Alan Bennett reminisces about his early years as a schoolboy, growing up in Leeds, and on to undergraduate life at Oxford University. find out more...

Gentle romantic comedy with rising star Minnie Driver as an innocent country girl let loose in the big city of Dublin. Besotted with the college heart-throb, she's ecstatic when he notices her but aghast when she has to choose between him and her virginity! Funny, sad, but ultimately heartwarming. find out more...

1950, rural Alabama; times are hard for 'The Honeydripper' a club where traditional blues music doesn't pull the crowds, the young cotton pickers and army boys prefering a rival bar with its juke-box, but help may arrive in the help of handsome young Sonny, his electric guitar and rock'n'roll. A lovely piece of independent cinema from the maestro John Sayles; a movie about myth, about family, about change and, above all, about music. find out more...

Forget that this is a Scorsese movie, 'cos there's not a gangster or a grifter in sight. Stunningly shot, this is the visually breathtaking account of the early life of the 14th Dalai Lama, starting with his discovery by Buddhist monks in the northern Tibet of 1935. Meticulously detailed but well-paced, it's a rich, riveting movie with a powerfully haunting soundtrack from Philip Glass. find out more...

Excellent, highly accessible production of Arthur Miller's play. Set in the fanatically puritan town of Salem in 1692, Ryder is one of several unfortunate teenage girls are caught "doing the Devil's work", inducing a potent and dangerous cocktail of paranoia, hatred and mass hysteria - Miller's contemporary references to 1950s America are all to palpable. Superb. find out more...

A dramatisation of Betty Page, a voluptuous young woman who grew up in a conservative religious family in Nashville, Tennessee, became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York and a nationwide erotic icon for her tongue-in-cheek fetishistic poses. To small town America, though, she was a 'moral threat' to their youth and, eventually, she became a target in a Senate investigation. Mary Herron's film is a richly evocative observation of an era and 50s America's repressive sexual and religious bel find out more...

Against a backdrop of the 1953 Anglo-American plot to overthrow democracy in Iran and reduce it to an autocratic police state, four women meet in a beautiful orchard to discuss life. They are the wife of a right-wing general, a prostitute, a compliant woman eager to wear the chador and marry and, the focal point of the movie, a liberal, politically aware 30-year-old with a devout Muslim brother.
Adapted from the book by Shahrnush Parsipur there is a touch of magical realism to 'Women Wit find out more...