Writer-director Alan Parker's feature debut Bugsy Malone is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls, and gang warfare, with references to everything from Some Like It Hot to The Godfather. Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing "spluge guns" sidestep any real violence and the movie climaxes cheerfully with the biggest custard pie fight this side of Casino Royale (1967). Unfortunately for a musical, Paul Williams's score-part honky-tonk jazz homage, part 1970s Elton John-style pop-lets the side down with a lack of memorable tunes. Nevertheless, Parker's direction is spot on and the look of the film is superb, a fantasy movie-movie existing in the same parallel reality as The Cotton Club and Chicago. A rare British love letter to classic American cinema, Bugsy Malone remains a true original; in Parker's words "the work of a madman" and one of the strangest yet most stylish children's films ever made. -Gary S. Dalkin.

In swinging '70s London, Jason (Robin Askwith), a Brian Jones doppelgänger, grows weary of the rock scene and decides it's time for a vacation. He responds to a flyer for a "Hairy Holiday" and meets up with Judy (Vanessa Shaw) on the way, but they soon find that their resort is actually a Hippie-to-Zombie Conversion Center, complete with crazed researcher (Michael Gough), evil midget, and lobotomized longhairs. The doctor harvests human heads with a retractable blade attached to his limousine and runs his zombies via remote control. A monster who appears to be made of Silly Putty stalks the grounds and claims an unlucky victim or two, until the midget and heroes plan their escape from the goonatorium. Gough claims some great chewable dialogue (Peter Cushing must have been busy), the midget has a great pathos-laden death scene, and a toxic waste site is also crammed into the overstuffed plot. It's not quite funny enough to be a horror comedy, but there's enough gore to give it the feel of a later-era Hammer film. Horror Hospital breathes some new life into the mad-doctor-and-zombification-facility plot and moves fast enough to keep things interesting, at least. If you don't go into it expecting stupendous effects or deep narrative, it's a fun ride. -Jerry Renshaw.

Furious, violently bombastic, terribly unsettling, Ken Russell's 1970 biography of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) is a portrait of artistic brilliance beset by the Russian composer's mounting guilt over, well, everything: his homosexuality, his marriage to the increasingly miserable and mad Nina (Glenda Jackson), his hidden attraction to Count Anton Chiluvsky (Christopher Gable), and his suggestively incestuous relations with a sister while growing up. Consumed by his art to the point of explosiveness, Tchaikovsky has increasing difficulty coping with his life, finding some solace in the distant love proffered by his rich patroness (who refuses to meet him but communicates her feelings through letters). Russell intends the film to be a bumpy and harsh ride that descends into grotesque tragedy as Nina is confined to a monstrous asylum and Tchaikovsky becomes ill. Still, there are a few of the usual pop-surreal sequences of which the director is so fond, most memorably a loony visual accompaniment for the 1812 Overture. -Tom Keogh.

Franc Roddam's terrifically energetic movie, set to music from the Who's Quadrophenia, is-at the very least, the best film ever based on a rock album (and, yes, that includes, Tommy, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and Jesus Christ Superstar). Actually, this tale of the battle between two early '60s youth subcultures-Mods and Rockers-in the seaside teenage wasteland of Brighton, England, isn't so much a cinematic "version" of the Who's 1979 double-record rock opera as it is a story based on the sequence of songs on the album. Quadrophenia is about that crucial time in teenhood when the lion's share of your sense of identity is tied up in the music you listen to, the clothes you wear, and the groups you hang out with. Jimmy (Phil Daniels) identifies himself with the sharp-dressing, scooter-riding Mods, who listen to American soul and British pop-rock (The Who themselves were once rather Mod). The Rockers, on the other hand, are leather-jacketed, black-booted, motorcycle-riding tough guys who listen primarily to classic American rock & roll. The film captures this minor pop-culture revolution perfectly. Look for Sting as a club-hopping slickster, who's shameful secret is that he's a hotel bellboy by day. -Jim Emerson.

This 1982, 180-minute television remake of the original MGM feature, produced 30 years before, is the rare makeover of a classic that works quite well under its own steam. Anthony Andrews plays the disinherited knight who returns from the Third Crusades and is determined to raise the ransom to free a kidnapped King Richard (Julian Glover). With his bid rebuffed by his estranged father (Michael Hordern), and the affection of the latter's ward, Rowena (Lysette Anthony), compromised, Ivanhoe looks toward the generosity of the beautiful Rebecca (Olivia Hussey)-whose father (James Mason) he rescued from anti-Semitic Normans-for help. But a plot by faithless friends to discredit Ivanhoe, and his subsequent partnership with Robin Hood (David Robb) to save the day, keep this story from slowing down even for a minute. Originally a miniseries, this production has enough breadth to provide lots of breathing room for the script and cast to mine all the drama they can from Sir Walter Scott's novel. This is also a great-looking movie, with wall-to-wall pageantry, superb costumes-the works. -Tom Keogh.

The second of the three Merchant/Ivory films adapting E. M. Forster novels (between A Room with a View and Howard's End), Maurice deals with a theme few period pieces dare mention-a young man's struggle with his homosexuality. It's not just a gay coming-of-age story, however. The hero wrestles with British class society as much as his personal and sexual identity. The film opens on a stormy, windswept beach, as an older man awkwardly instructs young, fatherless Maurice Hall (James Wilby) in the "sacred mysteries" of sex. The same turbulent, wordless struggle with passion lasts throughout this slowly evolving, beautifully filmed story. Novelist E. M. Forster's brainy, British melodrama hinges on choice and compulsion, as the pensive hero falls for two completely different men. [+]

Adaptation of Robert Bolt's play chronicling Sir Thomas More's struggles with corrupt King Henry VIII.

