Truffaut's first feature, the melancholy and revealing portrait (semi-autobiographical) of an adolescent boy growing up in Paris. We see the intense, destructive family background followed by an escape from reform school. Beautifully perceptive performances make this one of Truffaut's finest works. find out more...

Four men set in motion a heist of incredible audacity, a robbery where the level of risk is only matched by the protagonists' meticulous precision, but though the thieves are consummate professionals once the job is done their emotions and animosities begin to threaten the rewards of their hard work. Rififi is renowned for its tense half hour long heist scene in which not a word is ever uttered, and acknowledged as one of the classic examples of French film noir. 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...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...