Tues 18th March - Once (15)
Dir: John Carney (Ireland 2006 85 mins)

A soulful valentine to music, friendship and the joys of honest hard graft, played out in the bedsits and recording studios of a deglamourised Dublin. The film's unabashed romanticism might start to grate were it not for the director’s sharp feel for the impoverished circumstances of his main characters; the sense that, for all their flirty banter and boisterous singalongs, these people are pretty much clinging on by their fingertips.

Tuesday 25th March - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (PG) Dir:Tommy Lee Jones (USA/France 2005 121 mins)

A thoughtful, modern Western exploring death, delusion and friendship. Jones plays a rancher stricken by grief when his Mexican employee and friend Mel is killed. Enraged by official indifference at the death of this illegal immigrant, he sets out to fulfill a promise by taking the corpse home to Mexico. The film is filled with affection for the land - it was shot partly on Jones' own West Texas ranch - and a clear-eyed view of the relationship between America and Mexico; the affluent bully exploiting its poor neighbour.

“Gripping.” BBCi

Tuesday 1st April - Control (PG)
Dir:Anton Corbijn (UK 2007 121 mins)

A tender, bleakly funny and superbly acted biopic of Ian Curtis, the legendary lead singer of new wave band Joy Division, who in 1980 committed suicide on the eve of his first US tour: suffering from epilepsy and depression, agonised by a failing marriage, stunned by the ambiguous waves of violence and nihilism his music had unleashed and terrified by the accelerating bandwagon of celebrity.

“Best film of the year.” The Guardian

Tuesday 8th April - Bamako (PG)
Dir: Abderrahmane Sissako (France-Mali 2006, 112 mins)12 mins)

Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up. Chakra is much too occupied with her own problems to be concerned with the trial court that has been set up in the communal courtyard outside her house aiming to hold the World Bank and the IMF to account for Africa's woes.

The film is an oddly brilliant and rightly impassioned critique of Western involvement in Africa.

Tuesday 15th April - Blame It On Fidel (PG)
Dir: Julie Gavras (Italy/France 2006 99 mins)

Drawing on an autobiographical novel by Domitilla Calamai, and presumably her own experiences as the daughter of political moviemaker Costa-Gavras, the director looks at Paris in the early 1970s through the eyes of nine-year-old Anna whose left-wing parents - the mother from a haut-bourgeois family in Bordeaux, the father a prosperous lawyer from a pro-Franco clan in Spain - are trying to make up for their lack of political commitment in the 1960s by throwing themselves into the fray as supporters of Allende's campaign in Chile. "An acutely comic film." Observer

Tuesday 22nd April - 12:08 East of Bucharest (PG)
Cornelu Porumboiu (Romania 2006, 89 mins)

A dry little satire from Romania, poking fun at the vanities of smalltowners trying to claim credit for derring-do during the 1989 uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu. This is done through the medium of a local TV chat show - arguably the shoddiest programme ever portrayed on screen - during which a couple of the local gentry try to account for their movements at the magical moment of 12.08pm on the day of the overthrow.

It won the best first film award at Cannes. “An unexpected gem.” BBCi

Also this season : The American Astonaut (6th May - FREE) back to details

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