D'Artagnan (Michael York), a young swordsman, arrives in Paris with one dream: becoming a Musketeer. He meets and quarrels with Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), three Musketeers, who invite him to join them in fighting the evil Cardinal Richelieu (Cha...

After surviving an ambush by the Cheyenne, a naïve cavalry officer (Peter Strauss) and a defiant young woman (Candice Bergen) must trek through hostile terrain to make it back home. En route they witness a horrific bloodbath as the U.S. Cavalry takes revenge upon their enemy, in a battle that be...

Set in a world before Elvis, a Liverpool before the Beatles, Terence Davies' debut feature is a remarkable evocation of working-class family life in the 40s and 50s and a visionary exploration of memory. In a powerful succession of searing vignettes, Davies paints an autobiographical picture of a...

Christmas 1183. An elderly King Henry the Second (Peter O'Toole) is torn over naming his successor. He wants the young Prince John (Nigel Terry), one of his three sons, to take over, however, his wife Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) wants another of his sons, Prince Richard the Lio...

Akira Kurosawa’s visually spectacular epic transplants Shakespeare’s King Lear from Celtic Britain to feudal Japan. In its epic scope and expert execution, Ran can be seen as a culmination of the great Japanese director’s filmmaking career; a late triumph which he planned and refined over several...

Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt's famous film, produced at the GPO film unit, is an enduring example of British self-mythology and rousing evidence of the artistic potential of supposed propaganda. A hymn to our capital city's resilience during the Blitz, structured as a day-in-the-life of stiff...

With his reign coming to an end, a dying Henry VIII looks back on his life and the six marriages that would go on to define him. The film looks back with the King, following his life from his marriage to a Spanish princess to the foundation of Protestantism, to the beheadings and divorces that wo...

Chris Newby’s poetic debut feature addresses the gulf between patriarchal power and female ritual and rebellion against the backdrop of a remote Medieval village.

George Hoellering's powerful adaptation of TS Eliot's classic verse drama is a stark and highly atypical example of British historical cinema. Little-seen despite winning a top prize at the Venice Film Festival, the film recounts - entirely in verse - the clash between King Henry II and Archbisho...

The directorial debut of illustrator and producer Stewart Mackinnon, Justine is a near-lost example of British avant-garde cinema of the 1970s. Produced by the BFI Production Board in 1976, it has been out of circulation for the entire 40 years since.

Set in Ireland in 1920, Ascendancy is a powerful meditation on English guilt over the tormented history of Northern Ireland. Connie (Julie Covington) is an English aristocrat driven to despair over the horrors of war, including both the residual effects of the Great War and a new wave of violence...

Adapted from Nicholas Monsarrat's acclaimed novel, The Cruel Sea follows a Corvette, the Compass Rose, and its crew as they fight German U-Boats in an attempt to protect convoys throughout World War 2. A stark, honest, and emotionally fueled portrayal of wartime, The Cruel Sea is unusual in its f...

In Wales during World War Two, a German airman crash-lands in a wood and is found by 12-year-old Elenya. She decides to keep him a secret and does so for as long as she can until finally the village learns the truth, with tragic consequences.

The plight of women in the 1840s London rag trade is explored and deconstructed. Informed by experimental film practice and evoking a serialised Victorian novel, this unusual film investigates the effects of protectionist ‘philanthropy' in the sweatshop-style London clothes trade using contempor...

Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) promises his guests a night of horror only a mad poet can deliver and after partaking in hallucinogens, the guests tell ghost stories while exploring the dark corridors of his home - and of their minds. If any director is suited to retelling the wild night that conjured...

Patrick Troughton (riffing wonderfully on his prior incarnation as Doctor Who) plays a time-hopping inventor who’s disturbed by a couple of curious kids. He decides to send them back through the ages for themselves, but when his machinery begins to malfunction his charges wonder if they’ll ev...

A soldier, out on reconnaissance in the American Civil War, finds himself trapped - buried alive and alone under the rubble of a fallen wall - deep in enemy territory. Unable to move, he is overcome by a mad terror as he hallucinates and awaits his almost certain death. This potent short, based o...

Documentary, public information film, morale booster; propaganda film – all descriptions that apply to Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's extraordinary war-time film. Using his customary combination of poetry and propaganda, Jennings constructs a collage of the various people and classe...

The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings’ unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain’s greatest documentary filmmaker) i...

Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings’ later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom dan...

Spanning 50 years and a lifelong relationship amidst the violence and upheaval of national civil unrest, this unflinching epic balances intimate romance and devastating scale to heartbreaking effect. Adapted from the novel by Lilian Lee (author of Rouge), the tale of Dieyi and Xiaolou carries us ...