A weird story, based on legend, about a mother and her daughter-in-law who survived in times of hardship by murdering Samurai and selling their armour to buy rice. A wonderfully strange and visually striking Japanese folk tale, unusual in itself, but also a beautiful and detailed character study. find out more...

Adaptated from nine stories from Bocaccio's 14th Century classic "Decameron", this is a lewd and bawdy movie for those who like their lew and bawd to have a bit of style and class. find out more...

Bergman's fascinating and acclaimed allegorical search for a meaning for human existance. A disillusioned soldier returns from the Crusades to find plague ravaging Europe. Death arrives in person to take his soul, but by beating him at chess he earns a reprieve. Repressive, dark, medieval and superb! find out more...

An atmospheric medieval allegory for which Bergman won his first Oscar and International Critics Prize at Cannes. On her way to church, a 15-year-old peasant girl is raped and murdered by two goatherds. Later, in a bizarre twist of fate, the culprits ask for food and shelter at the house of the dead girl's parents. Discovering the truth, when the goatherds offer to sell them their dead daughter's bloodstained clothes, the parents exact a brutal revenge. The formal simplicity and overt symbolism, 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...