The first and best of the Italian "Mexi-Westerns", on a par with Leone's and with a haunting soundtrack. An American mercenary teams up with a bandit on the fringes of the revolutionaries in order to assinate their leader. A violent political film from the same pen as The Battle Of Algiers. find out more...

The wonderful people over at Second Run DVD have released another hidden gem: 'Daisies' (Sedmikrasky), originally made in 1966 by Vera Chytilova, who has since been called 'the first lady of Czech cinema' and whose efforts also earnt her a screening at the First International Festival of Women's Films in New York in 1972. find out more...

I Am Cuba is an epic poem to Communist kitsch - a dramatic journey though the decadence of Batista Havana set against the grinding poverty and oppression of the Cuban people. find out more...

In Fellini's sardonically humorous, yet powerfully dramatic, 'Il Bidone' three small-time crooks impersonate priests in Rome to con poor people out of their money. Broderick Crawford is extraordinary as the group's world-weary leader whose chance meeting with his own daughter opens his eyes to his wrongdoing. Too late, he suffers a crisis of conscience in this absorbing tale of hope, desperation and tragedy. 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...

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Godard's brilliant dialectical farce in which five Parisian students, members of a Maoist cell, discuss the implications of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the chances of using terrorism to effect a similar upheaval in the West. Dazzlingly designed as a collage of slogans and poster images, it was criticised at the time for playing with politics. But Godard was well aware what he was doing and his film stands as a prophetic analysis of events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and find out more...

A haunting and highly emotive film about the tough lives of Sicilian villagers, in a small fishing community, in the face of exploitative businessmen. The images of isolation and frustration capture the villagers' plight. Beautifully shot, Visconti's realist vision encapsulates the whole film. Produced by the Italian Communist Party. find out more...

Vittorio De Sica's award-winning masterpiece, Miracle in Milan, is one of the watershed films of the Italian cinema renaissance. find out more...

The Soviet Revolution in all its glory as the events of Red October unfold on an epic scale. The storming of the Winter Palace in Leningrad is one of the great set pieces of cinema history. Eisenstien practicaly invented the art of editing and this is the movie in which he did it! Brilliant. find out more...