For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life.

Told through the eyes of François Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime.

47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.

47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s _8½_ (_Otto e mezzo_) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.

A uniquely prolific and chameleonic figure of world cinema, Kon Ichikawa delivered a burst of stylistic bravado with this intricate tale of betrayal and retribution.

Thanks to a dog he finds, Charlie ends up in possession of some stolen loot. But the wrongdoers want their ill-gotten gains back.

The blind swordsman wanders into a town to celebrate the New Year. There, he befriends a young woman whose father has gone missing; as he tries to help her find him, he becomes entangled in a web of corruption and a series of tragic twists of fate.

Rossellini’s three-part series is like a Renaissance painting come to life: a portrait of fifteenth-century Florence, ruled by the Medici political dynasty. With a lovely score from composer Manuel de Sica, this grand yet intimate work is a storybook conjuring of a way of life and thought.

Technically, Alice in the Cities is Wim Wenders’s fourth film, but he often refers to it as his first, because it was during this film that he discovered the genre of the road movie.

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows.

Conceived as an amusing diversion in the wake of the despairing The Silence, this comedy is Bergman’s first film in color, and it looks like a glorious chocolate box.

Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the fascist period. The Academy Award–winning Amarcord remains one of cinema's enduring treasures.

Wim Wenders pays loving homage to rough-and-tumble Hollywood film noir with The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game.

Fassbinder’s experimental noir is a subversive, self-reflexive gangster movie full of unexpected asides and stylistic flourishes, and features an audaciously bonkers final shot and memorable turns from many of the director’s rotating gallery of players.

This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous.

With his second feature, a towering epic that took him years to complete, Andrei Tarkovsky waded deep into the past and emerged with a visionary masterwork.

George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of this classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion's paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values.

In 1986, Louis Malle set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers in middle- and working-class communities from coast to coast, Malle paints a generous, humane portrait of their individual struggles.

In Federico Fellini’s quirky, imaginative fable, a motley crew of European aristocrats (and a lovesick rhinoceros!) board a luxurious ocean liner on the eve of World War I to scatter the ashes of a beloved diva.

With _An Angel at My Table,_ Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brings to the screen the harrowing true-life story of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. _Angel_ beautifully captures the color and power of the New Zealand landscape.

A unique, enthralling cinematic experience, Teshigahara’s _Antonio Gaudí_, less a documentary than a visual poem, takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture.

As Apu progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother.

In this gently devastating drama, a critical breakthrough for Naruse, he contrasts the life of an aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, with that of her youthful counterpart, a lovely young girl resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.

Apu is now in his early twenties, out of college, and hoping to live as a writer. Alongside his professional ambitions, the film charts his romantic awakening, which occurs as the result of a most unlikely turn of events, and his eventual, fraught fatherhood.

In Kaurismäki’s drolly existential crime drama, a coal miner attempts to leave behind a provincial life of inertia and economic despair, only to get into ever deeper trouble. Yet a minor-key romance with a hilariously dispassionate meter maid might provide a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Kinoshita’s ambitious and intensely moving film begins as a multigenerational epic about the military legacy of one Japanese family, before settling into an emotionally complex portrayal of parental love during wartime.

On the last day of World War II, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment, we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar.

In this endlessly diverting compendium of four short films, Pierre Etaix regards the 1960s from his askew but astute perspective.

Based on events from writer-director Louis Malle’s own childhood, _Au revoir les enfants_ tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France.

The last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization.

Autumn Sonata was the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans: Ingmar, the iconic director of The Seventh Seal, and Ingrid, the monumental star of Casablanca.

Volker Schlöndorff transported Bertolt Brecht’s 1918 debut play to contemporary West Germany for this vicious experiment in adaptation, seldom seen for nearly half a century.

At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema.

Robert Downey Sr.’s first feature is a rollicking, slapstick, ultra-low-budget 16 mm comedy experiment that introduced a twisted new voice to the New York underground.

A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing _The Bad Sleep Well._ Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of _Hamlet_ and American film noir to chilling effect.

