Liberty, equality, fraternity. The national motto of France since the 1789 revolution, institutionalised during the third republic in 1870, is the inspiration for one of the greatest film trilogies ever produced and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic swan song. As with the miraculous television series Dekalog four years earlier, Kieslowski and long time screenwriting collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz drew their inspiration from a set of socially ingrained and long held principles.

When Tom Stall foils a vicious attempted robbery, rape and murder, he is hailed a hero and gains the attention of the national media. This uncomfortable publicity causes a threatening man to confront Tom and claim that he is Joey, the gangster who tried to rip his eye out with barbed wire, thus begins both an incredible thriller and a compelling mysterious family drama. A History of Violence.

Mesrine charts the tumultuous beginnings of the eponymous career gangster from his youth with the French in Algiers, to his then legendary criminal escapades across continents and decades. Basing the piece solely on Mesrine's own autobiography, Richet attempts to draw the man quintessentially, to summarise him completely across his two parts, an aim unequivocally voiced in the films 'disclaimer' style opening.

Released in 1976 to great acclaim and receiving 8 Oscar nominations, All the President's Men is a genuine modern classic and one of the finest and most significant films American cinema has ever produced. Looking at it again today, its power and potency remain undiminished and its ability to illuminate stronger than ever.

Rope is considered among the high, second shelf of Alfred Hitchcock movies, for me it’s a maguffin-less script that brims with sound-stage showiness, Rope is among my top five Hitchcock films.

Based on 2007's bestselling book of the same name, Gomorrah is an exposition of 'Italy's Other Mafia'. The title is a play on words with Camorra, the name by which this rampant criminal organisation are known.

Fingers was writer and director James Toback’s first film as a director, Toback is a respected film artist who has a body of solid, rather than outstanding, work. Fingers is his finest film. Harvey Keitel stars as a man who is torn between his Mob-connected father and his concert pianist mother.

La Zona’s opening sequence recalls the beginning of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with dreamy slow-motion shots of a wealthy, picket fenced, suburban neighbourhood but while Lynch’s camera dives down into the undergrowth of a well cut lawn to reveal a seething mass of insects, La Zona’s camera pulls up to reveal a hillside of slums sprawling out surrounding this wealthy enclave.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

This famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is mirrored in the words of Richard (Paddy Considine), the dark protagonist at the heart of Shane Meadows' harrowing lo-fi revenge shocker Dead Man's Shoes: