A British television series originally broadcast on CBS (and rebroadcast on PBS) in America in 1971, The Six Wives of Henry VIII remains a painless way to learn something about royal history and its impact on the political and religious landscape of England. Keith Michell stars as King Henry VIII, who assumes the throne as a boy after the death of his older brother and inherits the latter's Spanish betrothed, Catherine of Aragon (Annette Crosbie), as well. Growing up and increasingly complicated in personality, with an ever-growing appetite for elusive happiness as well as power and food, Henry maneuvers (and is maneuvered by) forces around him to break from Rome and create the Church of England, in part to accommodate his wish for a divorce. Each story of the king's successive brides takes up an entire episode in the series. Dorothy Tutin plays the doomed Anne Boleyn, Anne Stallybrass is Henry's favorite, Jane Seymour, Elvi Hale is Anne of Cleves, Angela Pleasence is Catherine Howard, and Rosalie Crutchley plays last-in-line Catherine Parr. A very large and fine supporting cast adds intrigue and extra layers of tragedy to the proceedings, especially John Baskcomb as Cardinal Wolsey, Wolfe Morris as Thomas Cromwell, and Ralph Bates as Thomas Culpepper. Each 90-minute episode was crafted by a different writer, but the series holds together very well under Keith Michell's dazzling performance as the despicable if sympathetic Henry, whose emotional arc over many years and losses is something to see. -Tom Keogh.

PBS's Masterpiece Theatre began business in 1971 with the American premiere of an engrossing, 12-part BBC series, The First Churchills, inspired by Sir Winston Churchill's biographical writings about 17th-century ancestors John Churchill and Sarah Jennings. Besides being a painless way to learn a few things about the revolving-door monarchy of the House of Stuart, The First Churchills is written with a stately air though its story flows like a steady stream of fresh gossip. A viewer needn't feel guilty about being entertained by intrigues at the royal court while listening to screenwriter's Donald Wilson's elegant and uplifting dialogue, rich in civility and courtly asides. John Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and Susan Hampshire (lauded for her earlier performance in The Forsyte Saga, a British series that helped launch public television in America) play John and Sarah, who meet in the court of Charles II (James Villiers) and defy family and friends by marrying for love instead of family fortune. (Neither has any money. ) John, a military officer who built much of Charles's army and never lost a battle, and Susan, an aide and confidante to the Duchess of York, are trusted figures in the king's circle. But as with everyone around them, they are jostled by political and religious forces following the death of Charles, including anti-Catholic sentiments that drive the king's stubborn successor, James II (John Westbrook), to Ireland and see the latter replaced on the throne by William, Prince of Orange (Alan Rowe), and his vindictive wife (and James's daughter), Mary (Lisa Daniely). With a European war raging and British soldiers and resources mishandled by amateurs, a restless John is sidelined and even briefly arrested due to royal paranoia; meanwhile, Sarah's close friendship to the future Queen Anne (Margaret Tyzack) yields numerous dramas on its own. The First Churchills is really about a tumultuous period in English history which saw strains between Parliament, the citizenry, and the monarchy come to a head, several times over. The story of John and Sarah's survival and deep regard for one another offers a perfect, reassuring line to follow through all the epochal raucousness. [+]

Jumping on to the end-of-the-century bandwagon a little early, Paramount Pictures released 10 of their top films in one 10-pack, the Millennium Collection, in 1998. All the films are presented in their widescreen editions; one, Breakfast at Tiffany's, is offered in this format for the first time. The set includes 5 Best Picture Oscar winners and films that took home an additional 33 Academy Awards. All the tapes are available to buy individually. The pack, with a handsome mosaic of faces from the movies, also features collector gift cards (a movie version of baseball cards) and a commemorative booklet detailing the productions of all 10 films. The collection is oddly weighted toward the last 25 years, offering only one film from the 1950s and one from the 1960s. Your taste in current cinema will define the value of the set. Besides Tiffany's, one of Audrey Hepburn's finest films, the collection contains: The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, Grease with John Travolta, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, the funny, whale-saving Star Trek IV-The Voyage Home, Tom Cruise's hit Top Gun, the smash hit Ghost with Demi Moore, Mel Gibson's Celt fest Braveheart, and Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks. -Doug Thomas.