In the first of Rohmer’s "Moral Tales," a law student (Barbet Schroeder) with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself full of sugar cookies and pastries daily in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery.

Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in brilliant color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work from Japan’s cinematic golden age, directed by the dynamic Keisuke Kinoshita.

Vincent Price portrays legendary swindler James Addison Reavis, who in 1880 concocted an elaborate hoax to name himself the "Baron" of Arizona, and therefore inherit all the land in the state. Samuel Fuller adapts this tall tale to film with fleet, elegant storytelling and a sly sense of humor.

This precisely wrought, emotionally penetrating romantic drama from Jacques Demy, set largely in the casinos of Nice, is a visually lovely but darkly realistic investigation into love and obsession.

The filmmakers of _Grey Gardens_ went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, _The Beales of Grey Gardens,_ a tribute both to these indomitable women, Big and Little Edie Beale, and to the landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them counterculture icons.

The remarkable and stark _Le beau Serge_ heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades.

The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.

Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, the fourth installment in François Truffaut’s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, _Bed and Board,_ is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.

Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her after­noon hours working in a bordello.

Based on the classic Emile Zola novel, Jean Renoir's _La bête humaine_, a suspenseful journey into the tormented psyche of a workingman, was one of the director's greatest popular successes—and earned star Jean Gabin a permanent place in the hearts of his countrymen.

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brazen depiction of the alternating currents of lethargy and mayhem inherent in moviemaking, a film crew deals with an aloof star (Eddie Constantine), an abusive director (Lou Castel), and a financially troubled production.

Mailer’s belief that we’re all capable of being either police or criminals was the impetus for his second feature, which takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema.

The Big City follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family.

One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater.

Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .).

This Freudian tale of adolescent sexuality set in a postapocalyptic world of shifting identities and talking animals is one of Malle’s most experimental films and a cinematic daydream like no other.

Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton

Perhaps Masaki Kobayashi’s most sordid film, Black River examines the rampant corruption on and around U.S. military bases in Japan following World War II.

You’ve probably never seen anything quite like this manic, oddball, anti–buddy picture about a young, jazz-obsessed Japanese drifter and a black American GI on the lam in Tokyo.

In this evocative, atmospheric biography, Roberto Rossellini brings to life philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who, amid religious persecution and ignorance, believed in a harmony between God and science.

Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane, sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to music, food, and all sorts of regionally specific delights.

Before he stunned the cinematic world with the epic series The Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy, the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski made his first work of metaphysical genius, Blind Chance.

This razor-sharp modern film noir, the first film by Joel and Ethan Coen, introduced the brothers’ inimitable black humor and eccentric sense of character, a sensibility that has helped shape the course of contemporary American cinema.

A young husband and father finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker in _Le bonheur_, one of Agnès Varda's most provocative films.

A low-key postpunk diary that took four years to complete, Allison Anders' _Border Radio_ features legendary rocker Chris D. as a singer/songwriter who has stolen loot from a club and gone missing, leaving his wife, a no-nonsense rock journalist, to track him down with the help of his friends.

In Jean Renoir's satire of the bourgeoisie, Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, whose family decides to take in the irrepressible bum.

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired.

Lars von Trier became an international sensation with this galvanizing realist fable about sex and spiritual transcendence.

Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs.

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang is finally available for US audiences.

With its combination of psychological and body horror, The Brood laid the groundwork for many of the director’s films to come, but it stands on its own as a personal, singularly scary vision.

Michael Redgrave gives the performance of his career in Anthony Asquith’s adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s unforgettable play. Redgrave portrays Andrew Crocker-Harris, an embittered, middle-aged schoolmaster who begins to feel that his life has been a failure.

As hard-hitting as its title, _Brute Force_ was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well, starring Burt Lancaster.

With a small film crew, Wim Wenders accompanied his old friend Ry Cooder, who had written the music for Paris, Texas and The End of Violence, on a trip to Havana. Cooder wanted to record his material for Ibrahim Ferrer’s solo album at a studio there—following the recording of the first Buena Vista Social Club CD.

