One of the greatest war films ever made; three captured French soldiers, one an aristocrat, one a mechanic and one a Jew, bond together when imprisoned together by German soldiers. Their attempts to escape and their relationships with their captors, especially that between the French aristocrat and his German counterpart, are superbly dramatised in this indictment of the mass slaughter that is war. Subtle, emotive and timeless. find out more...

A German woman on a ship coming back to Europe notices a face, of another woman, which brings recollections from the past. She confesses to her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war and that the woman had been an inmate, but perhaps her recollections have become confused with time. A study of guilt and retribution and the last film of talented Polish director Andrzej Munk who was tragically killed during the making of ‘Pasazerka'. It picked up Best Film at the Venice find out more...

'The Round Up' takes place within a detention camp in the remote Hungarian countryside, after the collapse of the 1848 revolution against Austrian domination. A formal variation on the main patterns of ritual power, director Jansco deliberately side-steps revolutionary heroics and focuses on the persecutions and de-humanizations, which always accompany conflict, and makes 'an almost abstract statement of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed'... there are only losers and survivors. find out more...

Bresson's remarkable and detailed account of the brilliantly conceived escape of imprisoned and condemned to death real-life resistance fighter Andre Devigny. The intensity of the direction is augmented superbly by the music; Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Superb. 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...