It is 1970 and nine-year old Anna is not amused. Seemingly overnight her bourgeois family have decided to abandon their middle class life and transform into leftist radicals. Gone is the grand family pad, gone are the new clothes and, humiliatingly, gone are Anna's beloved religious lessons. In their place is a cramped apartment filled with bearded revolutionaries, demonstrations and refugee nannies with strange cooking habits. But Anna is no wilting flower and before you can regurgitate the fir find out more...

Eight-year-old Zachary has, so far, enjoyed life as his father's favourite son, as the possessor of a gift for healing and as younger sibling to a tearaway, a jock and a bookworm, but this relatively idyllic childhood in Québec is cast under the shadow of his dad's suspicions when he is discovered wearing a dress. Seven years on it's 1975 and Zac is in thrall to Ziggy Stardust and his cousin's boyfriend, a confusing situation for him, made more complicated by a history of trying to satisfy his d find out more...

Bobby Sands was the IRA member who led the 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike as part of a campaign to achieve the status of political prisoners and not that of criminals. The first section of film deals with daily prison life, the 'dirty' protest and the violence, the second is a long discussion on the meaning of life with a sympathetic priest and the third depicts the last weeks and death of a man voluntarily dying of starvation. find out more...

Christy Brown was an Irish cerebal palsy victim who overcame his severe handicap to become a talented painter and author with just the use of his left foot. Daniel Day Lewis is totally and utterly convincing as Brown - using method acting he became Brown and his thoroughness makes the film a great one. find out more...

A relatively simple story that's so well told, played and visually conceived that it actually manages to leave you in numbed silence long after it has finished. Twelve year old James lives on a grindingly depressing Glascow estate in the 70s. The family home has been designed around the word 'misery' and one of James's few friends has drowned, a death that haunts him. Into his dark world comes Margaret and a relationship develops which provides the two of them with an escape from the previously find out more...

An artful documentary about the life of Daniel Johnson, singer/songwriter, artist, cartoonist and general artistic genius, but a man sadly afflicted with a severe mental illness that makes him totally self-delusional and an occasional danger to both himself and others. Daniel, raised in a Christian fundamentalist family in deepest West Virginia, amongst many of his fantasies, sees Devils everywhere, and with his overblown self-importance, not helped by his legions of admirers, vying with his low find out more...

In a masterly film Ang Lee turns his sharp, compassionate eye on affluent ex-urban New England during Thanksgiving 1973. As the Watergate scandal escalates Nixon's bad faith is echoed in the life of an adulterous Wall Street analyst, Kevin Kline, whose children are in revolt and whose wife is shouting for help. An extraordinary tale of sexual jealousy, of children acting like adults and of adults like children, leading up to the tragic night of the Icestorm, the worst weather to hit the area for find out more...

Based round extracts from his father's diaries and his mothers letters to relatives living in exile, Elia Suleiman recreates life, in four episodes, as an Israeli Arab from the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 until today.
Eloquent and dryly humorous. find out more...

A sublime film about the nature of loneliness told through the experience of the eponymous Tony Takitani. Brought up by his musician father, Tony lives a socially secluded life until he meets and falls in love with Eiko, a fashion-obsessed fitty, and the intimacy he shares with her is both tender and, ultimately, tragic. A remarkable film, meditatively paced, touchingly sincere with a fascinating aesthetic style, and the soundtrack is measured and judged to perfection. A deeply humane effort fro find out more...