The Italian adventurer and libertine Giovanni Jacopo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798, but in this six-part series Dennis Potter attempted to find a contemporary relevance through his central themes of sex and religion. He commented that Casanova "was concerned with religious and sexual freedom, and these are the things we have to address ourselves to now." Casanova was imprisoned in Venice in 1755, and Potter used that event as a central device, constantly inter-cutting to contrast Casanova's a find out more...

Alcatraz, 1938; after 3 years in solitary, a hellish hole in the ground with no heat, light or human contact, petty crook Henri Young emerges as a madman. When he kills another inmate there is only one man - attorney James Stamphill - willing to challenge the barbarity of Alcatraz. Moving and riveting with great performances from all three leads. find out more...

One of two classic Lean adaptations of Charles Dickens. From the opening shot of Oliver's mother struggling through the snow to reach the workhouse. The film brilliantly recreates the feeling of poverty-stricken Victorian England. Look out in particular for Alec Guinness' superb performance as Fagin. find out more...

The tale of two men banged up for years in the notorious French penal colony Devil's Island. Two escape bids by one of them results in years of solitary confinement but make him simply more determined to flee, even as old age approachs. The ultimate prison escape movie loosely based on a true story. find out more...

The tale of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official executioner, a man who personally dispatched 608 men and women, including various Nazi war criminals, Timothy Evans and Ruth Ellis. Timothy Spall superbly pulls off how this rather ordinary, but distinctly odd, bloke coped emotionally and professionally with his job. An awesome period piece and a superb look into a very strange occupation. A must for anyone who liked Vera Drake. find out more...

The Marquis de Sade has been locked away in a mental asylum, but he refuses to lie down and accept his fate. With the help of a laundry maid the Marquis continues to find an outlet for his writing and it is only with the arrival of the malevolent Dr Royer-Collard that the grim stink of desperation becomes apparent. The film cultivates an air of sardonic detachment beneath a lascivious leer, it pokes at sexual taboos - it's pretty subversive, considering - but sexuality and creativity are inde find out more...

Australia's dark secret of institutionalist eugenics gets an impressive and heartfelt celluloid airing in this adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara's book, a story based around the astonishing real life journey of three young girls, removed from their true Aboriginal families and transplanted to a boarding school/prison to be trained as domestic servants (from whence it was hoped they would quietly blend into white society), and their 1,500 mile trek home with only a rabbit proof fence to gui find out more...

An epic family drama spanning three generations of a Jewish family, who moved from a rural village to the city, became wealthy, respected, bourgeois and/or radicalised and Hungarianised, set against a backdrop of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War 1, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust and the Communist era. A tour-de-force performance by Ralph Fiennes in various reincarnations, especially as the character who won a fencing gold medal for Hungary in the 1936 Olympics, in th find out more...

It's 1942 and eight-year-old Bruno knows nothing of Germany's Final Solution and the Holocaust, only that his father was promoted and he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area. Here there is nothing to do and no one to play with, that is until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of a wire fence, and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel takes him from find out more...

Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters and lives a sweet life of cards, booze and women. Eventually Salomon's luck runs out when he's arrested and thrown into a Nazi concentration camp, but it's not long before his exceptional skills are spotted and he is coerced into a counterfeit operation on a gargantuan scale; a plan to help finance the war effort and flood the British and American economies with fake currency. For the first time in his life Salomon finds himself in a mo find out more...