In Kon Ichikawa’s eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death, an Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song, while a private disguises himself as a Buddhist monk.

Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend.

When he was cutting _Phantom India_, Louis Malle found that the footage shot in Calcutta was so diverse, intense, and unforgettable that it deserved its own film. The result, released theatrically, is at times shocking—a chaotic portrait of a city engulfed in social and political turmoil.

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.

One of Mexico’s most highly regarded works of political cinema, Canoa: A Shameful Memory is a daring commentary on ideological manipulation, religious fanaticism, and mass violence, as well as a visceral expression of horror.

Two years after his worldwide hit _Closely Watched Trains,_ Jiří Menzel directed this amusing idyll about three middle-aged men whose mellow summer is interrupted by the arrival of a circus performer and his beautiful assistant.

A young woman in a small Kansas town survives a drag race accident, then agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she becomes haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion.

As profoundly simple as its hero's famous statement "I think, therefore I am," Roberto Rossellini's Cartesius is an intimate, psychological study of obsession and existential crisis.

Jacques Becker lovingly evokes the belle epoque Parisian demimonde in this classic tale of doomed romance. When gangster's moll Marie (Simone Signoret) falls for reformed criminal Manda (Serge Reggiani), their passion incites an underworld rivalry that leads inexorably to treachery and tragedy.

Twenty years have passed: Fanny’s son, Césariot, is in a military academy, and Panisse is on his deathbed, where the local priest demands that he tell his son about his biological father.

This riot of bad taste was a breakthrough for Downey, thanks to rave notices. Visualized largely in still 35 mm photographs, it follows a shiftless downtown Manhattanite having his “annual November breakdown.”

After years of making mostly comedies and literary adaptations, Raffaello Matarazzo turned to melodrama with this intense tale of a tight-knit working-class family shattered by temptation.

In Chantal Akerman's early short film _La chambre_, we see the furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York.

Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice.

Jean Renoir’s ruthless love triangle tale, his second sound film, is a true precursor to his brilliantly bitter The Rules of the Game, displaying all of the filmmaker’s visual genius and fully imbued with his profound sense of humanity.

Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child in _The Children Are Watching Us_, a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time.

The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s later film career, Chimes at Midnight returns to the screen after being unavailable for decades.

The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin would term cinéma verité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France.

Two heartsick Hong Kong cops cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out restaurant stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye works. _Chungking Express_ is one of the defining works of nineties cinema and the film that made Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai an instant icon.

In this uplifting romantic drama, the wife of a mechanic and former fighter pilot falls in love with the idea of flying herself. This soon becomes an obsession, and she undertakes a lofty feat: the longest solo flight ever made by a woman

With a radical take on narrative, disturbing yet beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a decaying bourgeois family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel.

When we first meet Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp in this comic gem, he’s in typical straits: broke, hungry, destined to fall in love, and just as sure to lose the girl.

The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical Virginia Cherrill) and mistakes him for a millionaire.

“Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?” says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and her blonde stepsister, Claire.

Lodge Kerrigan’s raw, ravaging _Clean, Shaven_ is a headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schizophrenic as he tries to track down his daughter after he is released from an institution.

A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, _Cléo from 5 to 7_ is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (_The Umbrellas of Cherbourg_) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Wry and tender, Jirí Menzel's Academy Award-winning _Closely Watched Trains_ is a masterpiece of human observation.

Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and the fiction-documentary hybrid Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work.

One of the world’s most influential and provocative filmmakers, the Oscar–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precision and artistry.

An acclaimed early work by Olivier Assayas that has long remained unavailable, the deeply felt coming-of-age drama Cold Water at long last makes its way to U.S. theaters.

In Rohmer’s first color film, a bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.

A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds.

Many of the lost souls of _Ossos_ and _In Vanda’s Room_ return in the spectral landscape of _Colossal Youth,_ which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon.

