Helen Mirren stars in this drama about the relationship between the Queen and Tony Blair in the wake of Princess Diana’s death.

Stephen Frear’s feature-length docudrama traces the twists and turns of the week following Diana’s death, in which the aging Monarch (Mirren) comes to realise that “one needs to modernise”, while her young Prime Minister (Sheen) decides that he is not after all for revolution.

The Queen really comes into its own with its immaculate performances, its beautiful photography and its seamless blending of real and reconstructed footage.

The Queen won a BAFTA Award for Best Film and Helen Mirren an Oscar Award for Best Actress.

One reviewer called this “a chick flick for guys”, presumably because it’s an emotionally uplifting tear jerker that just happens to be about one man and his motorcycle! This is a film based on the true story of an elderly and eccentric New Zealander, Burt Munro, played to great acclaim here by Anthony Hopkins. Burt builds an old 1920’s era motorcycle (the ‘Indian’ of the title) in his garden shed and then embarks on a journey to Utah in the 1960s with a dream of breaking the world land speed record. By all accounts an inspirational, feel-good movie with universal appeal.

Set in 1940s Spain against the postwar repression of Franco’s Spain, a fairy tale that centres on Ofelia, a lonely and dreamy child living with her pregnant mother and adoptive father, who is a military officer tasked with ‘ridding the area’ of rebels. In her loneliness, Ofelia creates a world filled with fantastical creatures and secret destinies. With Fascism at its height, Ofelia must come to terms with her world through a fable of her own creation.

An all-time classic film directed in 1938 by Alfred Hitchcock. Set and made as the Second World War was approaching it stars Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave who become entangled in a mystery aboard a train as they return to Britain after a skiing holiday in the Alps.

A Miss Froy disappears on the train. The intrigue which follows concerns who the missing lady is, what secret she holds and why she has disappeared.

Hitchcock uses his mastery of the suspense genre to lead the viewer through scene after scene, as the suspense builds and the true explanation of Miss Froy’s disappearance is revealed, as, all the time, the train conveys the British passengers closer to home.

Dark comedy following a dysfunctional family crossing America so that their sevenyear-old can compete in a beauty pageant Little Miss Sunshine is a quirky little film that is almost impossible to categorise. Not quite drama, not out-and-out comedy, this charming and unusually understated film manages to squeeze more honesty and understanding into an hour-and-a-half than you’ll get from a whole course of therapy.

While the comedy is most certainly black, this is a remarkably uplifting, endearing and moving film. A treat.

Raimunda lives in Madrid with her daughter Paula and her husband Paco, who is always drunk. Her sister, Sole, is separated and works clandestinely as a hairstylist for women. The two sisters lost their parents in a fire in La Mancha, their birth village, years ago. Their aunt, Paula still lives in the village and continues to speak about her sister Irene, mother of the two sisters, as if she were still alive. When the old aunt dies the situation changes and the past returns (volver) in a twist of mystery and suspense.

Humour and heartstring pulling hit the mark as do most of the cast, not least Penelope Cruz. It’s the perfect blend of pride and vulnerability, spirit and sadness that really makes her performance stand out.

A Scottish doctor on a Ugandan medical mission becomes irreversibly entangled with one of the world’s most barbaric figures: Idi Amin. Impressed by Dr. Garrigan’s brazen attitude in a moment of crisis, the newly self appointed Ugandan President Amin hand picks him as his personal physician and closest confidante. Though Garrigan is at first flattered and fascinated by his new position, he soon awakens to Amin’s savagery–and his own complicity in it. Horror and betrayal ensue as Garrigan tries to right his wrongs and escape Uganda alive.

Best Foreign Language Film at the ‘07 Oscars, plus many other awards. Set in East Berlin just a few years before the Wall came down, this is a compelling political thriller that centres on a talented but disillusioned Stasi secret policeman as he investigates a celebrated writer and his actress wife. But when he discovers the real reason he has been ordered to keep them under surveillance he is forced to choose between his loyalty to the state and his own conscience. Which will he betray? Von Donnersmarck’s directorial debut establishes a brooding atmosphere of suspicion and fear.

In this sharp psychological thriller, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett give fierce, memorable performances as two schoolteachers locked in a battle of wits.

It is the story of Barbara Covett (Dench), a hard-nosed spinster schoolteacher, and her poisonous friendship with fellow teacher Sheba Hart (Blanchett). Barbara’s lonely life is shaken up by Sheba’s overtures of friendship, but it becomes increasingly clear that her take on the friendship is uncomfortably intense, if not borderline delusional. Things reach a fever pitch when Barbara happens upon Sheba dallying in the art room with a 15-year-old student, and uses the indiscretion to draw Sheba closer to her, and put her in her debt. But when Barbara’s demands on Sheba become too high, things soon unravel, setting off a chain of events that will leave viewers chewing their nails to the quick, but unable to tear their eyes away.

Cabaret brings 1931 Berlin to life inside and outside the Kit Kat Klub. There, starry eyed American Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and an impish emcee (Joel Grey) sound the call for decadent fun, while in the street the Nazi party is beginning to grow into a brutal political force. Into this heady world arrives British language teacher Brian Roberts who falls for Sally’s charm and soon, the two of them find themselves embroiled in the turmoil and decadence of the era.