An often blackly humorous modernist western, non-heroic and edgily understated, in which an itinerant gambler turned brothel owner and a prostitute turned madame strike up a precarious relationship in a bizarre mining town. The scope for frontier individualism is threatened by the encroachment of companies owned by shareholders back east.

A young woman, Anna, mysteriously disappears on an almost deserted volcanic island. After setting out to find her, her lover and her friend, Claudia, form a tenuous relationship; Anna is seemingly forgotten. Coming directly out of neo-realism, Antonioni rejected the dramatisation of psychology through established narrative conventions in dialogue, genre and editing in favour of equivalent of the modern novel, in order to invite contemplation of and reflection on the alienation of the protagonists.

Falstaff is at the centre of what is now regarded as Welles' most fully realised film after Citizen Kane. It is drawn largely from the two parts of Henry IV with Falstaff's death in Henry V used as a coda. Welles had initially developed the idea in a stage production in Ireland and his identification with Falstaff is complete. The comic side of Falstaff's character is overwhelmed by tragedy as he wages a struggle against the disappearance of the values of goodness that he represents. Prince Hal pays a heavy price in exchange for power. The battle of Shrewsbury with its ironic music, perhaps the most powerful sequence in all of Welles' cinema, sounds the death knell for all men in battle.

A tale of rampant Southern evangelism, mixing Southern gothic and bleak humour, as a would-be mystic with a one track, hopelessly literal mind stages a doomed private rebellion against the evangelism and repression of his upbringing. The central character, Hazel Moates, takes up the evangelical game and tries to play it according to his own rules ('the Church without Christ') but ironically, in the process, ensures his own destruction, imitating Christ's martyrdom. Along with the uniformly excellent cast, the real strength of the film is Huston's refusal of caricature although Moates' total humourlessness invites it.

WR - which stands for both Wilhelm Reich and World Revolution - starts out as a free-wheeling documentary on Reich whose pioneering research in the thirties was devoted to the relationship between sexuality and politics. Makavejev then begins intercutting American documentary footage (a Reichian therapy session, a drag queen, two women artists fetishizing sexuality, guerilla street theatre) with a humorously allegorical fiction set in Yugoslavia. The fiction involves a triangle: a liberated young woman, her jealous worker-boyfriend and a Stalinist ice-skating star.

A grotesque tale told through flashback, of a doomed revolt by dwarves in an institution on a barren volcanic island. The institution's director is absent and the dwarf instructor is temporarily in charge. The dwarves' outrage is initially directed against their deformity accentuated by the scale of the penal institution, and is, by implication, also directed against Mother Nature who has created them as freaks. The bleak view of humankind excluded from a state of grace is epitomised by hollow laughter, impotence and misdirected energy, but is also tempered by the quirky humour and a certain engaging quality in the dwarves' antics.

Although it deals with the disintegration of a Welsh mining family as seen through the eyes of tis youngest member, the emphasis is on a positive sense of community highlighted by the physical isolation of the mining town. The strike is seen not as a unifying factor so much as a threat, comparable to malicious rumour-mongering in its corrosive effects on the community.

A civil war veteran's five year search for his niece, who has been taken by Indians, ranges across the American landscape- physical, emotional and mythical- in this epic Western. Gaps open between Wayne's heroic image and the pathology underlying his obsessive quest, gaps which ultimately close around the tragic mythology of the Westerner, an outsider impelled to walk away from the comforts and security of community.

During a weekend in Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry celebration of country music is running parallel with a presidential election campaign. The film is meant to be a mosaic of contemporary American life. It moves from a barrage of simultaneous moments in the lives of more than 20 different characters to the presentation of multiple perspectives in a single unifying event. Although containing 27 songs and 13 on-stage performances, the film's explicit cultural indictment runs very much against the grain of the American musical.

La Grande Illusion is often described as the greatest war film ever made. The title is an ironic reference to the illusion entertained by many that The Great War would be the last one. To quote film critic Jonahthan Rosenbaum, "The film doesn't have quite the demonic, polyphonic, and emotionally contradictory brilliance of Renoir's The Rules of the Game, made 2 years later, but it's still one of the key humanist expressions to be found in movies: sad, funny, exalting and glorious."

Set over two hours or so in the life of a young woman- a successful pop singer- who awaits a hospital report, fearing the worst. Her gradually sharpening perception of the world around her is presented subjectively but with convincing detail. One of the few films in which the duration of the fiction actually approximates actual clock time.

With 'Crime in the Streets', Don Siegel tackled a popular genre of the 1950's, the teen-delinquency drama. The story was originally filmed for television and re-made as a feature film. The premise is simple: a gang of disaffected youths is talked by their leader, Frankie (John Cassavetes in his second role), into murdering a man who has publicly humiliated one of them.

A petty criminal, upon his release from prison, gradually sinks back into a world of crime and betrayal. This may be the most personal of Fassbinder's early films, a darkly absurdist, languorously paced depiction of a world which draws on French and American noir and gangster films.

The story, a complex interplay between melodrama and history, is based upon the autobiography of Lale Andersen who became the Nazi-sponsored singer of 'Lili Marleen', the song adopted by both German and Allied servicemen during World War II.

Adapted from a published interview with a convicted murderer, this bleak morality tale about a hard-working bricklayer who will go to any lengths to buy the love he craves so desperately but doesn't believe he deserves it, which also reflects aspects of Fassbinder's own personal relationships.