Gladiators

Up to one million gladiators are thought to have died in arenas across the Roman Empire. Seventy-five were recently found in a single cemetery in York. Two thousand years ago, York was a Roman stronghold, a staging ground for the push against the Scots. Apart from ancient Italy, Roman Britain had the highest density of gladiatorial arenas in Europe. As part of a routine building inspection in the outskirts of York, archaeologists discover an ancient Roman burial site. It soon became apparent the find was anything but routine.

Chris "Knuckles" Nilan is the focus of Alex Gibney's The Last Gladiators, a documentary that examines the role hockey "enforcers" – tough guys hired to protect star hockey players on the ice and get into fights with each other – played for decades in the NHL. Full of entertaining fight footage, and interviews with uber-tough guys like Tony Twist and Marty McSorley, Gibney's film also addresses head-on how the personalities of the men who did this job better than others have often made it very difficult for them to have a problem-free life after they are too old to continue their careers.

Framed for the escape of five gladiators from the arena, the son of one of Sparta's leading citizens is sentenced to the arena as gladiator himself and forced to fight for his life in the Roman Colosseum. Years later he manages to escape and return to Sparta, only to find out that his father has been murdered–even though it was ruled a "suicide"–and the woman he loves is about to marry the evil king who has usurped the throne. He sets out to find six of his fellow gladiators and return to Sparta to save his woman and place the rightful king on the throne.

Roccia and a band of fellow gladiators join forces with a patrician named Glaucus Valerius to replace Nero, (and his evil henchman, Tigelinus), with a new emperor: Servius Galba. During the course of this bloody struggle, the gladiators lose their mentor and trainer - Resius - and then must rescue Lidia, Resius' beautiful niece, from death on the cross.