Barbara Stanwyck plays a wayward mother who returns home to a hostile town, marvellous as the struggling actress who yearns for her old life. Though set in the past, the evocation of rural small-town life - a seeming idyllic little world poisoned with gossip, social prejudice, and double standards - isn't all that far from the modern suburbia of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. find out more...

A landmark in the history of the cinema; it was ranked Number 1 in the American Film Institute's 100 greatest films of all time in two polls (1998 and 2007) of more than 1,500 film industry movers and shakers and again by UK directors in a BFI poll. "Citizen Kane" narrates the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon driven by a childhood obssession and is loosely based round the life of William Randolph Hurst, who tried to have it banned, but incorporates elements from the lives of other fat cats il find out more...

Includes the films; How It Feels to be Run Over (1900) Explosion of a Motor Car (1900) Rescued by Rover (1905) The Other Side of the Hedge (1905) The Fatal Sneeze (1907) Visit to Peak Frean's and Co's Biscuit Works (1906) A Day in the Life of a Coalminer (1910) Par le trou de serrure (1901) Ali Baba et les quarantes voleurs (1905) Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (1906) Le chaval emballe (1907) The Physician of the Castle (1908) Magic Bricks (1908) It's Scotch (1898) The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) The 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...

Released in 1951, it was a project of the Festival of Britain. Adapted by Eric Ambler from the controversial biography by Ray Allister, it gave a biographic account of William Friese-Greene, who first designed and patented a working cinematic camera. This claim is subject to some controversy, but evidence now tends to support it. The film was notable for its cast: many well-known British film actors appeared in cameos. It was completed and shown just before the end of the Festival, but the gener find out more...