Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell by candlelight; Hilary Mantel on the BBC.
An English pilot shipwrecked in 1600 Japan and Lord Toranaga; the Emmy record-breaker.
Five friends in London through the AIDS years of the 1980s; Russell T Davies.
Elizabeth II from 1947 to 2005, with the cast replaced every two seasons.
Derek Jacobi as the stammering emperor and Sian Phillips as Livia; the BBC's 1976 Rome.
Two legionaries through the fall of the Republic; HBO and the BBC's expensive Caesar.
A 12-year-old joins a skinhead gang in 1983; Shane Meadows' Midlands.
Gael Garcia Bernal sells the campaign that voted out Pinochet in 1988, shot on 1980s video.
A colonial officer waits for a transfer that never comes; Lucrecia Martel's 18th-century fever.
An Amazonian shaman guides two explorers forty years apart, in black and white.
Two brothers in the Irish War of Independence and the civil war after; Loach's Palme d'Or.
Three Aboriginal girls walk 1,500 miles home along the fence in 1931.
Don Cheadle as the hotel manager who sheltered 1,268 people during the genocide.
A rich boy and a poor boy at a Santiago school in the months before the 1973 coup.
A woman rebuilds herself through the German economic miracle; Fassbinder's biggest hit.
The Red Army Faction from 1967 to 1977; Germany's terrorism epic.
A film student investigates a forgotten Stalinist hero bricklayer; Wajda's Citizen Kane.
A family through forty years of Chinese history, from the civil war to the Cultural Revolution.
Villagers play the British at cricket to escape a tax; three hours and forty-four minutes of it.
A family in Taiwan between the Japanese surrender and the 1947 massacre; Hou's Golden Lion.
A Seoul cabbie drives a German reporter into the Gwangju uprising of 1980.
Shakespeare's wife and the death of their son, and the play that came from it; Chloe Zhao's Maggie O'Farrell.
Branagh's childhood in 1969 Belfast in black and white, with Van Morrison.
Gary Oldman as Churchill in May 1940, and the speech in the Underground.
London gay activists support a Welsh mining village in the 1984 strike; the true story.
Strange punishments in a German village in 1913, in black and white; Haneke on the roots of fascism.
Martin Luther King and the 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway singing live on set and the barricades of 1832.
Hitler's last twelve days in the bunker, with Bruno Ganz; the meme and the masterpiece.
Two Peking opera stars across fifty years of Chinese history; the only Chinese Palme d'Or.
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