Taking man's inhumanity to man as its central theme, 'Au Hasard Balthazar' traces the life of a donkey, christened Balthazar by a group of young children, from birth to death. Balthazar's story begins on a small farm in a rural district of France. Throughout his life he is owned by many of the locals, returning to some of them more than once, and is set various tasks, from drawing a carriage to performing in a circus, turning a grindstone to acting as a smuggler's means of transport. Some owners find out more...

Perhaps the most influential period in cinema history was the Italian neo-realism period of the late 40s and director Vittorio De Sica was one of the prime reasons for this important period of film-making. "The Bicycle Thieves" is a film about a poor man whose only means for a job is his bicycle, which gets stolen. The film follows him and his young boy throughout war-ravaged Rome in search of the stolen bike. The trip involves some of the most brilliant vignettes in film history; the church, th find out more...

A succesful photograper in swinging sixties London leads an aimless existence. Then one day he apparently witnesses a murder in the park. A slow moving thriller, Antonioni's film is also a meditation on the relationship of film to reality and the relationship of the individual to society. find out more...

Mary Henry believes she has survived a serious car accident, but when she heads for Utah to start a new job as a church organist she finds herself pursued by an emaciated wrath. A cult horror classic from Harold Harvey. find out more...

A landmark in the history of the cinema; it was ranked Number 1 in the American Film Institute's 100 greatest films of all time in two polls (1998 and 2007) of more than 1,500 film industry movers and shakers and again by UK directors in a BFI poll. "Citizen Kane" narrates the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon driven by a childhood obssession and is loosely based round the life of William Randolph Hurst, who tried to have it banned, but incorporates elements from the lives of other fat cats il find out more...

A father is haunted by the death of his young child. Omens point to disaster and hallucinations predict the future as this wonderful atmospheric film moves to its disturbing climax. Shot in the beautiful city of Venice and based on the book by Daphne du Maurier.

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A psychotic American commander worried about the subversive effects of water fluoridisation on his "vital bodily fluids" starts off an attack on the Soviet Union. No-one can stop the fighters and no-one, as yet, knows about the failsafe Doomsday Machine. Brilliant black comedy. find out more...

Jack Nicholson is astonishing as the drifter trying to escape from his well-to-do background. He has created a new life of drinking, manual labour and womanising, but is called back to his father's deathbed, where a chance meeting means making a tough choice. Brilliantly moody and evocative drama. find out more...

The 1960s and tradition is teetering on the edge, a group of minor public school boys can't hack it any more and rebellion brews. Discovering a cache of automatic weapons, they revolt bloodily against the establishment around them, from the rooftop they engage in a firefight with the teachers and other students, who are armed with the Army Cadet training rifles. A classic of the English cinema... rise up all teens. find out more...

Resnais's controversial attempt at collaboration with avant garde author Alain Robbe-Grillet. The film sets up a puzzle that is never resolved, a man meets a woman in a rambling hotel and believes he may have had an affair with her the previous year at Marienbad - or did he? Or was it somewhere else? Deliberately scrambling chronology to the point where past, present and future become meaningless, Resnais creates a vaguely unsettling mood by means of stylish composition, long, smooth tracking sh find out more...