A landmark title in the evolution of CinemaScope, Bhowani Junction is a fascinating but exasperating instance of a provocative film running head-on into studio interference and censorship. This would be the next-to-last project in George Cukor's long history as an MGM director, and despite its rejection at the time, admirers regard it as one of his most personal achievements. What's irreducibly admirable is Cukor's sensuous embrace of India as both the film's location and its "major character. " With F. A. Young as cinematographer (six years before Young shot David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia), this director chiefly associated with intimate settings and soundstage productions created rich, gold-brown canvases surging powerfully with vast crowds and unrest. Ava Gardner plays a half-British, half-Indian woman trying to find an identity for herself at that moment in 1947 when Great Britain was preparing to withdraw from the country it had ruled for two centuries. Her dilemma is focused through her relationships with several men: a fellow half-caste (Bill Travers) who's been her longtime lover, a slimy British junior officer (Lionel Jeffries), a pure-blood Indian aspiring to make her his bride (Francis Matthews), and the senior British officer (Stewart Granger) whose fierce ambivalence must inevitably mutate into passionate love. If it's sensuousness you're after, you can do a lot worse than having the luscious Gardner at the center of your movie, and the actress responded beautifully to both the exotic setting and Cukor's direction. Alas, Granger was mostly a stick (Cukor wanted Trevor Howard), and the script is awful-structurally incoherent and endlessly recycling bald-faced declarations of the divided-ethnicity theme. [+]

Paderewski, Tempest, Portman. (1937). 87m. English. B&W.

Reminiscent of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, this intriguing gothic romance marked the directorial debut of Terence Young (From Russia with Love; Dr. No; Mayerling, 1968). Corridor of Mirrors begins in post-World War I Italy, where an artist becomes obsessed with a woman in a Renaissance-era painting. Imagining himself to be the reincarnation of her lover, the wealthy eccentric returns to London to make over his mansion in 16th-century Venetian fashion and search for his lady's modern counterpart. Impressed by his charms, a young British beauty is eager to play the part, even dress in period costume. The fantasy unravels, however, as the darkness of the artist's vision is revealed. Like Cocteau before him, Young treats viewers to a dream world created with lavish sets, exquisite cinematography, and the mesmerizing music of Georges Auric.

This first half of the 1967 original, 26-episode British television series (which aired on PBS two years later and inspired the creation of Masterpiece Theatre) is both literary soap opera and sprawling, Dickensian tale of love, money, and destiny fatefully intertwined. Set in the late Victorian era, the early chapters of The Forsyte Saga (based on several works by John Galsworthy) merrily buzz with a large and hopelessly confusing roster of Forsyte kin, most creaking with age and cackling ridiculously over family gossip. As these elders pass on, a core cast including Eric Porter as Soames, an acquisitive "man of property," Nyree Dawn Porter as the ethereal Irene, and Kenneth More as Jolyon-the family's artistic black sheep-becomes our key players, wrestling with their definitions of "value" (i. e. , that which can be measured versus that which can't), procreating, and stumbling in the dark for happiness. -Tom Keogh The miniseries that started in all! In 1969, a internationally-acclaimed BBC show began airing on the fledgling public broadcasting network. The Forsyte Saga, in telling the remarkable story of a nouveau riche English family, introduced America to a new kind of TV. Millions of Americans devoted the next half-year of their lives to following the frank treatment of all sins, foibles and peccadillos of the Forsytes and their circle. The series was so popular that Masterpiece Theatre was created to meet the new demand for great literary adaptations. With a cast of 150, 2000 separate costumes and over 100 sets, this sprawling yet intimate saga continues to move, provoke and entrance viewers today. [+]

Terry George, the cowriter of In the Name of the Father, wrote and directed this 1996 drama based on actual events from 1981, when Irish Republican Army prisoners in Belfast's Maze Prison staged a hunger strike to protest against British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's political policies. Led by IRA prisoner Bobby Sands, the hunger strike eventually lead to the deaths of 10 prisoners, who had refused to wear prison uniforms to emphasize their identity as political (and not criminal) prisoners. But this fictionalized account is not about the hunger strikers as much as the moral dilemma faced by two of the strikers' mothers, played by Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan in an emotional drama that gets right to the heart of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. While Annie (Flanagan) understands her son's political motivations and supports his readiness to die, Kathleen (Mirren) is a pacifist who cannot comprehend how any mother could sacrifice her own son to a political principle. The women become friends despite their opposing views, and desperately hope for a compromise in Irish-British negotiations while the hunger strikers continue to wither away. By keeping the Northern Irish conflict on such a purely personal level, Some Mother's Son both clarifies and complicates the difficult issues involved, making clear arguments for both mothers' actions in the context of a milestone event in Northern Ireland's history. The film doesn't pretend to hide its anti-British position, but the cause of death on both sides is deeply acknowledged. Through Helen Mirren's richly layered performance, Some Mother's Son asks if any belief is truly worth dying for, and poses the question on powerfully personal terms. -Jeff Shannon.