One of Japanese cinema’s supreme emulations of American noir, Takashi Nomura’s _A Colt Is My Passport_ is a down-and-dirty but gorgeously photographed _yakuza_ film starring Joe Shishido as a hard-boiled hit man caught between rival gangs.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunning debut, the brutalized corpse of a Roman prostitute is found along the banks of the Tiber River. The police round up a handful of possible suspects and interrogate them, one by one, each account bringing them closer to the killer.

Orson Welles’s _Mr. Arkadin_ (a.k.a. _Confidential Report_) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a Cold War European landscape.

A startling tale of heartbreak and violence set against the backdrop of bloody revolution, Volker Schlöndorff's _Coup de grâce_ is a powerful film that explores the interrelation of private passion and political commitment.

In _Les cousins,_ Claude Chabrol crafts a sly moral fable about a provincial boy who comes to live with his sophisticated bohemian cousin in Paris. This dagger-sharp drama won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and was an important early entry in the French New Wave.

Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintarô Ishihara, and critically savaged for its lurid portrayal of the postwar sexual revolution among Japan’s young and privileged, _Crazed Fruit_ is an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation.

An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary color photography of Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behavior in the face of death.

In Ingmar Bergman's feature directing debut, urban beauty-shop proprietress Miss Jenny arrives in an idyllic rural town one morning to whisk away her eighteen-year-old daughter, Nelly, whom she abandoned as a child, from the loving woman who has raised her.

Fresh out of the slammer, Togawa (Branded to Kill’s Joe Shishido) has no chance to go straight because he is immediately coerced by a wealthy mob boss into organizing the heist of an armored car carrying racetrack receipts.

_Daisies_ is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that’s widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.

This unique love story follows the maneuverings of a society lady as she connives to initiate a scandalous affair between her aristocratic ex-lover and a prostitute. With his second feature film, director Robert Bresson was already forging his singularly brilliant filmmaking technique.

Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution.

David Lynch: The Art Life looks at Lynch’s art, music, and early films, shining a light into the dark corners of his unique world and giving audiences a better understanding of the man and the artist.

This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.

The young wife of an older pastor falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village, where stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Carl Dreyer's _Day of Wrath_ remains an intense, unforgettable experience.

Charlie decides to take his wife and children on a boat trip, but the family car proves somewhat recalcitrant.

Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.

Genius provocateur Nagisa Oshima, an influential figure in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, made one of his most startling political statements with the compelling pitch-black satire Death by Hanging.

Upper-class geometry professor Juan and his wealthy, married mistress, Maria José, driving back from a late-night rendezvous, accidentally hit a cyclist, and run. Juan Antonio Bardem's charged melodrama _Death of a Cyclist_ was a direct attack on 1950s Spanish society under Franco’s rule.

This masterwork by Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements in visual storytelling.

Donna Deitch’s swooning and sensual first film, Desert Hearts, was groundbreaking upon its 1986 release: a love story about two women, produced and directed by a woman.

Sacha Guitry exchanges his usual top hat for a uniform in _Désiré,_ playing a cavalier valet embroiled in an awkward flirtation with his new employer, played by the actor-director’s real-life wife, Jacqueline Delubac.

With his customary restraint and ruthless attention to detail, director Jean-Pierre Melville follows the parallel tracks of French underworld criminal Gu (Lino Ventura), escaped from prison and roped into one last robbery, and the suave inspector, Blot (Paul Meurisse), relentlessly seeking him.

After a streak of bad luck tempts a hard-working farmer to bargain with the Devil, he enlists the aid of the legendary orator and politician Daniel Webster. William Dieterle’s stylish film features an unforgettable score by Bernard Herrmann and a truly diabolical performance from Walter Huston.

This sophisticated fantasy—the last Bergman film to be shot by the great Gunnar Fischer—is an engaging satire on petit-bourgeois morals.

Before Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Repulsion, there was Diabolique, a heart-grabbing benchmark in horror filmmaking, featuring outstanding performances by Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse.

In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played by Michel Piccoli.

