This thoughtful, feelgood fantasy-comedy-drama is Hollywood at its best. Nineties teenager Tobey Maguire and his wild child sister Reese Witherspoon get the culture shock of their lives when they're sucked through the TV into '50's sitcom Pleasantville. Given that in Pleasantville there's never been passion, hatred, war, tears, rain, or even colour, the residents get quite a surprise too when real life starts creeping into their perfect, monochrome world. Thought-provoking and thoroughly enterta find out more...

The true story of champion boxer Jake La Motta brought to the screen by De Niro and Scorcese - probably the greatest partnership of the 1980s. De Niro watched innumerable boxing videos and gained 2 stone to put in a performance that won him an Oscar. Voted Best Film of the '80s by the critics. find out more...

Based on a true story, the film charts the troubled life of Barbara Daly, who married into the American Baekeland dynasty (the inventors of bakelite). Despite the melodramatic nature of the plot, the performances of the three leads are subtle and engaging. These are not characters to like, but they are fascinating nonetheless. Exquisitely shot, 'Savage Grace' is a harrowing, moving and disturbing dramatisation of faded love and familial obsession - events that ended with a brutal murder. find out more...

A highly acclaimed and influential account of Algeria's turbulent past made in psuedo-documentary style. The tense plot surrounds the rise of nationalist organisations in '54 and the French government's attempts to quell them. This film was the prototype for most political thrillers of the 1970s. find out more...

Fascinating, factually based story of an anti-social double murderer, Robert Stroud, who used his years in the world's toughest prison to transform himself into a world-renowned ornithologist. Superb performances all round but Karl Malden is particularly riveting as the sadistic prison governer. find out more...

Buddy Holly laid the foundations for a generation of popular music with his groundbreaking combination of country music and rhythm and blues. This film tells his story from it's explosive beginning to its tragic end with Gary Busey giving an electrifying Oscar nominated performance as the young genius from Lubbock Texas, who changed the tune of rock 'n' roll history.

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A cinephile's odyssey through a century of film clips, to take a witty and stylish look at homosexuality on the silver screen, narrated by Lily Tomlin, with interviews with the likes of Curtis, Sarandon, Hanks and MacLaine and including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Thelma & Louise and Philadelphia. find out more...

The Terence Davies Trilogy acts, as do his two later films, ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives' and ‘The Long Day Closes', as a reconstruction of his childhood and youth in working class post-war Liverpool. In his trilogy Davies uses alter ego Robert Tucker, a shy and introverted child who is assumed to be not as able mentally as his peers and so bullied by those around him. Robert's home life is darkly overshadowed by his violent abusive father and his guilt over homosexual feeling, which is exacerba find out more...

Based on the novel 'The Midwich Cockoos' by John Wyndham, this creepy classic sees George Sanders fighting a community of platinum-blonde children hell-bent on mind-control and total world domination. find out more...