Cinema Essentials

Renowned Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is called in by a London insurance company when wealthy industrialist Sir Horace Blatt (Colin Blakely) attempts to have a cheap piece of costume jewellery insured for £50,000. Puzzled by this very wealthy man attempting to perpetrate such an obvious fraud, Poirot is sent to meet him on his yacht in the south of France. When the two men meet, Sir Horace tells Poirot that the jewel was a gift to a mistress, former actress Arlena Marshall (Diana Rigg), who has obviously had the original jewellery replaced with a fake. Poirot heads to an exclusive hotel on a small island in the Adriatic to meet Arlena and to investigate. While there he encounters an assortment of wealthy guests, including Arlena and her husband Kenneth (Denis Quilley), her lover Patrick Redfern (Nicholas Clay) and her former associate Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith), who now runs the hotel. Also present are waspish gossip columnist Rex Brewster (Roddy McDowall), Re

Ah, the 1980s. It's long enough ago now that we can all get nostalgic about the decade, and while the '80s produced a lot of dross, there were some great films in there too. Here are 25 famous films from the 1980s. How many can you name?

Of all the heroic figures to have been created by World War II, and to be immortalised by a Hollywood biopic, Erwin Rommel has to be one of the most unlikely. Rommel was a German general who fought the Allies in Europe and North Africa and loyally served Hitler, at least until it became clear that Germany was losing the war. But his reputation in the North African campaign, where he was untainted by allegations of serious war crimes, and his alleged involvement in the July Plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, helped to turn him into an acceptable figure of non-Nazi German soldiery in the years after World War II. Like the American General George Patton and Britain's Bernard Montgomery, Rommel's antagonist in the desert, Rommel was also an adept self-promoter, something that helped to make him the best known German general of the war. His skill as a military commander was demonstrated in North Africa, where he fought against the British. He earned the enduring respect of his