Ronald Harwood

Leeds born filmmaker David Nicholas Wilkinson's thirty three year quest to prove that the worlds film industry started in Leeds, Yorkshire, England in 1888.

Commemorating the centennial of Mercer's birth, this documentary is part biography, part archive, and part recontextualization, taking Mercer's tunes and putting them in the hands of modern singers like Jamie Cullum and Dr. John to show they are still relevant today. Host Clint Eastwood also interviews artists who collaborated with Mercer or performed his songs, including composer John Williams, Blake Edwards, Andre Previn, Tony Bennett, and Julie Andrews.

Program focuses on the lasting appeal and cinematic brilliance of The Ladykillers. Included in it are clips from interviews with broadcaster and author Stuart Maconie, film editor Catherine Shoard, actor and writer Reece Shearsmith, and author Ronald Harwood, amongst others.

Mackendrick on Film is an educational project constructed around the film teachings of legendary pedagogue Alexander Mackendrick. Taking as its starting point Mackendrick's body of written work contained in his book On Film-making: An introduction to the craft of the director, Mackendrick on Film is a structured 'illustrated lecture' that features never-before-seen footage of Mackendrick at work in the classrooms and studios of the California Institute of the Arts, new interviews with former students and colleagues, extracts from archived interviews with Mackendrick about his career as a teacher of cinema, rare photos, and a selection of his student handouts, storyboards and sketches.

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French fashion bible Elle magazine, has a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem results in locked-in syndrome, with which he is almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking an eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of expression left to him.

Cissy, Reggie, and Wilf are in a home for retired musicians. Every year, there is a concert to celebrate Composer Giuseppe Verdi's birthday and they take part. Jean, who used to be married to Reggie, arrives at the home and disrupts their equilibrium. She still acts like a diva, but she refuses to sing. Still, the show must go on, and it does.

In Colombia just after the Great War, an old man falls from a ladder; dying, he professes great love for his wife. After the funeral, a man calls on the widow - she dismisses him angrily. Flash back more than 50 years to the day Florentino Ariza, a telegraph boy, falls in love with Fermina Daza, the daughter of a mule trader.

An orphan endures a harsh life in a workhouse before fleeing to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the criminal Fagin, and eventually finds a better life, exposing the cruelties of poverty and child labor in Victorian England.

In Victorian England, graverobbers supply a wealthy doctor with bodies to research anatomy on, but greed causes them to seek an easier means of getting the job done.

Andrew Crocker-Harris is an embittered and disliked teacher of Greek and Latin at a British prep school. After nearly 20 years of service, he is being forced to retire for 'health reasons', and perhaps may not even be given a pension. The boys regard him as a Hitler, with some justification. His unfaithful wife Laura tries to hurt him in any way she can. Andrew must come to terms with his failed life and at least regain his own self-esteem.

An ambitious Judge and an exacting Colonel re-open the sixty-year-old case of Pierre Brossard, an escaped Nazi collaborator accused of murdering seven Jews. Now an old man living a sheltered life within the Catholic Church, Brossard is also being trailed by mysterious hit men, determined to kill him before he's arrested.

One fateful night in a small English regional theatre during World War II a troupe of touring actors stage a production of Shakespeares King Lear. Bombs are falling, sirens are wailing, the curtain is up in an hour but the actor/manager Sir who is playing Lear is nowhere to be seen. His dresser Norman must scramble to keep the production alive but will Sir turn up in time and if he does will he be able to perform that night? The Dresser is a wickedly funny and deeply moving story of friendship and loyalty as Sir reflects on his lifelong accomplishments and seeks to reconcile his turbulent friendships with those in his employ before the final curtain.

Julia Lambert is a true diva: beautiful, talented, weathly and famous. She has it all - including a devoted husband who has mastermined her brilliant career - but after years of shining in the spotlight she begins to suffer from a severe case of boredom and longs for something new and exciting to put the twinkle back in her eye. Julia finds exactly what she's looking for in a handsome young American fan, but it isn't long before the novelty fling adds a few more sparks than she was hoping for. Fortuately for her, this surprise twist in the plot will thrust her back into the greatest role of her life.

Czechoslovakia, 1942. Three brave Czech patriots risk everything to rid their country of its brutal Nazi leader, SS-General Reinhard Heydrich.

One of the most spectacular and renowned conductors of the 1930s, Wilhelm Furtwangler's reputation rivaled that of Toscanini's. After the war, he was investigated as part of the Allies' de-Nazification programme. In the bombed-out Berlin of the immediate post-war period, the Allies slowly bring law and order to bear on an occupied Germany. An American major is given the Furtwangler file, and is told to find everything he can and to prosecute the man ruthlessly. Tough and hard-nosed, Major Steve Arnold sets out to investigate a world of which he knows nothing.

In 1870, a Jamaican colonial family sends its children to Britain for proper schooling, but their ship is taken over by pirates, who become fond of the kids.

In a touring Shakespearean theater group, a backstage hand - the dresser - is devoted to the brilliant but tyrannical head of the company. He struggles to support the deteriorating star as the company struggles to carry on during the London Blitz. The pathos of his backstage efforts rival the pathos in the story of Lear and the Fool that is being presented on-stage, as the situation comes to a crisis.

In a touring Shakespearean theater group, a backstage hand - the dresser - is devoted to the brilliant but tyrannical head of the company. He struggles to support the deteriorating star as the company struggles to carry on during the London Blitz. The pathos of his backstage efforts rival the pathos in the story of Lear and the Fool that is being presented on-stage, as the situation comes to a crisis.

A boy who cries wolf witnesses a political assassination on the island of Malta. But will anyone other than his granddad believe him?

A South-African preacher goes to search for his wayward son who has committed a crime in the big city.

Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa's first Black President, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in negotiating a bloodless revolution in that country.

A military mission is interrupted when a British soldier claims that God had appeared to him in a transcendental vision.

An Italian gentleman and a doctor's wife plot to break up their spouses' tryst in Paris.

Fly-on-the-wall treatment of an ordinary day in the life of a prisoner in Stalin's Gulag. Closely adapted from Solzhenitsyn's classic novel based on his own experiences. Shot entirely on location in northern Norway

Mr. Figg, the barber, is fond of telling customers about his family, but he hasn’t really got one – he’s a bachelor quite alone in the world. But that may change.

Swinging playboy Grand Duke Nicholas Goduno, a direct descendent of the Romanov family who were overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917, learns that his family's crown jewels will be exhibited at a London museum and plots to steal them. To this end, he gathers a crew of beautiful but dangerous women, led by Bridget Rafferty, to assist in his plot against Popov, the Soviet functionary in charge of the exhibit.