Lindsay Duncan's lean yet luminous face will draw you in to the story of The Rector's Wife. Anna Bouverie (Duncan, Rome) chafes at her limited life as a vicar's wife in a small English town. When her husband Peter (Jonathan Coy, from the Horatio Hornblower series) is passed over for a promotion and her daughter is bullied at school, Anna gets a job at a supermarket in another town-a small act of independence that sets off gossip, domestic fights, and worse. When Anna meets another man who seems to understand her frustrations, she stumbles into an affair. The Rector's Wife, in its broad outlines, combines a romance novel plot with feminist themes, but its real strength is the richness of the characters, both in the writing and the performances. Duncan's performance is wonderfully three-dimensional and seemingly background character keep popping out with vivid details (Prunella Scales, Fawlty Towers, and Pam Farris, Rosemary & Thyme, have great scenes). This four-episode mini-series is sort of a British version of An Unmarried Woman-less concerned with psychology and more attuned to the social pressures of a small town, but nonetheless an engaging portrait of a woman struggling towards independence. -Bret Fetzer Anna Bouverie is a vibrant woman who has spent 20 years scrimping and saving to raise a family and support her husband's parish work. When her husband is passed over for promotion, Anna takes a job at a supermarket in order to provide for her children's.

A television treasure from the 1990s, the Sarah, Plain and Tall series stoked audience hunger for a simpler, more neighborly America during the early 20th century, and it did so without being cloying or preachy. Based on the novel Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan, the first feature-originally aired in 1991 on CBS to an enormous audience of 50 million-starred Christopher Walken as Kansas farmer Jacob Witting, a widower with two children. Seeing his newspaper advertisement seeking a bride, Sarah Wheaton (Glenn Close), a Maine schoolteacher, heads out to the heartland for a trial run as wife and stepmother. There are difficulties: Jacob has set ideas about the role of a woman in his house and he isn't emotionally ready for a new beginning. Meanwhile, the kids are dubious about anyone stepping into their mom's old job. But the strong-willed Sarah soon ushers love, energy, and a sense of possibility into the gloomy Witting home, and the resulting bond within this new family proves durable. The bond is tested, however, in the 1993 sequel, Skylark, in which Sarah heads back to Maine with the others when dangerous weather threatens the farm. Finally, 1999's Winter's End brings Jack Palance into the fold as Jacob's estranged father, who comes to make amends during a harsh winter season under the shadow of World War I and the influenza epidemic. It's not hard to see why this Hallmark trilogy means so much to so many, evoking as it does a perhaps mythical period of innocence and most certainly underscoring values of faith, loyalty, and family ties. Throughout, Walken and Close are absolutely first-rate, their chemistry quite special. [+]

This first installment of Archives of War, a collection focusing on 20th-century warfare, uses as its centerpiece a British silent film shot in the 1920s-The Battle of Ypres, which was produced to resemble a World War I documentary. The rest is an eclectic mix of newsreels shot in Europe and Asia that show how the stage was being set for World War II. The material is presented in its original languages with no translations, but the footage itself is often fascinating. The second installment focuses on the leaders of the nations involved in World War II. In addition to Hitler and Mussolini propaganda clips, perhaps the most interesting material features Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose famed "date which will live in infamy" speech is shown in its entirety. Roosevelt also is seen delivering his devastatingly sarcastic speech lampooning Republicans, and Winston Churchill appears in a variety of newsreels. -Robert J. McNamara.

