THE very best in British film is perhaps the strongest theme that runs through Colchester Film Society’s season for 2010.

Starting on Thursday, with Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, half of the films on offer this year are British, with the first one in February.

That’s Venus, a witty and enchanting film about a veteran actor, played by Peter O’Toole, who falls for a young girl.

March continues the theme with Control, profiling the tragic life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis and in April it’s Terence Davies’ fractured chronicle of the life of a working-class family in the Forties and Fifties in Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Ae Fond Kiss, set in Glasgow, is the society’s offering in May and another Brit-flick occupies the June slot with the appropriately titled This is England, Shane Meadows’ raw look at the white working classes of Eighties Britain.

The final British film of the season takes place in August, after July’s US-made movie, the Kite Runner.

Like that film, Brick Lane is based on a best-selling book, portraying the seclusion of a young Bangladeshi woman on the estates of London.

For the rest of the year, the society has trawled the very best in European and American cinema for its films, the best of which has to be the Coen brothers’ spectacular homage to the prohibition gangster movie, Miller’s Crossing, which is screened in November.

Starring Gabriel Byrne and with an incredible performance by the great Albert Finney, the film projected the highly talented film-makers into the mainstream, with a piece that works as both a crime thriller and an ironic commentary on that genre.

All films are screened at the Headgate Theatre, Chapel Street North, Colchester. Full membership, which includes admission to all this season’s films, costs £25 and £20 for concessions.

Membership also entitles people to bring a guest at £3.50 (£2.50) per film, subject to seat availability.

For more information, call the box office on 01206 366000 or visit www.colchesterfilm.org.uk