An all time classic 60s movie glamourising the real life story of the Barrow gang who terrorised the American South in the early 30s. 'Reclaiming the American gangster movie, after it had been stolen by the Nouvelle Vague, Penn's film was so successful (and so imitated) that it inevitably met with some grudging devaluation. But it's still great, half comic fairytale, half brutal fact, it reflects the essential ambiguity of its heroes by treading a no man's land suspended between reality and fant find out more...

Polanski has a go at the film noir detective thriller, very bleak, very twisted and very menacing it is to. Nicholson plays a private-eye in pre-war LA who is hired to pursue an adultery case, but finds himself embroiled in a complicated murder investigation. find out more...

Set during the Great Depression and based on the true story of James J Braddock, Cinderella Man is the story of an ex-prize-fighter (Russell Crowe) who makes a last-chance bid to return to the ring in order to help his impoverished family. With no one thinking he has a chance, and with nothing to lose, Braddock begins an amazing comeback. A heartwarming, well acted film with enough blood and guts to give balance to the slightly sentimentalised script. Highly enjoyable. find out more...

A landmark in the history of the cinema; it was ranked Number 1 in the American Film Institute's 100 greatest films of all time in two polls (1998 and 2007) of more than 1,500 film industry movers and shakers and again by UK directors in a BFI poll. "Citizen Kane" narrates the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon driven by a childhood obssession and is loosely based round the life of William Randolph Hurst, who tried to have it banned, but incorporates elements from the lives of other fat cats il find out more...

The object of this massive tribute died as he had always lived, without wealth, without property, without official title or office. Mahatma Gandhi was not the commander of armies, nor the ruler of vast lands, he could not boast any scientific achievement or artistic gift, yet men, governments, dignitaries from all over the world, have joined hands today to pay homage to the little brown man in the loin cloth who led his country to freedom. This quote is from his funeral, one of the greatest s find out more...

Roberto Benigni stars and directs this award littered Chaplinesque comic fable. In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish book keeper named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido, an imaginative man, turns to humour, pretending that the Holocaust is a game and tha find out more...

The definitive gangster-epic; violent? Yes, but never mindless. The Jewish Mafia's coming of age on the Lower East Side in 1923, their rise to wealth during Prohibition, and their fall in 1933, provide the background to a story of friendship and betrayal, love and death. Leone's masterful cinematography evokes both the harshness of the vice-ridden decades before and after Prohibition, but also the philosophy behind it. Splendid performances by De Niro and Woods and a stupendous score by Ennio Mo find out more...

Born in New Orleans, abandoned and adopted on the day of the end of WWI, Benjamin Button is a medical mystery. Entering life as a physically old man, over the course of his remarkable existence he rejuvenates to infancy. He has a unique, poignant, but also joyous, perspective on the world around him. Very loosely adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald's excellent short story of the same title, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is a beautifully visualised and whimsical tale that drifts through the e find out more...

Made almost contemporaneously with the 1930s setting, this authentically portrays the poverty and repression of the migrant 'Okies', evicted from their dustbowl farms and treated like slaves in California. Adapted from Steinbeck's book, often called 'THE Great American Novel' and with outstanding performances coming from Henry Fonda (Tom Joad) and John Carradine (John Casey) a preacher with a fondess for vice, but a true heart... fantastic. find out more...

From the director of 'Shawshank Redemption' and based on another story by Stephen King, the title refers to the last walk condemned prisoners make to the electric chair. 'The Green Mile' is filled with the mystical, one of the prisoners having the power to heal and emanating a goodness which slowly but surely disperses the weary cynicism of the guards. Though the story itself is relatively slight it's the ensemble acting which makes 'The Green Mile' such a strong, watchable movie, Tom Hanks in p find out more...