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...

An extremely dark and erotic story of a young woman, the new maid of the house hold, who arrives to become entwined with the strange family and even odder gardener. The death of a young girl nearby adds intrigue. Bunuel digs right down to that spiritual gunge which links political, sexual and social positions as equal perversions of human desires. Like most Buñuel heroines, Célestine is intuitively a feminist, but before her time, and blows it by her egoism and ambivalence before male ruthlessne find out more...

A visually striking and powerful exploration of the "Oedipus" myth so loved by Freud, which draws on the director's own experience and the timeless themes of mythology. In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destine find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con find out more...

Based on David Low's cartoon character, Major General Clive Wynne-Candy, VC, we back-track over his life, drawing us into sympathy with the prime virtues of honour and chivalry which have transformed him from dashing young spark of the 1890s into crusty old buffer of World War II. Roger Livesey gives us not just a great performance, but a man's whole life, losing his only love (Deborah Kerr) to the German officer (Walbrook) with whom he fought a duel in pre-WWI Berlin, then becoming the latter's find out more...

One of the all-time classic film noirs. Sultry Lana Turner is hypnotic as the bored, beautiful wife whose dreary life takes a dramatic turn when enigmatic drifter Frank walks into the diner she runs. Only her good-natured husband stands in the way of the pair's deadly passion. Superb stuff. find out more...

This is late Buñuel, mockingly sensible black comedy, set in Toledo in the early 1930s, in which an old guardian (Rey) seduces his young ward Tristana (Deneuve), but is unable to possess her, betrayed by surrealist lurches in time and reality and by Tristana's changing 'nature'. Rey is brilliant as the Mephistophelean, anti-clerical Socialist, dandy and outmoded master of social graces: father, lover and husband all in one. His passion ruins and softens him, but (caught as she is in the chauvini find out more...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...