This is the middle story of Satyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy and, after Pather Panchali, we find Apu on the cusp of adulthood. The young lad moves with his family to Benares but with the death of his father, Apu's desire to continue his learning is affirmed and as his passion for knowledge grows so he and his mother find themselves drifting apart, especially as he wants to leave home and go to Calcutta to study. Aparajito is a beautifully drawn film and an immaculate observation of the characters find out more...

After Renoir's reluctant addition of a couple of titles to satisfy the producers desire to expand to feature length, this masterpiece was finally released in 1946. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl briefly leaves her family and fiance and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost, but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, find out more...

It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

The master of cinematic naturalism goes to America! Jean Renoir's tale of a family hitting hard times in the dustbowl of the US is beautifully realised. Zachary Scott plays a sharecropper who decides that, if his family is to survive the depression, he needs to go it alone. Buying his own land and tools he sets to work, but is soon faced with the obstinate fact that nature is at best indifferent, at worst devastatingly cruel. Crisis follows catastrophe as, with a proud ethic that is constantly u find out more...