Made in Italy

In 73 BC, Spartacus broke out of gladiator school and started the most terrifying slave revolt in Rome's history. Visiting Pompeii, southern Italy and the British Museum, Bettany explores the importance and appalling reality of slavery in ancient Rome and how the revolt played a major role in shaping Rome's political future. She also reveals that not all of Spartacus's followers were slaves.

This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and - according to the credits - the end of cinema itself.

A mad scientist captures young women and drains their blood, in order to keep alive an ancient, evil duchess.

After expatriate American jockey Danny Arnold double-crosses ruthless gambler Louis Bork, he flees Italy with his adoring son Joe, who isn't aware of his father's lies and corruption. While in France he begins a relationship with a beautiful French nightclub singer and buys a problematic racehorse that no one seems to be able to train. After Joe suggests that the horse has a future as a jumper, Danny converts him to the steeplechase and turns him into a consistent winner. When Bork shows up and tells him he must lose the big race or die, Danny must weigh his life against his son's faith that he has become a man of honor.

Giancarlo Siani, a reporter for Il Mattino, is killed with ten pistol shots in 1985. An easygoing 26 year-old, he loves his life and his work. During the last four months of his life, he goes from his home in the Vomero neighborhood to the hell of Torre Annunziata, the kingdom of crime boss Valentino Gionta. Giancarlo is investigating corruption in earthquake reconstruction efforts. Amidst the mafia, corrupt politicians, frightened prosecutors and helpless policemen, he is like a lily in the mud.

50% of the world's population lives in urban areas. By 2050 this will increase to 80%. Life in a mega city is both enchanting and problematic. Today we face peak oil, climate change, loneliness and severe health issues due to our way of life. But why? The Danish architect and professor Jan Gehl has studied human behavior in cities through 40 years. He has documented how modern cities repel human interaction, and argues that we can build cities in a way, which takes human needs for inclusion and intimacy into account. THE HUMAN SCALE meets thinkers, architects and urban planners across the globe. It questions our assumptions about modernity, exploring what happens when we put people into the center of our planning.

Jean-Paul Belmondo delivers a subtly sensual performance in the hot-under-the-collar Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The French superstar plays a devoted man of the cloth who is desired by all the women of a small village in Nazi-occupied France. He finds himself most drawn to a sexually frustrated widow—played by Emmanuelle Riva—a religious skeptic whose relationship with her confessor turns into a confrontation with both God and her own repressed desire. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of French cinema’s towering virtuosos.

World War I in Colour is a Channel 5 documentary series made with the cooperation of the Imperial War Museum, featuring all aspects of the land, sea and air war covered in separate programmes. Up until now, World War 1 had always been seen as a war that happened in black & white, but that was not the reality.

Throughout American history, from the Revolution to San Juan Hill and to the sands of Iraq, black soldiers have fought and died under the Stars and Stripes. Long before they were recognized as citizens, much less equals, African-Americans sacrificed their lives for a society from which they were largely excluded. Through period accounts, first-person recollections, and rare photos and footage, the difficult journey of the African-American men and women who fought to secure their rightful place in the U.S. Military is followed.

Dan Cruickshank's quest is to tell the story of civilisation through the greatest of man's achievements. It will also be the story of his travels, and who and what he meets along the way. Whether standing before the solemn heads of Easter Island, investigating the mysterious Nazca lines in Peru or the magnificent temple of Borobodur in Java, Dan is never less than fascinating about the origins, construction, mysteries and vicissitudes of each of these monuments to the great civilisations of the world.