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...

Adapted from the classic, absurdist, anti-war novel by Joseph Heller. "Catch-22" is the story of Yossarian, a pilot who trys to opt out of flying bombing missions by being declared insane, the catch being that anyone trying to avoid bombing missions by being insane must be sane. This dark classic catches much of the flavour of the book, the insanity, the corruption and the absurdity of war. Think MASH, but non-linear - flawed but awesome. find out more...

Returning to themes he had touched upon in his earlier films Polanski develops the idea of Pinter's "two people in a room and then a third enters" with a couple on a remote island invaded by two on-the-run gangsters. Gradually the power positions shift... underlined with great black humour. 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...

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...

Part 2, and surely the greatest, of Wajda's trilogy describes the last days of the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The imagery of the sewers, to which the Polish fighters retreat, is superbly used to represent both their desperation and their new Soviet prison. Made in 1956 despite Stalinist censorship. find out more...

Polanski's first, and arguably his finest, feature film is an economically brilliant exercise in tension. Sparse of cast and props, the atmosphere grows painfully taut as a young couple on a yachting trip and the hitcher they've picked up engage in ever more dangerous emotional games. find out more...

A mournful elegy by a 38-year-old bourgeois playboy, writer and liberal who remained in Cuba after Castro's successful revolution while his family, friends and wife all fled for greener pastures in the US. In fragmented narration we learn of his love life, his failure to cling on to what he had, his inability to identify with the revolution's achievements and his quick appreciation of its downsides; 'You are not a counter-revolutionary, you are not a revolutionary, you are nada'. find out more...

In the final days of WWII, during the chaotic Soviet occupation, a seventeen-year-old Hungarian boy, Jancsó's alter ego, wanders his own countryside. He is captured by occupying Soviet troops, released and then, after donning a German uniform for warmth, captured once more. Sent to assist a wounded young Russian soldier guarding a diary herd the two strike up a firm friendship and this is the detailed episode at the crux of his travels. Throughout the movie displaced people drift; bandits, escap find out more...