The last of Wajda's famous trilogy, the one that signifies despair, has Cybulski, the 'Polish James Dean', as a young fighter no longer killing Germans but instructed to assassinate a recently appointed communist official. His deepening love affair with a hotel barmaid has him starting to question the value of his struggle. Superb. find out more...

Adapted from Zola's novel, this powerful tale concerns a triangle of love and murder in which a train driver becomes passionately involved with a femme fatale. With its images of trains and railways as symbols of human destiny this is a visually arresting film; Gallic and tragic. find out more...

Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant labourer (Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish husband (De Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder, recrimination - begins. 'Ossessione' is often described as the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty is pure Visconti, while the ble find out more...

After Renoir's reluctant addition of a couple of titles to satisfy the producers desire to expand to feature length, this masterpiece was finally released in 1946. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl briefly leaves her family and fiance and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost, but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, find out more...

The widow Rosaria moves to Milano from Lucania with her poor south Italian family, five sons. In the beginning everyone manages to find something to do, Simone is boxing, Rocco works in a dry cleaners, and Ciro studies, but Simone meets Nadia, a prostitute, and they have a stormy affair and then Rocco begins a relationship with her. A bitter feud ensues between the two brothers, which will lead as far as murder...the peasant lifestyle they have left behind is replaced only by violent misfortune find out more...

The master of cinematic naturalism goes to America! Jean Renoir's tale of a family hitting hard times in the dustbowl of the US is beautifully realised. Zachary Scott plays a sharecropper who decides that, if his family is to survive the depression, he needs to go it alone. Buying his own land and tools he sets to work, but is soon faced with the obstinate fact that nature is at best indifferent, at worst devastatingly cruel. Crisis follows catastrophe as, with a proud ethic that is constantly u find out more...

Now well into adulthood and living in Calcutta, where he struggles to get by as a writer, Apu becomes married to the beautiful Aparna, a relationship that quickly develops into one of genuine love; but a terrible tragedy leaves Apu's world in tatters and in his grief he runs from the place he has long come to know as home. 'The World Of Apu' is the final part in Satyajit Ray's trilogy and fittingly it's a stunning emotional masterpiece. find out more...