In Pietro Germi’s hilarious and cutting satire of Sicilian male-chauvinist culture, Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) longs to marry his nubile young cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), but one obstacle stands in his way: his fatuous and fawning wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca).

Documenteur is a small-scale fiction about a divorced mother and her child (played by Agnès Varda’s own son) leading a quiet existence on L.A.’s margins.

By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s _Dodes’ka-den_ follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Kurosawa’s gloriously shot first color film displays all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion.

A topsy-turvy riches-to-rags fable with songs by Michel Legrand, Donkey Skin creates a tactile fantasy world that’s perched on the border between the earnest and the satiric.

Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D. A. Pennebaker.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. _The Double Life of Véronique_ is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.

In Masahiro Shinoda’s striking adaptation of a Bunraku puppet play (featuring the music of famed composer Toru Takemitsu), a paper merchant sacrifices family, fortune, and, ultimately, life for his erotic obsession with a prostitute.

Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout film Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in the American landscape

This formally accomplished and psychologically complex gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a hardened career criminal, and Kazuko, the sweet-natured older sister of a newly initiated young hoodlum.

The Chinese Wuxia (martial arts) picture was never the same after King Hu’s legendary Dragon Inn.

Grave and witty by turns, this drama develops into a probing study of the psychology of desire. Susanne (Eva Dahlbeck), head of a modeling agency, takes her protégée Doris (Harriet Andersson) to a fashion show in Gothenburg, where Susanne makes contact with a former lover, and Doris finds herself pursued by a married dignitary (Gunnar Björnstrand).

Zoltán Korda’s charged adaptation of a novel by The Four Feathers author A. E. W. Mason features Sabu in his second film role, as the teenage Prince Azim, forced into hiding when his father, the ruler of a peaceful kingdom in northwest India, is assassinated by his own ruthless brother.

In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician.

In his first film after the commercial and critical success of _Tokyo Story,_ Ozu examines life in postwar Japan through the eyes of a young salaryman, dissatisfied with career and marriage, who begins an affair with a flirtatious co-worker.

The Mamiya family is seeking a husband for their daughter, Noriko, but when she impulsively chooses her childhood friend, she fulfills her family’s desires while tearing them apart. Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer is a nuanced examination of life’s changes across three generations.

The most cherished work from French master Max Ophuls, The Earrings of Madame de . . . is a profoundly emotional, cinematographically adventurous tale of deceptive opulence and tragic romance.

A mix of hilarious, anything-goes slapstick and biting satire of me-generation self-indulgence, Eating Raoul marked the end of the sexual revolution with a thwack.

Commissioned to make a working-class family drama, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, upending expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective.

Lars von Trier’s stunning debut film, influenced equally by Hitchcock and science fiction, is the story of Fisher, an exiled ex-cop who returns to his old beat to catch a serial killer with a taste for young girls.

Jean Renoir’s delirious romantic comedy stars Ingrid Bergman in her most sensual role as a beautiful, but impoverished, Polish princess who drives men of all stations to fits of desperate love.

Elephant Boy served as the breakthrough showcase for the thirteen-year-old Sabu, whose beaming performance as a young mahout leading the British on an expedition made him a major international star.

Set in a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, _Empire of Passion_ details the downfall of a married woman and her lover after they murder her husband and dump his body in a well. With eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution.

The Kohayakawa family is thrown into distress when childlike father Manbei takes up with his old mistress, in one of Ozu's most deftly modulated blendings of comedy and tragedy.

In Satyajit Ray’s absorbing contemporary adaptation of a play by Henrik Ibsen, a good-hearted doctor discovers that the serious illness befalling the citizens of his small Bengali town may be due to a contamination of the holy water at the local temple.

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in _Equinox Flower,_ his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty.

Lars von Trier’s hypnotic _Europa_ is a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. _Europa_ is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works.

Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite racked by guilt over the shocking death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick.

In the formally ravishing _Every-Night Dreams,_ set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo, a single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son—until her long-lost husband returns.

A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece. Made one year after his international sensation _Viridiana,_ this is a furthering of Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the frivolous upper classes.

