Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant labourer (Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish husband (De Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder, recrimination - begins. 'Ossessione' is often described as the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty is pure Visconti, while the ble find out more...

After Renoir's reluctant addition of a couple of titles to satisfy the producers desire to expand to feature length, this masterpiece was finally released in 1946. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl briefly leaves her family and fiance and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost, but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, find out more...

First installment of "The Apu Trilogy". Apu, the young son of an impoverished family, begins life in a small Bengali village. Here he tastes his first experiences of the world some happy, some sad, but always portrayed with compassion and a realism that's almost painful. Poetic and stunning. find out more...

The widow Rosaria moves to Milano from Lucania with her poor south Italian family, five sons. In the beginning everyone manages to find something to do, Simone is boxing, Rocco works in a dry cleaners, and Ciro studies, but Simone meets Nadia, a prostitute, and they have a stormy affair and then Rocco begins a relationship with her. A bitter feud ensues between the two brothers, which will lead as far as murder...the peasant lifestyle they have left behind is replaced only by violent misfortune find out more...

Rossellini's masterpiece of neo-realist cinema. Based on the life of a priest who serves in the Resistance movement, it's triumph is to show the Resistance against a backdrop of everyday wartime life in Rome. The realism is enhanced by the camerawork and locations. A truly remarkable film. 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 master of cinematic naturalism goes to America! Jean Renoir's tale of a family hitting hard times in the dustbowl of the US is beautifully realised. Zachary Scott plays a sharecropper who decides that, if his family is to survive the depression, he needs to go it alone. Buying his own land and tools he sets to work, but is soon faced with the obstinate fact that nature is at best indifferent, at worst devastatingly cruel. Crisis follows catastrophe as, with a proud ethic that is constantly u find out more...

Now well into adulthood and living in Calcutta, where he struggles to get by as a writer, Apu becomes married to the beautiful Aparna, a relationship that quickly develops into one of genuine love; but a terrible tragedy leaves Apu's world in tatters and in his grief he runs from the place he has long come to know as home. 'The World Of Apu' is the final part in Satyajit Ray's trilogy and fittingly it's a stunning emotional masterpiece. find out more...

Retired civil servant Umberto struggles to survive on his rapidly dwindling pension in the harsh environment of post-World War II Rome, a city plagued by its society's total disregard for the plight of the elderly, the poor and the downtrodden. His only companions are his loyal dog, Flag, and a pregnant housemaid named Maria. Facing eviction from his humble home by his tyrannical landlady Umberto's desperate failed attempts to raise money lead him to contemplate suicide, but first he must find a 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...