1560, Peru. In a beautiful poetic opening scene the conquistadors cross an Andes pass, situated between the peaks and the valleys, between conquered land and unexplored forests, between 'heaven' and 'earth', shrouded in mists, they make their way down a narrow path. Aguirre's meglomania grows as around him his comrades mutiny and die in his search for the lost city of El Dorado. Herzog's best film, an unforgetable tour de force. Made before the director himself gave in to meglomania on a later t find out more...

Big-budget monster movie with the biggest, baddest, meanest and maddest computer-generated snake you've ever seen! A film crew on location in the Amazon jungle get the squeeze put on them by a 40 foot long Anaconda, unaware that a stranger in their midst is secretly out to trap the beast! Cheesey fun, and watch out for Jon Voight's smile - wicked. find out more...

The greatest movie ever made? A soldier is sent into the Heart of Darkness to retrieve a commander gone AWOL in an insane reality of tin-pot power, paranoia and inglorious killing. The horror of war is stripped naked in a surreal twilight world. The crew nearly went mad making it, Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack and Coppola flew so far beyond budget that the word 'bankrupt' was nearly redefined. See "Heart of Darkness"... find out more...

The definitive 'Apocalypse Now' (as if the original wasn't pretty definitive) this has nearly an hour of extra footage fleshing out the surreal journey of our central protagonists and, though it brings the film to a whisker short of three and a half hours, much of it explains what happens to the eclectic characters we meet. The cut version of 'Apocalypse Now' stands as one of the most awesome films of modern cinema, anyone who has seen it will inevitably see it again, it's just that now you have find out more...

Herzog's epic movie about a man's obsessive attempt to bring opera to the Indians living deep in the Peruvian jungle. To do this he must take a steamship/tub way up the Amazon river system, a monumental task, at one point involving transporting it over a not unconsiderable hill, with the help of a system of pulleys and massed Indian labour. A surreal comment on madness, power and vision. There is also a documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the notoriously fraught making of the film. find out more...

Great Plains; how many of you know that the most numerous bird on the planet is the Red-billed Quelea? Now do you want to see the size of their flocks? And, for the less faint-hearted, did you know that a largish pride of hungry Kalahari lions (30 in this example) will bring down and kill a largish elephant if it's isolated from the herd? find out more...

Seasonal Forests; from General Sherman, a giant sequoia ten times the size of a blue whale and the largest living thing on the planet, to 4,000 years old bristlecone pines that pre-date the pyramids. From the world's greatest insect emergence, cicada, to the baobab forests of Madagascar. find out more...

A ravishing journey across China; from the glittering peaks of the Himalayas to the barren steppe, the sub-Arctic to the tropical islands, through deserts both searingly hot and mind-numbingly cold, to observe the mysterious, beautiful and rare creatures of this immense and environmentally diverse nation and the traditional customs of its different ethnic groups. find out more...