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—at a horrifying price.

In this staggering work of existential science fiction, Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger.

Picking up moments after the end of Marius, this film follows Fanny’s grief after Marius’s departure—and her realization that she’s pregnant

Ingmar Bergman described _Fanny and Alexander_ as "the sum total of my life as a filmmaker." And in this, the full-length (312-minute) version of his triumphant valediction, his vision is expressed at its fullest.

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction.

Bergman had discovered the bleak, windswept island of Fårö while scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly in 1960.

Returning to Fårö after living in Germany for three years, Bergman undertook his second documentary tribute to the remote Swedish island he loved.

Fat Girl is not only a portrayal of female adolescent sexuality and the complicated bond between siblings but also a shocking assertion by the always controversial Catherine Breillat that violent oppression exists at the core of male-female relations.

From 1963 to 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon.

Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F for Fake, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies.

High schooler Kiroku Nanbu yearns for the prim, Catholic Michiko, but her only desire is to reform Kiroku's sinful tendencies. Hormones raging, Kiroku channels his unsatisfied lust into the only outlet available: savage, crazed violence.

While on the road, Zatoichi befriends a young mother right before she is savagely murdered. Promising her that he will hand over her baby to its father, the blind masseur embarks on an adventure both sentimental and beset by perilous action.

A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman’s first color film, _The Firemen’s Ball_ (_Horí, má panenko_), is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire that chronicles a firemen’s ball where nothing goes right.

An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II, Kon Ichikawa's _Fires on the Plain_ is a compelling descent into psychological and physical oblivion, and one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile filmmakers.

Unsparing in its portrait of the inner turmoil of a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself, _The Fire Within_ is one of Louis Malle's darkest and most personal films.

Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio.

An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all, in Yasujiro Ozu’s color collaboration with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.

Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, Rossellini's _The Flowers of St. Francis_ is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.

Mikio Naruse’s earliest available film, _Flunky, Work Hard_ is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son.

Al Reinert’s visually dazzling documentary _For All Mankind_ is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon—told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences.

This Technicolor spectacular, directed by Zoltán Korda, is considered the finest of the many adaptations of A. E. W. Mason’s classic 1902 adventure novel about the British empire’s exploits in Africa, and a crowning achievement of Alexander Korda’s legendary production company, London Films.

A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

French Cancan, Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge, is a Technicolor tour de force starring Jean Gabin as a wily impresario juggling the love of two beautiful women in nineteenth-century Paris.

Harold Lloyd’s biggest box-office hit was this silent comedy gem, featuring the befuddled everyman at his eager best as a new college student.

Made during his self-imposed exile in Germany, Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes offers a lacerating portrait of a troubled marriage, and a complex psychological analysis of a murder.

In the shady black markets and bombed-out hovels of post–World War II Tokyo, a band of prostitutes eke out an existence, maintaining tenuous friendships and a semblance of order. But when a renegade ex-soldier stumbles into their midst, lusts and loyalties clash, with tragic results.

A winner of Academy Awards for best foreign-language film and best costume design, Gate of Hell is a visually sumptuous, psychologically penetrating work from Teinosuke Kinugasa.

In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.

Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity.

The insects are taking over in this nasty piece of disaster horror directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. A group of military personnel transporting a hydrogen bomb are left to figure out how and why swarms of killer bugs took down their plane.

An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast.

The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin shown through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.

Carl Dreyer’s last film is a meditation on tragedy, individual will, and the refusal to compromise. A woman leaves her unfulfilling marriage and embarks on a search for ideal love—but neither a passionate affair with a younger man nor the return of an old romance can provide the answer she seeks.

Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour.

The goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to completely lose his bearings.

In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline.

_Godzilla_ is the roaring granddaddy of all monster movies. It’s also a remarkably humane and melancholy drama made in Japan at a time when the country was still reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing.

After an airplane is forced to crash-land in a remote area, its passengers find themselves face-to-face with an alien force that wants to possess them body and soul—and perhaps take over the entire human race.

