Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

Outside Covent Garden on a rainy evening in 1912, cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, meets linguistic expert Henry Higgins. Higgins, in turn, bets with his companion, Colonel Pickering, that, within six months, he could transform Eliza into a proper lady, simply by teaching her proper English. The next morning, face and hands freshly scrubbed, Eliza presents herself on Higgins' doorstep, ready and willing to be turned into a lady.

Thomas Gradgrind is an eminently practical man who believes in facts and statistics and has brought up his two children, Louisa and Tom, accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative sides of their nature. They are raised in ignorance of love and affection, and the consequences are devastating. No other work of Dickens presents so harsh an indictment against the attitude of life he associated with Utilitarianism. With savage bitterness Dickens...

When his boss demands more speed and efficiency, Chaplin goes crazy from his repetitious assembly line job. Primarily a silent film with music and sound effects, but occasional voices emanate from radios and television screens.

Adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London yet set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy's history, this is a passionate and enthralling story in the tradition of great Italian classics. Martin is a self-taught proletarian with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy university student. The dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to...

A vibrant and inventive father-daughter comedy follows Georgie, a resourceful twelve-year-old girl who secretly lives alone in her flat in a working-class suburb of London following the death of her mother. She makes money stealing bikes with her best friend Ali and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. Out of nowhere, her estranged father Jason arrives and forces her to confront reality. Uninterested in this sudden...

"A novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, following the intersecting lives of the local families fighting to protect their homeland, the West Indian laborers recruited to dig the waterway, and the white Americans who gained profit and glory for themselves"-- It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring...

Eleven-year-old miner's son Billy Elliot is on his way to boxing lessons when he stumbles upon a ballet class. Billy secretly joins the class, knowing that his blue-collar family would never understand.