Fanis, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, recalls his childhood growing up as a Greek boy in Istanbul and the time spent with his shopkeeper grandfather learning about life and, in particular, the art of cooking. And it was here, in his grandfather's store, that he first fell in love, with Saime. After political tensions over Cyprus in 1963 Fanis's family were deported, but his grandfather stayed in Istanbul, and it is decades later that they meet again as Fanis returns 'home', after yea find out more...

One of the best films to come out of the British cinema for a long time. The story of the peroxided bar girl Ruth Ellis, who murdered her upper class lover and became the last woman to be hanged in the UK. A study not just of her personality and the tragic love affair which ended in this crime of passion, but of the seedy mood of repression and austerity in class ridden 50s Britain. Miranda Richardson is outstanding in this compelling movie. find out more...

David Lean's epic romance set against the turbulant backdrop of the Russian revolution. One man's struggle for moral political and personal survival amidst the complex web of intrigue and tangled loyalties that accompanied the fall of the Tsar.

find out more...

A lovingly created homage to the melodramas of the 1950s sees Frank and Cathy Whitaker's picture perfect marriage masking a relationship based on lies. A blossoming friendship with the black gardener and a husband whose fallen in love with another man leave Cathy shunned by her friends and neighbours, her outwardly idylic world finally revealed for the sham that it is. Far from Heaven looks stunning, the recreation of the period nothing short of immaculate, but I have never been a fan of 1950s m find out more...

From the window of her New York apartment beautiful bored housewife Diane spots her beast, a mysterious masked man, and is transfixed. This it will turn out is Diane Arbus' epiphany, a portal that will take her on a journey that unleashes not just her soul but her remarkable gift as a photographer. Hirsute ‘Wolf Man' Lionel, part Elephant Man, part seductive gentleman, takes Diane into his world of outsiders and gradually wins her heart before turning into a handsome prince and disappearing in a find out more...

This thoughtful, feelgood fantasy-comedy-drama is Hollywood at its best. Nineties teenager Tobey Maguire and his wild child sister Reese Witherspoon get the culture shock of their lives when they're sucked through the TV into '50's sitcom Pleasantville. Given that in Pleasantville there's never been passion, hatred, war, tears, rain, or even colour, the residents get quite a surprise too when real life starts creeping into their perfect, monochrome world. Thought-provoking and thoroughly enterta find out more...

David Hare's brilliant screenplay is both a comment on the desperate results of a casual sexual encounter, the passion of a moment snatched in war-time France - the intensity of which can never be matched again, and a commentary on the post war decline of Britian. A brilliant movie! find out more...

Intelligent, affectionate rites-of-passage drama set in the late 1950s. 14-year-old Dani is on the verge of womanhood and her loins start astirring with the arrival of a tasty newcomer in town. But adolescent angst sets in when her worldly older sister catches his eye instead. Tear-jerking. find out more...

An ex-SS officer, now a hotel porter, meets by chance a young woman who was previously his prisoner in a concentration camp. Unwillingly drawn together again they resume their sado-masochistic relationship. A compelling, though morally ambiguous, study in dominance and submission. find out more...

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist reporting from 1950's Vietnam (just as the troubles there escalate from France's colonial desperation to America's genocidal idealism), and a man who has lost his passion for the world. Into this cynical and complacent western community arrives young Pyle, a naive and optimistic American medical worker, whose motives are more convoluted than they at first appear. These two men are drawn together by a shared passion for Thomas's mistress, Phoung, a beautiful find out more...