1560, Peru. In a beautiful poetic opening scene the conquistadors cross an Andes pass, situated between the peaks and the valleys, between conquered land and unexplored forests, between 'heaven' and 'earth', shrouded in mists, they make their way down a narrow path. Aguirre's meglomania grows as around him his comrades mutiny and die in his search for the lost city of El Dorado. Herzog's best film, an unforgetable tour de force. Made before the director himself gave in to meglomania on a later t find out more...

Inside this conventionally structured biopic resides an extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. William Wilberforce was the parliamentary spokesman for a group of radicalised young Evangelists (and Quakers), who despised the money politics and corruption of late 18th Century UK politics and who fought for many reformist policies, the most notable of which was the one this film annotates, the abolition of slavery, a process that took years of political skulduggery and the slow passage of find out more...

Herzog's epic movie about a man's obsessive attempt to bring opera to the Indians living deep in the Peruvian jungle. To do this he must take a steamship/tub way up the Amazon river system, a monumental task, at one point involving transporting it over a not unconsiderable hill, with the help of a system of pulleys and massed Indian labour. A surreal comment on madness, power and vision. There is also a documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the notoriously fraught making of the film. find out more...

The object of this massive tribute died as he had always lived, without wealth, without property, without official title or office. Mahatma Gandhi was not the commander of armies, nor the ruler of vast lands, he could not boast any scientific achievement or artistic gift, yet men, governments, dignitaries from all over the world, have joined hands today to pay homage to the little brown man in the loin cloth who led his country to freedom. This quote is from his funeral, one of the greatest s find out more...

A caustic and often funny romp set 24 BC during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Rome's first emperor, and ending in AD 54 with Nero on the throne. Claudius (Jacobi) is Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, grandson of Mark Antony, who bears witness to the ruthless ambition, shocking debauchery and murderous intrigue of his remarkable family. For the most part he escapes their evil scheming by virtue of a stutter and limp that mark him as a fool. A remarkable, ground-breaking series, with towering per find out more...

A large rubber-tree plantation is owned by a French colonist in 1930s Vietnam. Eliane is a proud but imprudent woman, who lives with her father and her native adopted daughter Camille.

Camille runs off with mum's lover, gets married to another guy and goes on a long journey across the country to find the man she really loves. In between she discovers her Vietnamese identity and becomes an independent person.

Shot in stunning locations, a seductive romantic epic!

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Central India 1893, and the villagers of Champaner have just been informed by the local British commander that the enforced tax (Lagaan) is to be doubled. One young man stands up to colonial authority, pleading that any increase will cripple the community, and the nasty Brit in charge gives him one option, win a game of cricket, which the Indians have never before played, against the colonials and the tax will be scrapped, lose, and it will be tripled. Will the village cripple, the last man in, find out more...

A film dominated by one performance, Forest Whitaker's turn as the infamous dictator Idi Amin. When young Scotsman Nicholas Garrigan becomes his personal physician few of us doubt that it will inevitably end in tears, but Amin, as is so often the way with monsters, has considerable charm to go with his paranoid genocidal tendencies and the naïve Garrigan is seduced. However Garrigan's role is ambiguous; is he just dumb or is he willingly looking the other way? The film also reverses the typical find out more...

A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens - moon scudding behind clouds, rubber dripping from a tree, coolies dozing in the compound, a startled cockatoo - as a shot rings out, a man staggers out onto the verandah, and Davis follows to empty her gun grimly into his body. The contrivance evident in Maugham's play during the investigation and trial that follow is kept firmly at bay by Wyler's technical expertise and terrific performances, n find out more...