be. find out more...

This is the middle story of Satyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy and, after Pather Panchali, we find Apu on the cusp of adulthood. The young lad moves with his family to Benares but with the death of his father, Apu's desire to continue his learning is affirmed and as his passion for knowledge grows so he and his mother find themselves drifting apart, especially as he wants to leave home and go to Calcutta to study. Aparajito is a beautifully drawn film and an immaculate observation of the characters find out more...

The last of Wajda's famous trilogy, the one that signifies despair, has Cybulski, the 'Polish James Dean', as a young fighter no longer killing Germans but instructed to assassinate a recently appointed communist official. His deepening love affair with a hotel barmaid has him starting to question the value of his struggle. Superb. find out more...

Perhaps the most influential period in cinema history was the Italian neo-realism period of the late 40s and director Vittorio De Sica was one of the prime reasons for this important period of film-making. "The Bicycle Thieves" is a film about a poor man whose only means for a job is his bicycle, which gets stolen. The film follows him and his young boy throughout war-ravaged Rome in search of the stolen bike. The trip involves some of the most brilliant vignettes in film history; the church, th find out more...

At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. But back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young girl who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena. She departs with her assistant to rehearse in Sils Maria; a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal is to take find out more...

Edmund is a young Berliner, attempting to survive and make some sense of a world set in the remnants of a post-WWII Germany. Their are few voices that exude assured confidence in Edmund's life but his Nazi teacher is one such man and the consequences of his impassioned doctrine on the impressionable lad have horrific and tragic consequences. Germany Year Zero is a powerful and haunting drama, understated and all the more mesmerising for it observation of ordinary men's capacity for simplistic find out more...

The best of Fellini went into this bleakly funny study of five young men adrift in the wasteland of their provincial home town. Middle class layabouts living by cadging off their families, aimlessly spending their days in pursuit of amusement and girls while nursing vague ambitions never likely to be more than pipe-dreams, they are trapped as much by their own moral bankruptcy as by the futureless society in which they have never quite grown up. Beautifully shot and performed, and governed by an find out more...

A man, fired from his job, migrates abroad, leaving behind his wife and daughter, who hear no word from him for months. A feckless stranger arrives in town in search of work and is immediately drawn to the beautiful young woman whom he hears no longer has a husband. This is a world dominated by the need to survive, where migration is seen as an escape, however illusory, and families are separated by poverty. Adapted from the story ‘Safar' by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, this fourth feature from acclaime find out more...

Part 2, and surely the greatest, of Wajda's trilogy describes the last days of the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The imagery of the sewers, to which the Polish fighters retreat, is superbly used to represent both their desperation and their new Soviet prison. Made in 1956 despite Stalinist censorship. find out more...

Through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse, we observe the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s. Frustrated by money problems, Stan finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a coffee cup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife in the living room, holding his daughter. Killer of Sheep offers no solution to Stan's world, merely a presentation of his life and those around him; find out more...