A successful actress employs a woman in exchange for her flattery, only to find her employee is scheming her way to the top at her own expense. An intelligent, bitchy script complements the fine acting, making this one of Time Out's top 100 films of all time. Won Best Picture at 1950 Academy Awards.

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Winner of the Best Actress award at Cannes, 1967, and possibly the prettiest film of the sixties. A high-ranking Swedish soldier sacrifices his wife, career and social standing for the love of a young circus girl, but their idyllic liaison is soon tainted by the realities of life. Romantic tragedy. 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...

Winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar back in 1957, this early Fellini drama also bagged a Best Actress award at Cannes for Giulietta Masina, and was the inspiration for the hit musical "Sweet Charity". Cabiria (Masina) is the archetypal tart with a heart, a street prostitute who never loses her smile or her faith in human nature, despite being rejected and ripped off by the various men in her life. Digitally remastered from a newly restored print which contains a seven-minute scene not seen sin find out more...

The story of an ambitious young clerk who abandons his real love so he can marry into a rich family. The first of the British "realist" pictures - films that dealt with working class people and the realities of the English class structure - as a change from cosey middle class drama. 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...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...