Movies: John Shrapnel

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...

A shy, stuttering professor brings satanist Aleister Crowley back to life....

Plagues are ravaging Thebes, and the blind fortune-teller Tieresias tells Oedipus, the King, that the gods are unhappy. The murder of the former king has gone unavenged, and Oedipus sets out to find the killer....

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...

Whistle depicts the dreary off-hours of an ultra-technological hit-man who becomes 'involved' in the life of one of his victims. The hit-man's wife is not only fully cognizant of her husband's day job but she is also the cold-blooded contact with his...

Experience the fear as you're sucked into the disturbed mind of Alex. Tormented by harrowing voices of the past Alex searches for the one girl who can silence the horror of a tortured soul. As the quest becomes darker and more sinister Alex's fear fi...

While still the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII meets the married American socialite, Wallis Simpson. Their relationship causes furor in the palace and in parliament, especially when King George V dies, Mrs. Simpson gets divorced, and King Ed...

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

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....

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....

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...

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....

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

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...

A young woman has a mental breakdown in a state institution....

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...

"Horizon" examines the recent discovery of supermassive black holes, which spawn galaxies even as they threaten to destroy everything in their path....

The dramatic story of the British expedition that made the first ascent of Everest. Combining interviews with the surviving members of the 1953 British and 1952 Swiss attempt on Everest with rare archival material, this film tells the story of the r...

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...

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...