Paul Newman gives one of the defining performances of his career and cemented his place as a beautiful, rebel screen icon playing the stubbornly tough and independent title character in Cool Hand Luke. And before he became familiar as a sidekick in 1970s' disaster movies (Earthquake and the Airport movies), George Kennedy won an Oscar for playing Dragline, the brutal chain-gang boss who tries to beat loner Luke's cool out of him. It's a classic rebel-against-the-repressive-institution story in the line of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or The Shawshank Redemption. Certain moments have become classics-particularly the hardboiled egg-eating contest and the immortal line (drooled by Strother Martin, as a sadistic redneck prison officer): "What we have here is a failure to communicate". And don't forget, Luke is also the source of the oft-quoted driving ditty: "I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus, right here on the dashboard of my car. " -Jim Emerson.

A story of a back-street boy, who, unwanted and unloved, rejected by society, his teachers and finally his adopted family, had one burning ambition: To become someone. There was Claudia to help. A first experience in the joy of young love. Diego proves himself a swimmer. Against all the odds he becomes the championship hope of the very people who rejected him. Last Feelings is one boy's dream of happiness that turns to tragedy. He had so much to live for but so little time to live it.

Samurai Banners is very much Toshiro Mifune's film. It was made for his production company, and he dominates every scene as the wily, limping ex-ronin (masterless samurai) Yamamoto, chief adviser to the warlord Shingen Takeda. Takeda is vain and none too bright, and Yamamoto acts as the power behind the throne, working through his overlord to achieve his eventual goal of national unity. The action of the film is set in the mid-16th century, very precisely dated by intertitles to the period from 1543 to 1561 when Japan, torn apart by the ambitions of rival warlords, was gradually being unified under a single rule that would become the Shogunate. Many Japanese directors (notably Mizoguchi and Kurosawa) have been attracted by this cruel, turbulent era. Hiroshi Inagaki, a reliable workhorse director who specialised in period action movies, avoids any hint of social criticism or modern political parallels, and instead exploits the resources of colour and widescreen to stage his story like a pageant, full of swirling battle scenes and grand romantic gestures. Samurai Banners makes for stirring spectacle; the historical background, though complex, is made clear even for non-Japanese viewers, and Mifune, lurching saturninely around with more than a hint of Olivier's Richard III, is as charismatic and unfailingly watchable as ever. -Philip Kemp.

Starring Brigitte Bardot, then at the height of her fame, and Michel Piccoli as a married couple tearing the last strips off a failing marriage, Le Mépris is both one of Jean-Luc Godard's most accessible films and perhaps his most excoriating and emotionally raw. Godard and his regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard (lensman for most of the greatest films of the New Wave) splashed out the budget for this international co-production on Bardot's salary and gorgeous CinemaScope photography to capture the Italian setting's intense beauty, bright as a knife. The nominal story concerns the film production of an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, on which Piccoli is the scriptwriter, much to the disgust of his wife Camille (Bardot) who preferred life when he merely wrote novels. Hired by Jack Palance's swaggering American producer to adapt the Greek epic for a film to be directed by the august Fritz Lang (director of M, here playing himself), Paul inadvertently sets in motion the elements which will unravel his marriage, earning his wife's contempt (the closest translation of the French word "mépris"). Soon, the tenderness of the film's opening sequence-wherein they loll naked on a bed as she coquettishly solicits his approval of each of her body parts-gives way to harrowing bickering, the meat of film's central 35-minute scene which will induce pained winces in anyone who has ever been through a bitter split-up. If that sounds harrowing, be reassured that Le Mépris is not without its lighter moments and joys: Godard's trademarked musings on the nature of cinema, Bardot looking exquisitely chic in a selection of soigné little outfits, Lang bemusedly quoting the German poet Hölderlin and Bertolt Brecht. As mannered as the New Wave posturings now seem, Le Mépris still looks unbeatably stylish, its themes as eternal as Homer and the Capri landscape. -Leslie Felperin.

Chaplin, Sir Richard Attenborough's biographical film of the life and times of the famous comic, is a little thin as a narrative, but it is so charmingly creative and ultimately moving that it's hard to worry about the deficits. Robert Downey Jr does an excellent job re-creating Chaplin's graceful slapstick and getting inside the silent-film superstar's head over the years of triumph, defeat, scandal, official persecution, exile and inner peace. A huge cast portray the allies, friends, lovers and enemies in Chaplin's life, including Moira Kelly as his final, long-time wife Oona, Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks, Geraldine Chaplin as Charlie's mother and James Woods as a prosecutor working hard to nail Chaplin for anti-American sentiments. Attenborough declines to tell the story in a flat, linear way, employing such clever techniques as detailing one chapter in Chaplin's life as a silent comedy. The climactic scene set at an Oscar tribute for Chaplin will get the tears flowing. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Set in an unmercifully rugged, coastal village in Scotland in the 1970s, this extraordinary film by Lars von Trier stars British actress Emily Watson as a naive girl named Bess, who holds regular conversations with God and whose pure and intensely personal faith is hardly tolerated by the gruesome Calvinist elders of her church. Bess marries an oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgård) and comes to believe that erotic discovery is a part of God's grand plan. But after her spouse is hurt in an accident, she decides that divine instruction is leading her towards the life of a prostitute-with disastrous but somehow beautiful results. Von Trier (The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark) has made a wonderful, entirely unexpected and rigourous work of discovery in this film, with a formal visual design that recalls classic films by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson. Watson is a phenomenon, her wide-eyed wonder at the world as God's handiwork is a breathtaking portrayal of conviction. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Sally Potter's self-reflective film stars Potter (an actress and the director of Orlando), more or less as herself, learning to tango from master-dancer Pablo Veron and considering making a film called The Tango Lesson. The film that we happen to be watching, however, is concerned largely with the delicious conflict between the politics of tango-the need for one partner, typically the woman, to yield to the other-and the expectations of the film-maker to do things on her own terms. Can Potter simultaneously surrender and control for the duration of this circular project? The question is made more complicated by Veron's desire to be in one of Potter's films-in other words, to follow her lead. Potter may not be Veron's equal on the dance floor, but that isn't the point of this interesting movie and its provocative, internal debate. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

War is hell, but it can bring out the best in the unlikeliest of men. Sword of Honour, a splendid British miniseries, is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's alter ego in the film, Guy Crouchback, played with gravitas, fortitude, and a wee bit of vulnerability by a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig, joins the World War II effort as an older soldier because he feels a pure calling to fight evil. And fight he does, though the realities of war and army life are ultimately revealed to him in all their venality and haphazardness. The film sweeps across Europe, from pre-war England-where life for the upper crust is all crisp linen, martinis, and a fierce denial of the notion that the British Empire is, in fact, doomed-to Capt. Crouchback's missions in Vichy France, an utterly destroyed Crete, Egypt, and more. All the while, Crouchback fights his own demons along with the Nazis; his alluring ex-wife, Virginia (played with sultry sensuality by the American actress Megan Dodds, so memorable in the British series MI-5), to whom Crouchback is undeniably still drawn. The action and production values are topnotch, as is the ensemble cast. But the key is Craig, whose world-weary demeanor only barely masks the needs of a soldier-and a man-who is all too human. His performance is soul-stirring, and even those who think they aren't war-film fans will be captivated by the layered storytelling here. [+]