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...

The greatest movie ever made? A soldier is sent into the Heart of Darkness to retrieve a commander gone AWOL in an insane reality of tin-pot power, paranoia and inglorious killing. The horror of war is stripped naked in a surreal twilight world. The crew nearly went mad making it, Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack and Coppola flew so far beyond budget that the word 'bankrupt' was nearly redefined. See "Heart of Darkness"... find out more...

The definitive 'Apocalypse Now' (as if the original wasn't pretty definitive) this has nearly an hour of extra footage fleshing out the surreal journey of our central protagonists and, though it brings the film to a whisker short of three and a half hours, much of it explains what happens to the eclectic characters we meet. The cut version of 'Apocalypse Now' stands as one of the most awesome films of modern cinema, anyone who has seen it will inevitably see it again, it's just that now you have 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...

When wealthy John du Pont invites Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz to move to his estate and help form a wrestling team for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Mark sees a way to step out of the shadow of his charismatic and revered find out more...

Wild-eyed Williams plays Alan Parrish, set free by orphans Judy and Peter after 26 years trapped inside a magical jungle boardgame. But with him come a malevolent melange of wild beasts to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting town! Superior fantasy adventure with impressive special FX. Great family fun. find out more...

A movie in which a lovelorn supersize gorilla and lonely human belle make heavy eyes at each other, not Lord of the Rings here, but Beauty and the Beast! The film is in three chapters; a movie producer sets sail with cast and crew for the legendary Skull Island; where they are attacked by human sacrificing natives, ravenous dinosaurs, cockroaches as big as beer barrels and scorpions the size of cars, to name but a few; what's left of our less than heroic crew return to New York with the greates find out more...

Great Plains; how many of you know that the most numerous bird on the planet is the Red-billed Quelea? Now do you want to see the size of their flocks? And, for the less faint-hearted, did you know that a largish pride of hungry Kalahari lions (30 in this example) will bring down and kill a largish elephant if it's isolated from the herd? find out more...

Seasonal Forests; from General Sherman, a giant sequoia ten times the size of a blue whale and the largest living thing on the planet, to 4,000 years old bristlecone pines that pre-date the pyramids. From the world's greatest insect emergence, cicada, to the baobab forests of Madagascar. find out more...

Oliver Stone's autobiographical account of life at the front in Vietnam deservedly swept the Oscars. It is particularly strong in portraying the tensions within the army social group between the brutal all-American rednecks and the more liberally inclined cynics. find out more...