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...

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 story of Tracy Edwards, a 24-year-old cook on charter boats, who became the skipper of the first ever all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race in 1989. This is a film that doesn't leave you: the images of gigantic waves and ice bergs and superhuman levels of courage and endurance are hard to process. If it were a work of fiction you would dismiss it as Hollywood hype: but it's not, find out more...

A little known passage of British history - the fate of the black men who volunteered for the King's Men in the American War of Independence. At least the Empire didn't abandon them to the slaver George Washington and his thugs, instead dumping them on the desolate Novia Scotia coastline. But where there's life there's hope and enter the radical Thomas Clarkson's brother, a young naval officer named John, who, energised by their living conditions, collected the remnants and shipped them to Freet find out more...

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Set at the beginning of the end for the native peoples of North America, we follow the first white settlers to the land of the new Eden, and in particular the relationship between Pocahontas, the beautiful headstrong daughter of an Indian chief and Captain John Smith, a new arrival to her rich homeland. This being a Terence Malick film the sheer visual beauty is almost overwhelming, the story itself never clear cut or finite, focusing as it does on the machinations of individuals and their causa find out more...