Helena loves Bertram, but he's of noble birth, while she's just a doctor's daughter. But Bertram is at the court of the King of France, who is ill, and Helena has a remedy that might cure him and win her the right to marry Bertram. But does Bertram want to marry her? BBC doing the full text. As only they can do. Apparently. find out more...

Colin Blakeley and Jane Lapotaire star as two of the most famous lovers in history in this superb Jonathan Miller directed adaptation of Shakespeare's turbulent script. The 16th Century setting gives a non-traditional feel, but the cast and direction are of the highest BBC standards. find out more...

The Mayan Empire is at its peak, the last mighty roar before its cataclysmic fall, and there are no Central American people, however small and nomadic their tribe, that remain free of its murderous grasp. When his people are massacred and Jaguar Paw captured he, with the remnants of his tribe, begins a long and merciless journey to the Mayan capital, a place due to be his last, brief, bloody home. But the knowledge of the survival of his wife and child wills Jaguar on to become more than just an find out more...

Shakespeare's delightful romantic comedy is given the usual high class treatment by the BBC. find out more...

"I am dying in time to the splash of their oars - if arms as steady as these had embraced me in life...". This film is Jarman's vision of the life of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573 - 1610). Caravaggio revisits periods of his tempestuous life in a series of deathbed flashbacks and prose-poem voice-overs, focusing particularly on the intense relationship between himself and a couple who model for him in Rome, Lena and Ranuccio. This sexual and violent love triangle eve find out more...

Following on from 'Elizabeth' this sees her a more confident and assured, in firm control of her court, but still troubled by the bothersome Mary Queen of Scots and facing a war with Catholic Spain that few believe she will survive. "Elizabeth The Golden Age" is a beautifully lit, sumptuously dressed dogs dinner of a movie, a fine cast wasted on a shamelessly lazy script and created more in the style of a fashion shoot than a film. The old girl would probably love it mind, because Cate Blanchett find out more...

A beautifuly staged historical epic set in a sixteenth century Japanese civil war. find out more...

The man who broke the back of Catholicism, or certainly compacted a few vertebrae, Martin Luther, the German Augustinian who questioned the doctrine of the established church and created a Christian revolution. Set at the beginning of the 16th Century when Luther was still young, this is a lush dramatisation of the man behind the birth of the Protestant faith. find out more...

Another faithful and compelling adaptation from the very watchable BBC collection. find out more...

Nominated for five Academy Awards; Michael Curtiz's expansive period drama sets the tumultuous on-again, off-again affair between Queen Elizabeth I and the second Earl of Essex against Essex's powerful ambition to assume power in England. Having won several important battles, Essex's popularity among the masses is soaring, but despite his own substantial cunning he is ultimately no match for his Queen, a woman Essex greatly admires but has sworn to usurp. An epic, rip-roaring reinterpretation of find out more...