A factionalised account of how the 1919 baseball world series was thrown by the heavily favoured Chicago White Sox. They made a deal with gangsters to get back at their stingy boss and make a packet on the side. This was a scandal that shocked a nation and is an excellent film. find out more...

Costner is superb as an inexperienced farmer who starts hearing voices and is considered mad when he builds a baseball pitch over his crop and then goes in search of an ageing sixties guru. A delightful and daringly sentimental parable of a man who has the courage to pursue his dreams. Goosebump city.

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Perhaps Caine's defining role as the ruthless London villain in Newcastle to sort out some gang bovver. When he finds out his niece has become embroiled with some very seedy characters, his involvement becomes far deeper. A violent and slick thriller with an excellent feel for both time and location and a comment on the despair of Britain in the 1970s. find out more...

This is the director's cut of the 1933 classic. It contains several scenes that were originally excised and is taken from a restored archive print. Kong looks as terrifying as ever and there is also a half-hour documentary of celebrating the 60th anniversary of the making of King Kong. Excellent stuff. find out more...

A tour de force with a stellar cast, events unfold over the period of just one day as a series of apparently random characters, from a game show host too an ex-boy genius, weave into each others lives through chance, circumstance and even divine intervention. 'Magnolia' is a drama of the highest order with both comic and very dark touches, some fine performances and an absorbingly intricate story line. find out more...

The definitive gangster-epic; violent? Yes, but never mindless. The Jewish Mafia's coming of age on the Lower East Side in 1923, their rise to wealth during Prohibition, and their fall in 1933, provide the background to a story of friendship and betrayal, love and death. Leone's masterful cinematography evokes both the harshness of the vice-ridden decades before and after Prohibition, but also the philosophy behind it. Splendid performances by De Niro and Woods and a stupendous score by Ennio Mo find out more...

A superb modern thriller in the ultra-hardboiled Jim Thompson mould, in which a trio of criminals, wanted for a brutally murderous drugs heist, converge on a small, quiet Arkansas township where the local cop, treated with contempt by the LA officers in charge of the case, looks forward to a High Noon-style showdown. The asides on racial and sexual inequality are made subtly and succinctly; the performances and pacing are nigh perfect; the violence is explicit, disturbing but never gratuitous; a find out more...

A fantastic looking film with a very pregnant atmosphere. Based on a true story of three girls disappearing on a school outing (only one was found and she remembered nothing). The film transforms this into an allegory for the loss of innocence that is associated with virginity and childhood. find out more...

An archetypal classic Western, since remade countless times, with Alan Ladd superb as the world-weary gunslinger who rides into town and finds himself as the 'good guy' protecting the innocent from powerful malevolent forces. In this case the innocent are squatters determined to fight for their rights against a rancher and his gunmen; in one way this is the evolution of the west from lawlessness to settlement, in another the battle between big and small business. For Shane the options are clear, find out more...

The true story of Karen Silkwood, a worker at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Cimarron, Oklahoma, who becomes aware of cover-ups about the dangers to her and her fellow workers and gets immersed in fighting her bosses for safety rights. The film very effectively mixes her personal life, ex-hubby, boyfriend, lesbian mate, child custody, heart to hearts, and her political struggle. Eventually she discovers she has a highly radioactive fridge and they are out to get her. Meryl Streep is again brill find out more...