Peter Yates' Oscar-winner is a heart-warming coming-of-age story that has also taken its place as the greatest sports movie about cycling ever made. Four friends graduate from high-school and find themselves looking at an uncertain future in small-town America. Dave's passion is cycling and his dream is to be a world-class champion like the Italians he idolises. His passion for cycling takes on new meaning when he and his friends face a team from the local college in the town's annual bike ra find out more...

One of the best films to come out of the British cinema for a long time. The story of the peroxided bar girl Ruth Ellis, who murdered her upper class lover and became the last woman to be hanged in the UK. A study not just of her personality and the tragic love affair which ended in this crime of passion, but of the seedy mood of repression and austerity in class ridden 50s Britain. Miranda Richardson is outstanding in this compelling movie. find out more...

David Lean's epic romance set against the turbulant backdrop of the Russian revolution. One man's struggle for moral political and personal survival amidst the complex web of intrigue and tangled loyalties that accompanied the fall of the Tsar.

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A lovingly created homage to the melodramas of the 1950s sees Frank and Cathy Whitaker's picture perfect marriage masking a relationship based on lies. A blossoming friendship with the black gardener and a husband whose fallen in love with another man leave Cathy shunned by her friends and neighbours, her outwardly idylic world finally revealed for the sham that it is. Far from Heaven looks stunning, the recreation of the period nothing short of immaculate, but I have never been a fan of 1950s m find out more...

Ian McKellan stars as James Whale, the avowed homosexual and eccentric director famed for his monster movies of the 1930s. Concentrating on a fictionalised version of the latter years of Whale's life, the film explores an unusual but close relationship he develops with a gardener (a muscle-laden Brendan Fraser). His loving maid (Lynn Redgrave) remains convinced he is doomed to hell for his openly sexual lifestyle and tries in vain to change his behaviour. Memorable performances from all the lead find out more...

Goodnight And Good Luck takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America, chronicling the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Murrow, his news team and, indeed, CBS itself made a defiant and impassioned stand against McCarthy's increasingly delusional, corrupt and fear-fueled rants and this, George Clooney's second turn in the director's chair, is a beautifully suc find out more...

This thoughtful, feelgood fantasy-comedy-drama is Hollywood at its best. Nineties teenager Tobey Maguire and his wild child sister Reese Witherspoon get the culture shock of their lives when they're sucked through the TV into '50's sitcom Pleasantville. Given that in Pleasantville there's never been passion, hatred, war, tears, rain, or even colour, the residents get quite a surprise too when real life starts creeping into their perfect, monochrome world. Thought-provoking and thoroughly enterta find out more...

Buddy Holly laid the foundations for a generation of popular music with his groundbreaking combination of country music and rhythm and blues. This film tells his story from it's explosive beginning to its tragic end with Gary Busey giving an electrifying Oscar nominated performance as the young genius from Lubbock Texas, who changed the tune of rock 'n' roll history.

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It's the early 50s in Argentina and two middle class medical students decide to make a journey across their largely unknown continent. While on this eight month travel one of the men begins his own journey from privileged ignorance to iconic revolutionary, the birth of Che Guevara has begun. The Motorcycle Diaries is a breathtakingly beautiful film, beginning as a whimsical, idiosyncratic and often humorous adventure and gradually expanding into a powerful and deeply moving drama. find out more...

Vera Drake, is one of the kindest, most selfless individuals any right thinking person could hope to meet, the mother of two grown up children, the wife of a loving husband, she works as a cleaner and is the epitome of a warm hearted decency. Vera is not just devoted to her family however, in the little spare time available to her she helps young girls terminate unwanted pregnancies and, though she takes no payment, this is 1950s Britain and the consequences for her actions, should she be discov find out more...