Movies: John Shrapnel

A radical cinematic investigation into the myth of Hamlet, the avenging prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare's creature; his origins and his unending influence on many diverse cultures....

Based on the medieval legend of Pope Joan, who was made Pope for a brief period around 855 A.D. The movie presents her existence as fact, though it is questionable that Pope Joan really did exist, and portrays her relationships with other notables of...

The story of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his life and career during the rule of Stalin....

Three philosophy professors travel to Prague for a conference. One of them, Anderson, is forced to rethink his ideas on ethics when a former student is arrested by the Czech authorities for writing about individualist approaches to morality....

Former Irish Republican Army member Niall Hennessy lives in Belfast, Ireland, with his wife and daughter amid the ongoing Irish-British conflict. Though he still knows people in the IRA, including fugitive leader Tobin, Niall has given up his violent...

In 1981, Gerd Heidemann, a war correspondent and reporter with the German magazine Stern, makes what he believes is the literary and historical scoop of the century: the personal diaries of Adolf Hitler. Over the next two years, Heidemann and the sen...

Lieutenant Hornblower and his shipmates are sent to accompany a doomed royalist invasion of revolutionary France....

Examination of the events that led to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland....

Timon loves to give parties and objects to friends, but when he cannot pay his creditors, his "friends" refuse to help him, and he becomes a misanthropic hermit....

Central Europe, early 16th century: two childhood friends, Martin & Georg, find themselves on rival sides of a religious war with both of them struggling to do the right thing....

A young ambitious claims assessor investigates a multi million dollar marine insurance fraud....

Retired British solider Richard Hannay is recruited by British intelligence in an attempt to recover three hostages taken prisoner by a shadowy criminal organisation...

In a final battle for the control of Thebes, Oedipus's two sons kill each other. Creon issues an order that no one is to bury Polynices upon pain of death. But Antigone is determined that her brother's body will have the proper rites of burial....

The tumultuous events surrounding the sub-continent's partition in 1947 into India and Pakistan are re-imagined in Ken McMullen's complex and visually striking film. A lunatic asylum in the city of Lahore becomes a mirror image of events in the outs...

Reinhard Heydrich was considered the most dangerous man in Nazi Germany after Hitler himself. The plot to kill him masterminded in England and carried through to finality in Prague in 1942, is told in this gripping dramatised documentary special. Fea...

A tale of power, passion and obsession set in a politically torn Eastern European country....

Ralph decides to give his sister Clare a night on the town to cheer her up. They visit a burger bar and a disco in a modern precinct, and Clare gets slightly drunk. At the end of the evening, they both end up at Clare's flat....

King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and t...

He is a respectable pillar of London society who yearns for an idyllic existence away from the noise and the smoke. She feels hemmed in by the confines of an isolated fishing village and dreams of the bright lights, and even brighter people, of the g...

From its sell-out run at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre comes a film version of this unique and critically acclaimed production of Hamlet with BAFTA-nominee Maxine Peake in the title role. This ground-breaking stage production, directed by Sarah...