Winner of 8 Oscars, this is the story of a misfit who challenges the power of the tough New York Longshoremen's Union. Steiger plays his brother, caught between divided loyalties, and Eve Marie Saint plays the woman he falls in love with. Highly recommended viewing despite its political premises. NB the special pleading on behalf of informers, deriving presumably from the fact that Kazan and Schulberg named names during the McCarthy witch-hunts. find out more...

The world as a lunatic asylum. Jack Nicholson plays the anarchist determined to challenge the smug system of authority and obedience that rule the roost. The first film by Czech dissident Forman after migrating from Czechoslovakia to the United States, and a superb comment on society! Won Best Picture plus others at 1975 Academy Awards. find out more...

A mesmerising dramatisation of one of the kings, Ray Charles. Unsurprisingly the soundtrack is pure bliss, but it is Jamie Foxx in the title role that pulls everything together, an hypnotic performance of a music legend, through all his highs and lows, and one of those increasingly rare examples of a leading actor Oscar that actually makes sense. find out more...

It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

Geoffrey Rush won a much deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Aussie pianist David Helfgott. A dazzling drama, following David's rejection by his dad after enrolling at London's Royal College of Music, his subsequent descent into madness and the touching love affair which would be his redemption. find out more...

Guinness restores the morale of British PoWs by building a bridge which is of military value to the Japanese, and then attempts to thwart the RAF's destruction of it! A classic film which swept 7 Oscars including "Best Picture". find out more...

The famous drugs thriller as Gene Hackman plays the cop determined to fix the Marseille based heroin runners once and for all. An action-packed movie full of murders, car chases and everything else a good thriller should have - making it one of the classics and a yardstick for others since. Won Best Picture at 1971 Academy Awards. find out more...

As the second son of George V, the future George VI was not expected to ascend to the throne, but when his brother Edward abdicated he found himself a reluctant king. Plagued by a nervous stammer he was expected to make a rousing radio speech to herald Britain’s entry into the war against the Third Reich. ‘The Kings Speech’ charts the touching, often humourous, personal relationship that developed between England's reluctant King and his irreverent Australian speech therapis find out more...

A film dominated by one performance, Forest Whitaker's turn as the infamous dictator Idi Amin. When young Scotsman Nicholas Garrigan becomes his personal physician few of us doubt that it will inevitably end in tears, but Amin, as is so often the way with monsters, has considerable charm to go with his paranoid genocidal tendencies and the naïve Garrigan is seduced. However Garrigan's role is ambiguous; is he just dumb or is he willingly looking the other way? The film also reverses the typical find out more...

Winner of a frightening number of Oscars (Best Film, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay); a vulnerable FBI rookie is sent to coax much needed information from the monstrous Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in order to stop a killer who skins his victims. Brilliant, terrifying and gripping. find out more...