Former perv-master Almodovar goes all new man with this latest offering, widely considered to be his most accomplished film yet. After the accidental death of her beloved son, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona, where she plans to look up old friends, exorcise her ghosts, and, just maybe, tell her long-estranged ex about the son he never knew he had. But this involves bring up some painful and unpleasant secrets from the past, and present. Almodovar's characteristically camp humour is still pre find out more...

Four interlocking stories run in parallel; two set in Morocco, one in Mexico and one in Japan and all four follow different cinematic traditions that can be described as coming from World Cinema, American melodrama, American thriller and Asian New Wave. The accidental shooting of an American tourist is the trigger that begins a chain of misery that slowly envelopes four seemingly disparate groups of people from different social, cultural and geographic backgrounds. Borrowing, at a distance, from find out more...

It's 1941 and the golden days of Tinsel Town. Seriously earnest New York scriptwriter Barton Fink is lured to Hollywood with an offer to write a wrestling movie. Stricken by writer's cramp and seeking inspiration, Barton finds it in real life events. This witty drama was a Cannes Film Festival multi-award winner. 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...

A moody, atmospheric movie about people trapped by circumstance and their own inability to change. Wide-eyed, streetwise Abby and her hot-tempered lover come, amidst thousands of other croppers from the industrial north, to the fertile landscape of World War I Texas. Once there they are caught up in a diffident, ultimately fatal, triangle with their dying young landowner-boss, whom the boy convinces Abby to marry so that they can have a claim to his fortune. These are the surreal, idyllic, numbe find out more...

A young man has an affair with an older woman, but he is very jealous of her husband and decides that they should kill him. One night, after the husband's had plenty of sake to drink and is in bed, they strangle him and dump his body down a well. She pretends her husband has gone off to Tokyo to work and for three years the wife and her lover secretly see each other, but suspicions arise and people begin to gossip. To make matters worse, her husband's ghost begins to haunt her and the law arrive find out more...

An excellent black comedy, handsome thriller and a tall story that keeps you guessing as it unwinds. The genuinely ridiculous plot (a man pays a couple of goons to 'pretend' to kidnap his wife in order to get his paws on his in-laws' 'ransom' money) is completely credible as mighty plans fall apart, spiralling ever more beyond the protagonist's control and leaving us marvelling at the complex stupidity of human nature. A modern classic.

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Herzog's epic movie about a man's obsessive attempt to bring opera to the Indians living deep in the Peruvian jungle. To do this he must take a steamship/tub way up the Amazon river system, a monumental task, at one point involving transporting it over a not unconsiderable hill, with the help of a system of pulleys and massed Indian labour. A surreal comment on madness, power and vision. There is also a documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the notoriously fraught making of the film. find out more...

Life seems perfect for Georges and Anne, a bourgeois Parisian couple who live in a comfortable home with their adolescent son, Pierrot. But when an anonymous videotape turns up on their doorstep, showing their house under surveillance from across the street, their harmony begins to disintegrate. A growing sense of guilt begins to rise in Georges as he recalls his less-than-angelic childhood and soon their happy home is an emotional battleground. find out more...

Tense and engaging account of contemporary Parisian street life. The recriminations against the notorious police for an injured friend are realised by a documentary style of film making with voyeuristic undertones. Violently realistic and bitter drama. Excellent soundtrack. find out more...