This masterpiece is understandably on many people's all time favourite list. The lives of six Parisians are intertwined against the backdrop of the early-19th Century popular theatre and underworld, with the film a multi-layered meditation on the nature of performance. Flawlessly executed and cast. find out more...

Woody Allen has fun with his affection for long Russian novels, the films of Ingmar Bergman and metaphysical abstraction. One of his funniest! find out more...

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...

A frontier opportunist stumbles into a small gold-rush town and decides to earn a little extra pocket money by accepting a temporary assignment as their sheriff. Happily applying himself to his new position he manages to turn the town derelict into his deputy, outsmart the dreaded Danby clan and fend off the lusty advances of the mayor's daughter - all without breaking a sweat or dirtying his shiny black boots! 'Support Your Local Sheriff' is a deliciously witty western, which overturns and rein find out more...

Produced by Spike Lee, CSA is a wickedly clever 'mockumentary' that attempts to show what life in America may have been like if the South had won the civil war. The film is peppered with fake adverts, together with some that are rooted in reality and manages to be satirically humorous as well as genuinely thought provoking. find out more...

One of the finest of the genre, this classic western follows two men whose initial contempt for each other's methods, one a hard man rancher, the other a naively honest lawyer, develops into respect when faced with the the town's local hoodlum. Tense, absorbing and not without wit. Superb. find out more...

Crusading frontier policeman Captain Stanley captures the fugitive Burns brothers, Charley and Mikey, at the scene of a bloody rape and murder. Informing Charley that he must kill his older brother, Arthur, in order to avoid the execution of Mikey, Stanley retreats to an old jailhouse and awaits the bloody outcome. Director John Hillcoat's second collaboration with Nick Cave (here contributing the film's screenplay and soundtrack), is a taut and often brutal character study of desperation ami find out more...

Jimmy Stewart plays the good brother whose sharp shootin' wins him the eponymous, and often fetishised, rifle in a riveting contest. The episodic story that follows tracks the rifle as it changes hands, from brother to brother, arms trader to Indian warrior, encouraging the viewer to realise that the true star of the film (and indeed the battle for the West) is the rifle. The actors, including a young Rock Hudson, seem to play their characters in the knowledge that they are very much in the back find out more...