The object of this massive tribute died as he had always lived, without wealth, without property, without official title or office. Mahatma Gandhi was not the commander of armies, nor the ruler of vast lands, he could not boast any scientific achievement or artistic gift, yet men, governments, dignitaries from all over the world, have joined hands today to pay homage to the little brown man in the loin cloth who led his country to freedom. This quote is from his funeral, one of the greatest s find out more...

Encounter of three social classes in England at the beginning of the century; the capitalists, the Wilcoxes, whose only god is money, consider themselves as aristocrats, the enlightened bourgeois Schlegels and the proletarian Basts. The Schlegel sisters' humanism will be torn apart as they try both to softly knock down the Wilcox's prejudices and to help the Basts. Essentially the same story as Room With A View, nobody marries beneath their station and class is everything, but with a distinct el find out more...

 

Movie Mole says: Hugo allows an adult audience to experience the sheer childlike joy of solving a mystery, of keeping of a great big secret and, most importantly, of seeing a film for the very first time; the movie is filled to the brim wi find out more...

A fine dramatic telling of the almost mythical event that took place on Christmas eve 1914 at the beginning of World War One, when soldiers from opposing sides made a tentative cease fire, swapped conversation, presents and played football before inevitably returning to the senseless slaughter. Poignant, sensitive and agonisingly sad, Joyeux Noel was nominated for best foreign film Oscar at the 2006 awards.

find out more...

Tita's heart is broken when she is forbidden to marry the man she loves because of a family tradition. When her sister instead marries her lover her anger goes into her magical cooking. A wonderfully inventive and touching story, with superb visual flourishes - a beautiful, colourful fable.. find out more...

Vincent Minelli directs this biopic that, unusually for Hollywood, doesn't subsume the subject's achievements in a fictionalised life-story, explaining one not in terms of the other, but fully celebrating both. Douglas is superb as the artist living on the edge. Not just for art aficionados.

find out more...

Philip Carey (Leslie Howard), a club-footed medical student, falls for a pretty waitress Mildred Rogers (Bette Davis). To Philip's dismay Mildred does not return his affection, instead she suffers his attentions, while treating him with contempt. As desire leads to infatuation, Philip, ever the gentleman, finds himself on the receiving end of her lies and mockery, but finds it impossible to kick her out of his life. As Mildred's cruel and uncompassionate personality drags her inevitably into find out more...

A musical satire on WW1. Patriotic songs of the period are brilliantly parodied and the lunacies of war are portrayed as a series of games played by the upper classes - Haig playing leapfrog and conducting battles from a helter-skelter, losses reflected on cricket scoreboards, while the working classes are massacred on the front line. Scores of well-known faces, brilliant. find out more...

One of Stanley Kubrick's earliest films, Paths of Glory is a seminal anti-war movie. Set during the First World War, the French general staff give the order for Colonel Dax (Douglas) and his men to attack a particularly well fortified German position. The order is little more than authorised suicide and when the remanants of Dax's men return, the high command, looking for something to distact from their murderous incompetence, decide to court-martial three of the surviving soldiers. The outra find out more...

The film is based on the life of John Reed, the Communist, journalist, and writer who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his book Ten Days that Shook the World. The film works both as a history of the American left and as an epic romance, between Reed and Louise Bryant, an important feminist and radical journalist in her own right. After involvement with labour and political disputes in the US, they go to Russia in time for the 1917 October Revolution and, inspired, return to the US, hoping to find out more...