Part 1 of Wajda's trilogy of wartime films, the hopeful one, is set in Wola, a working-class area of Warsaw in 1942, and deals with the graduation of a bunch of semi-delinquent street kids, through individual acts of defiance and courage, into a youth resistance group. The heroism is not simple, neither loyalties nor self-sacrifice are assured, but united they will be. find out more...

This is the middle story of Satyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy and, after Pather Panchali, we find Apu on the cusp of adulthood. The young lad moves with his family to Benares but with the death of his father, Apu's desire to continue his learning is affirmed and as his passion for knowledge grows so he and his mother find themselves drifting apart, especially as he wants to leave home and go to Calcutta to study. Aparajito is a beautifully drawn film and an immaculate observation of the characters find out more...

The last of Wajda's famous trilogy, the one that signifies despair, has Cybulski, the 'Polish James Dean', as a young fighter no longer killing Germans but instructed to assassinate a recently appointed communist official. His deepening love affair with a hotel barmaid has him starting to question the value of his struggle. Superb. find out more...

Perhaps the most influential period in cinema history was the Italian neo-realism period of the late 40s and director Vittorio De Sica was one of the prime reasons for this important period of film-making. "The Bicycle Thieves" is a film about a poor man whose only means for a job is his bicycle, which gets stolen. The film follows him and his young boy throughout war-ravaged Rome in search of the stolen bike. The trip involves some of the most brilliant vignettes in film history; the church, th find out more...

Edmund is a young Berliner, attempting to survive and make some sense of a world set in the remnants of a post-WWII Germany. Their are few voices that exude assured confidence in Edmund's life but his Nazi teacher is one such man and the consequences of his impassioned doctrine on the impressionable lad have horrific and tragic consequences. Germany Year Zero is a powerful and haunting drama, understated and all the more mesmerising for it observation of ordinary men's capacity for simplistic find out more...

The best of Fellini went into this bleakly funny study of five young men adrift in the wasteland of their provincial home town. Middle class layabouts living by cadging off their families, aimlessly spending their days in pursuit of amusement and girls while nursing vague ambitions never likely to be more than pipe-dreams, they are trapped as much by their own moral bankruptcy as by the futureless society in which they have never quite grown up. Beautifully shot and performed, and governed by an find out more...

Part 2, and surely the greatest, of Wajda's trilogy describes the last days of the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The imagery of the sewers, to which the Polish fighters retreat, is superbly used to represent both their desperation and their new Soviet prison. Made in 1956 despite Stalinist censorship. find out more...

Adapted from Zola's novel, this powerful tale concerns a triangle of love and murder in which a train driver becomes passionately involved with a femme fatale. With its images of trains and railways as symbols of human destiny this is a visually arresting film; Gallic and tragic. find out more...

A haunting and highly emotive film about the tough lives of Sicilian villagers, in a small fishing community, in the face of exploitative businessmen. The images of isolation and frustration capture the villagers' plight. Beautifully shot, Visconti's realist vision encapsulates the whole film. Produced by the Italian Communist Party. find out more...

Vittorio De Sica's award-winning masterpiece, Miracle in Milan, is one of the watershed films of the Italian cinema renaissance. find out more...