Cinema Essentials

Produced to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War, They Shall Not Grow Old is a collaboration between Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and Britain's Imperial War Museum.

Commissioned by the museum and by WWI commemoration project 14-18 Now, Jackson was given access to the Imperial War Museum's archive of WWI footage, which he used to build a picture of the experiences of ordinary soldiers on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. The documentary images are combined with sound clips from interviews with 120 First World War veterans, many of them conducted in the 1960s for the BBC documentary series The Great War (1964).

Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) was the star reporter on The Morning Post, the newspaper edited by her former husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant). Burns and Hildy are now divorced and Hildy is marrying again, and this time she's giving up her career as a reporter as well. Hildy intends to settle down to a life of domesticity with Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), a solid, dependable type, who works in insurance and lives with his mother in Albany in upstate New York.

But the scheming Walter Burns doesn't want to lose his best reporter and he isn't going to let a little thing like Hildy's divorce, remarriage and retirement from the newspaper game get in his way. The city's newspapers are covering a big story, a mixed up guy, Earl Williams (John Qualen), who lost his job, lost his mind (maybe) and killed a cop. To get Hildy back on the team, Burns emotionally blackmails her into covering the story and writing a sympathetic interview that could help Williams get committ…

When Jack (Stephen Moyer) goes missing just before his wedding to Kirsty (Colette Brown), his best friend, police detective Michael Colefield (Jack Davenport), sets out to track him down and find out why he has disappeared. When he finally finds him, Jack tells him that he is in hiding because he is being hunted by an undercover government “death squad” who are out to kill him. But what kind of government organisation would be trying to murder him, and why?

Colefield gradually learns the truth, that Jack has been turned into a vampire, and he is drawn into a secret world of modern day vampires and the shadowy government organisation trying to defeat them. Eventually he is slightly reluctantly recruited into the team of vampire hunters, led by a priest, Pearse Harman (Philip Quast), and assisted by a haematologist Dr Angela March (Susannah Harker) and an ex-soldier, Vaughan Rice (Idris Elba). The team investigate a series of incidents that may or may not be related to vampires. In the…

Madeleine is based on a true story, a notorious murder trial from 19th Century Scotland. Madeleine Smith (Ann Todd) is a young woman living with her well-to-do family, including her stern father (Leslie Banks), in Victorian Glasgow in the 1850s. Her family has hopes for her to marry soon and one suitor, William Minnoch (Norman Wooland), seems ideal. There's only one problem; unbeknown to her family, Madeleine is already carrying out an illicit affair with a down-at-heel Frenchman, Emile (Ivan Desny).

The Last of the Mohicans is an epic adventure story set in the North American Colonies during the Seven Years War. Two Englishwomen, Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe) and her sister Alice (Jodhi May), are being escorted by British soldiers to Fort William Henry, a British fort commanded by their father, Colonel Munro (Maurice Roëves). But their native guide is the treacherous Magua (Wes Studi), who is secretly loyal to the Huron tribe and their French allies.

Wing Commander Roy Grant (Cliff Robertson) is the commander of 633 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, flying de Havilland Mosquitoes on raids against the German forces in occupied Europe during WWII.

In the run up to D-Day in 1944, 633 Squadron is given a highly dangerous mission to bomb a German rocket fuel factory in Norway. Just to complicate things, their target is not the factory itself but a rock face overhanging it that will collapse onto the factory and destroy it. To do that they need to fly at extremely low level along the length of a Norwegian fjord and under the guns of the German defenders.

To increase their chances slightly, the Norwegian resistance, led by Lieutenant Erik Bergman (George Chakiris), will attack the German anti-aircraft guns along the fjord just before the attack takes place.

Grant isn't that enthusiastic about the plan, but while the squadron trains for the mission, he at least has the distractions of Bergman's attractive sister Hilde (Maria Persc…