The tale of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official executioner, a man who personally dispatched 608 men and women, including various Nazi war criminals, Timothy Evans and Ruth Ellis. Timothy Spall superbly pulls off how this rather ordinary, but distinctly odd, bloke coped emotionally and professionally with his job. An awesome period piece and a superb look into a very strange occupation. A must for anyone who liked Vera Drake. find out more...

An award-winning and arty biopic, adapted from his memoirs, of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich, focusing on the period between the 30s and 60s and his deeply ambivalent relationship with Stalin. Worthy and with a resonant cinematic understanding of Shostakovich's opuses. find out more...

Howard Hughes was an insatiable man, a billionaire whose success within Hollywood and obsession with aviation made him more famous than many of the movie stars his studio employed. This lush dramatisation of Hughes concentrates on the man, as a rebel within the ordered system of big business, charming, glamorous, decadent and ruthlessly focused. We witness the beginning of his fall from grace and decent into reclusive paranoia, but this is more an epic of Hughes glory years and, though lacking t find out more...

It's all sweetness and light in this moving music biopic classic of Glen Miller's impressive rise to fame with June Allyson playing his childhood sweetheart and James Stewart outstanding as the man himself. It's got all the great arrangements from 'Pensylvania 6-500' to 'Moonlight Serenade', all scored by Henry Mancini in homage to Miller's style, plus Louis Armstrong makes an appearance playing 'Basin Street Blues' and Frances Langford does 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'. find out more...

A biography of Aisin-Gioro "Henry" Pu Yi, who at the age of three was named the Emperor of China and died as a gardener at the Botanical Gardens of Peking. Told in an interesting flashback/flashforward style, we learn of Pu Yi's childhood, the time he spent in the Forbidden City, his term as the emperor of Japan's Manchukuo, his imprisonment by the Communists and his eventual release back to public life in 1959. A true epic with a cast of millions. find out more...

A dramatisation of Betty Page, a voluptuous young woman who grew up in a conservative religious family in Nashville, Tennessee, became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York and a nationwide erotic icon for her tongue-in-cheek fetishistic poses. To small town America, though, she was a 'moral threat' to their youth and, eventually, she became a target in a Senate investigation. Mary Herron's film is a richly evocative observation of an era and 50s America's repressive sexual and religious bel find out more...

An intriguing fictionalised account of Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker. Having acknowledged that the end is near the leader of the Third Reich looks back on the years of his rise to power and in particular the intense relationship he shared with his vivacious niece Geli Raubal. Superbly acted and meticulously styled, Uncle Adolf is an absorbing and fascinating interpretation of the making of a monster. find out more...