The story of a director, devoid of inspiration and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, trying to satisfy the anticipation surrounding his next project. Surreal, serio-comic mildly autobiographical and widely acclaimed as one of the great films about movie-making. Fellini's masterpiece.
find out more...
BICYCLE THIEVES (1948)
CertificationU Our Rating
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...
CINEMA PARADISO (1989)
CertificationPG Our Rating
Winner of numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This is the story of a young boy's love affair with the local cinema, where he regularly sneaks into the village priest's weekly preview and censorship session. Years later now a successful film director he returns to his native town. Stunning and beautiful.
find out more...
CINEMA PARADISO: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT (1989)
CertificationPG Our Rating
Winner of numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film; this is the story of a young boy's love affair with the local cinema, where he regularly sneaks into the village priest's weekly preview and censorship session. Years later now a successful film director he returns to his native town. Stunning and beautiful. An extra 50 minutes is incorporated into the Director's Cut in case you were left slathering for more!
find out more...
CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)
Certification12 Our Rating
Martial arts master Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien battle against the mysterious forces of evil to recover the Green Destiny sword. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is a simple story of bad versus good, intertwined with romance in its purest fairytale form and all done on an epic scale. Visually stunning, beautifully performed and with the most breathtaking martial arts fight sequences yet to be committed to celluloid.
find out more...
LA STRADA (1954)
CertificationPG Our Rating
Life as a circus is the theme of Fellini's tragi-comic road movie. Gelsomina, a naive simpleton, is sold to strongman Zampano, whose brutish behaviour becomes increasingly evident as they tour through the desolation that is post-war Italy. Despite the pessimism of much of the story, Fellini has already moved far from his roots in neo-realism and symbols, metaphors and larger-than-life performances hold sway, and moments of bizarre if inconsequential charm abound. Sad, sentimental and simply stun
find out more...
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1998)
CertificationPG Our Rating
Roberto Benigni stars and directs this award littered Chaplinesque comic fable. In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish book keeper named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido, an imaginative man, turns to humour, pretending that the Holocaust is a game and tha
find out more...
RASHOMON (1950)
Certification12 Our Rating
Set in medieval Kyoto, this is an engrossing tale of rape and murder in which contradictory accounts of events are later related from the perspectives of four of those involved. A film which awakened the West to the richness of Japanese cinema.
find out more...
THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006)
Certification12 Our Rating
It's 1980s East Germany and our anti-hero, an accomplished surveillance officer, is ordered to spy on a successful and outwardly loyal playwright and his actress girlfriend, but the motive is not entirely political, involving the lust for the girl of a political commissar and the career prospects of his immediate superior. The Stasi officer is dragged into the Kafkaesque web created by this moral duplicity in this compelling and twisting tale. First class.
find out more...