1960s; young scouser Jude crosses the Atlantic and meets upper class Lucy in this musical tale of two star-crossed lovers set against the raging waters of the volatile 60s counterculture movement; race riots, Vietnam, civil rights, protest, music, drugs, dance, art, hippies and psychedelia. Over 30 Beatles songs are woven into the plot together with visual allusions to their films and, with cameos from Bono and Eddie Izzard, this weird, loud and colourful montage will either have you breaking ou 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...

'Burma VJ' is an amazing collection of footage shot by Democratic Action for Burma activists as the 2007 popular attempted up-rising against the evil military junta took place and is both about the demonstrations and, more succinctly, about the brave Burman reporters who filmed them and transmitted the footage to the outside world. The resultant edit by Danish film-maker Anders Ostergaard has won more awards than you've had hot pies. Must watch stuff. find out more...

Goodnight And Good Luck takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America, chronicling the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Murrow, his news team and, indeed, CBS itself made a defiant and impassioned stand against McCarthy's increasingly delusional, corrupt and fear-fueled rants and this, George Clooney's second turn in the director's chair, is a beautifully suc 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...

An intelligent, thoughtful, highly engaging biopic of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco based idealist, who became the first openly gay activist to run for political office in the US. Before his assassination Milk was a leading cog in the battle for civil rights for the gay community, as in the 1978 fight against Proposition 6, which could have banned gay and lesbian individuals from teaching in schools. The story may have been a terriby tragedy, but the tone of the movie is upbeat and vibrant, Gus find out more...

A wonderful tale of a girl's passage from childhood to adulthood, a time that coincided with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by the tyranny of a fundamentalist theocracy. find out more...

Starting with the murder in an Afghan prison of an innocent taxi-driver by American soldiers, this brilliant documentary outlines the lines of command from Cheney and Rumsfeld down to those on the front line. We learn about the techniques of torture and who authorised which methods. We hear about some of the history of CIA torture methods, the irrelevance of torture to extracting information and its use as a weapon of terror and political posturing by those in power in Washington. find out more...

It's 1980s East Germany and our anti-hero, an accomplished surveillance officer, is ordered to spy on a successful and outwardly loyal playwright and his actress girlfriend, but the motive is not entirely political, involving the lust for the girl of a political commissar and the career prospects of his immediate superior. The Stasi officer is dragged into the Kafkaesque web created by this moral duplicity in this compelling and twisting tale. First class. find out more...

Winner of the 2003 Grierson Awards for Best International Documentary and Best Newcomer. "When a coup was launched in April 2002 against Hugo Chavez, the elected President of Venezuela, some young Irish filmmakers were lucky enough to be on hand to witness the events. They were actually inside the Presidential Palace - a filmmakers' dream - when the soldiers came to take Chavez away. But they were also there 48 hours later when the same soldiers switched sides reinstalling the president. The res find out more...