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...

'City of Life and Death', like the earlier 'City of War; the John Rabe Story', is an account of the Rape of Nanjing; the terrible crimes committed by the Japanese army during the sacking of the Chinese city and the desperate efforts to protect those, mainly Chinese, sheltering in the protected German zone. This version concentrates less on the atrocities and heroic whites and more on the growing sensitivity and terrible guilt of a Japanese sergeant.
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Larry Fishburne plays New York mobster Bumpy Johnson, kingpin of the numbers racket in 1930's Harlem. But a turf war erupts when psycho gangster Dutch Schultz tries to muscle in on the game, leaving Bumpy with no choice but to enlist the notorious Lucky Luciano's help to save his own life and prevent an inevitable bloodbath. Moody mob drama. find out more...

Eight months after a disastrous job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier turned contract killer, Jay, is pressured by his partner, Gal, into taking a new assignment. As they descend into the dark and disturbing world of the contract, Jay begins to unravel once again, his fear and paranoia sending him deep into the heart of darkness. An find out more...

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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...

A young London based filmmaker chances upon the diaries of her grandfather, who served in the British police force in India during the freedom struggle. Excited about these memories, she makes plans to shoot a film on the Indian revolutionaries mentioned in the diaries but it is at first difficult for her and her colleagues to truly identify with the self sacrifice they are attempting to show. Rang De Basanti is an interesting drama that gradually blurs the divide between 1930's British ruled In 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...

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Set during the Great Depression, Jacob Janowski finds his promising career as a vetinary student shattered by family tragedy. Bereft and confused Jacob joins the Benzini Brothers circus as the vet for their animals and in particular the company’s elephant, Rosie. But it is the ringmaster’s wife that really holds the young Jacob’s attention, and it is this mutual attraction that forms the heart of the story. Based on Sara Gruen’s best selling novel, ‘Water for Elephants’ is a sumptuous but relati find out more...