Two talented landscape artists become romantically entangled while building a garden in King Louis XIV's palace at Versailles.

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London, 1818; the young Romantic poet John Keats begins an unlikely three year romance with chic urbanite neighbour Fanny, an affair cut short by his premature illness and death. A superbly made interpretation of love and its rendition through poetry. 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...

Due to the devoutly religious beliefs of his wife, Emma, Charles Darwin kept his evolutionary beliefs under wraps for 20 years. Creation is a finely crafted period melodrama that, while lush and emotionally charged, tells us not a great deal about the man behind the scientist who revolutionised humanities conception of humanity. find out more...

One of the best films to come out of the British cinema for a long time. The story of the peroxided bar girl Ruth Ellis, who murdered her upper class lover and became the last woman to be hanged in the UK. A study not just of her personality and the tragic love affair which ended in this crime of passion, but of the seedy mood of repression and austerity in class ridden 50s Britain. Miranda Richardson is outstanding in this compelling movie. find out more...

A visually stunning and passionate potted history of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century, the Mexican, Frida Kahlo. This film deals primarily with Frida's private life, the enduring relationship with her husband and fellow artist, Diego Rivera, and her many scandalising affairs. Frida is a dramatic and affectionate portrait of a remarkable woman. find out more...

The film is based on the life of John Reed, the Communist, journalist, and writer who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his book Ten Days that Shook the World. The film works both as a history of the American left and as an epic romance, between Reed and Louise Bryant, an important feminist and radical journalist in her own right. After involvement with labour and political disputes in the US, they go to Russia in time for the 1917 October Revolution and, inspired, return to the US, hoping to find out more...

This is a bog standard period drama with some very nice and historically accurate but all too clean costuming. Set during the first world war and based on the biography of Vera Brittain, the story is one of tears, drama and determination. Hits all the right but all too regular notes, looks a lot like it was shot for TV...

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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...