The second half of this massive miniseries covers events from the last two years of World War II with members of our fictitious family-the Henrys-scattered throughout the world. Pariah "Pug" Henry (Robert Mitchum) visits Russia and England as an advisor-and proposes to his much-younger lover, Pamela (Victoria Tennant)-before retuning to the Pacific theater to join his son Byron (Hart Bochner), a submariner, in battling the Japanese. Meanwhile, Byron's wife, Natalie (Jane Seymour), and her uncle (John Gielgud) continue their harrowing plight, starting in the "Paradise Ghetto" and leading to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This half-11. 5 hours-aired on ABC in May 1989, six months after the first half. Unfortunately there is no kinetic battle sequence like the first half's Midway clash to absorb the viewer. Director Dan Curtis relies more on newsreel footage (and the sometimes heavy-handedness of narrator William Woodson) to cover large events. To compensate, the filmmakers give inordinate screen time to the conspiracy to kill Hitler (Steven Berkoff) by his inner circle. Like in Herman Wouk's novel, Hitler's decision to eliminate the Jews is the backbone of the entire series and the film's steely reenactments of these events-an amazing achievement for network television-is quite harrowing. Authenticity (filming at Auschwitz) plus ace performances (Seymour has been rarely better, Gielgud is outstanding) combine for a powerful statement, although the whole production is sometimes weighed down by the soap-opera elements of the Henrys' lives. [+]

P. D. James's Headstrong heroine Cordelia Gray (Helen Baxendale, Friends) returns as she plunges once more into the murky world of crime. Cordelia has resolved to make her mark on the ramshackle detective agency she inherited from her boss, and develop her career as a private detective. But there's an unexpected development-she finds herself pregnant. Still she is determined that the prospect of motherhood will not affect her ambitions. The fiercely independent young detective matched wits with a pair of murderous thugs and snares an unlikely killer with a connection to Scotland Yard, proof to one and all that her profession is hardly an unsuitable job for a woman or a mother.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace towers over most novels. It isn't merely the length that impresses-over 1,200 pages-but the number of characters. This BBC/Time-Life serial spans the Napoleonic Wars (1805-20) and incorporates 52 principals and 110 supporting players (a 44-page booklet proves indispensable with identification). Chief among them is Pierre (a bespectacled Anthony Hopkins), an illegitimate idler who becomes Count Bezuhov upon his father's death. Pierre admires Napoleon (David Swift), and chooses not to fight. Cousins Nikolai Rostov (Sylvester Morand) and Andrei Bolkonsky (Alan Dobie) harbor no such reservations. The Yugoslavia-filmed battle sequences convince with their cavalcade of extras, but the drawing-room scenes serve as the heart of the series. (The soft exteriors were shot on film; the crisp interiors on video. ) In these sequences, the other Rostovs, Bolkonskys, and Bezuhovs-notably Nikolai's impetuous sister, Natasha (Morag Hood)-emerge as complex individuals. Occasional inner monologues distinguish them further. [+]

By now the revisionist Western chronicling the horrors suffered by the American Indian has become a genre as codified as the old Westerns ever were. And, regrettably, the new genre is just as susceptible to oversimplification and facile audience manipulation. This Canadian miniseries, based on a true story, manages to avoid all pitfalls, however, filling out its three-hour running time not with tirades faced toward the choir or half-baked mysticism, but with generous and sympathetic portraits of people caught up in the waves of history-inevitably to their peril. When Canadian officials insist that Cree chief Big Bear (Gordon Tootoosis, in a performance of nobility but also with enough of an old man's confusion about a changing world to avoid cardboard saintliness) sign a treaty and lead his people off the buffalo-rich land where they have lived, he refuses to sacrifice his tribe's independence. But the coming of the soldiers is a fait accompli-in a nice touch the whites' halting attempts at Cree are identical to the ungrammatical "Injun" speech of movies past-and the arrogance and casual cruelty of the reservation agents spur younger members of the tribe to declare war. Big Bear is philosophical about what he sees as an unwise move, while his wife Running Second (the formidable Tantoo Cardinal) spitefully mocks the "brave young men" whose actions have forced them on the run. Only one of many scenes testifying to the expansive humanity director Gil Cardinal brings to this film. -Bruce Reid.