A beautiful, witty depiction of a fantastic female poet. Terence Davies gives Dickinson the treatment she deserves, exploring how her personal life and character burst onto the page in the form of beautiful, lyric poetry. Wonderfully portrayed by Cynthia Nixon with a stellar supporting cast, it's a pure joy to watch. 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...

London, 1818; the young Romantic poet John Keats begins an unlikely three year romance with chic urbanite neighbour Fanny, an affair cut short by his premature illness and death. A superbly made interpretation of love and its rendition through poetry. find out more...

Two works from the father of narrative cinema. In "Broken Blossoms" (1919); a Chinaman arrives in London to teach the locals the ideals of Buddhism but finds them most unreceptive and, instead, opens a shop which becomes the refuge for a xenophobic boxer's abused daughter. Lillian Gish is brilliant and Griffith poetic. "Abraham Lincoln", (1930), was Griffith's first talkie and is a straightforward biopic from childhood to his premature assassination. find out more...

It has been customary to portray Byron as the archetypal Romantic hero with a big floaty cloak, eyeliner and an evil chuckleAn intelligent and perceptive film that concentrates on the highly comples witty, intelligent and charismatic writer rather than some . Jonny Lee Miller carries off Byron's personality with aplomb, making him smug and petulant while unavoidably charismatic and likable. Of course it's still all conjecture, but as far as Byron films go, there's nothing out there to touch this find out more...

The moving and superbly directed account of the life of the talented sculptor Camille Claudel and her tempestuous affair with the already famous Rodin, which lasted 15 years during which time she inspired some of his greatest works, but suffered with her own sanity. Depardieu and Adjani excel. find out more...

The film focuses on Camille's time spent in an asylum after she is sent there by her brother, the poet Paul Claudel, who questions his sister's sanity when she destroys some of her own works. She lives a reclusive life trying to prove to her doctor that she is mentally stable while waiting in hope that her brother will visit and consent to her discharge from the institution. 

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A landmark in the history of the cinema; it was ranked Number 1 in the American Film Institute's 100 greatest films of all time in two polls (1998 and 2007) of more than 1,500 film industry movers and shakers and again by UK directors in a BFI poll. "Citizen Kane" narrates the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon driven by a childhood obssession and is loosely based round the life of William Randolph Hurst, who tried to have it banned, but incorporates elements from the lives of other fat cats il find out more...

Abandoned by her father and brought up in an orphanage Gabrielle Chanel's early years were not easy ones, but her willful determination, intelligence and obvious gift would see her ultimately rise to iconic status within the world of 20th Century fashion. 'Coco Before Chanel' never glamorises her life, neither the way she looks nor the lovers she takes; a thoughtful understated observation of Chanel's life before fortune finally beckoned. Not a visually sumptuous film, as you might expect, but a find out more...

A fictional account of one year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. On Christmas Eve 1877, Elisabeth, once idolized for her beauty, turns 40 and is officially deemed an old woman; she starts trying to maintain her public image.

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