Small time gangster's moll Blondie kidnaps a big-wig local politico's junkie wife in order to secure her husband's release from the local mafiosi. Altman's homage to his hometown is a swirl of bourbon soaked atmospherics on the themes of love, crime, race and politics, grafted onto a fine jazz soundtrack. 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...

Sweeping romantic drama of epic proportions. Fiennes's WWII pilot lays badly burned and in the care of an army nurse. As the unnamed, stiff-upper-lipped "English Patient" begins to recover, memories emerge of a past life as an archaeologist/cartographer in the Sahara, and a passionate affair with a married woman, Katharine. Though Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel simplifies, jettisons and changes certain elements of the original story, it remains a rich, complex, entran find out more...

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...