Set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Jean Renoir’s ravishing, sumptuous tribute to the theater involves a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell’arte company (the vivacious Anna Magnani).

Charlie Chaplin’s comedic masterwork—which charts a prospector’s search for fortune in the Klondike and his discovery of romance (with the beautiful Georgia Hale)—forever cemented the iconic status of Chaplin and his Little Tramp character.

Ozu's hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent _I Was Born, But . . . , Good Morning_ (Ohayô) is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set.

Despite having a loving and patient wife at home, a good-natured suit-and-tie man, played by writer-director Pierre Etaix, finds himself hopelessly attracted to his gorgeous new secretary in this gently satirical tale of temptation.

Featuring sensuous cinematography, a lush score, and an award-winning central performance by the great Toni Servillo, this transporting experience by the brilliant Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is a breathtaking Felliniesque tale of decadence and lost love.

In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona.

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion.

Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi's _Hands over the City,_ a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion.

Following the collapse of his clan, unemployed samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to commit ritual suicide on his property in Masaki Kobayashi’s fierce evocation of individual agency in the face of a corrupt and hypocritical system.

A Hard Day’s Night, in which the bandmates play cheeky comic versions of themselves, captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever.

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning _Harlan County USA_ unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs.

In this warmhearted comic yarn from Aki Kaurismäki, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a kindly old bohemian who shines shoes for a living in the French harbor city Le Havre.

Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered from the same hysteria as turn-of-the-twentieth-century psychiatric patients. _Häxan_ is a witches’ brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.

The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa’s trademark deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action, and compassionate humanity.

Adapting Ed McBain's detective novel _King's Ransom,_ Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.

An unsung comic triumph from David Lean, _Hobson’s Choice_ stars the legendary Charles Laughton as the harrumphing Henry Hobson, the owner of a boot shop in late Victorian northern England whose haughty, independent daughter decides to forge her own path, romantically and professionally.

The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife’s political horizons, drives her into the arms of his radical school chum.

Based on a shocking true story and shot in documentary-style black and white, The Honeymoon Killers is a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love.

This landmark film, which documents the journeys of two remarkable families, continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.

In Ronald Neame’s film of Joyce Cary’s classic novel, Alec Guinness transforms himself into one of cinema’s most indelible comic figures: the lovably scruffy painter Gulley Jimson.

Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux.

The strangest and most disturbing of the films Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, Hour of the Wolf stars Max von Sydow as a haunted painter living in voluntary exile with his wife (Liv Ullmann).

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet.

Richard E. Grant is the endlessly suave Dennis Bagley, a high-strung advertising executive whose shoulder sprouts an evil, talking boil. This caustic satire reunites the talented team behind the cult classic _Withnail and I_ to create a tour de force of verbal jousting and physical comedy.

In his documentary _Humain, trop humain_, Louis Malle presents his meditative investigation of the inner workings of a French automotive plant.

Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.

A parallel film to Vilgot Sjöman's controversial _I Am Curious—Yellow, I Am Curious—Blue_ also follows young Lena on her journey of self-discovery. In _Blue,_ Lena confronts issues of religion, sexuality, and the prison system, while at the same time exploring her own relationships.

This landmark document of Swedish society during the sexual revolution has been declared both obscene and revolutionary. It tells the story of a searching and rebellious young woman's personal quest to understand the social and political conditions in 1960s Sweden, and her own sexual identity.

In Koreyoshi Kurahara’s directorial debut, rebel matinee idol Yujiro Ishihara stars as a restaurant manager and former boxer who saves a beautiful, suicidal club hostess (Mie Kitahara) trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s _Identification of a Woman_ is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness.

The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul's reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this "folly" looks ever more fascinating.

Charlie is the spitting image of a rich woman’s drunk husband. At a masked ball, her inability to distinguish one from the other leads to much confusion.

Ermanno Olmi’s masterful feature is the tender story of two Milanese fiancés whose strained relationship is tested when the man accepts a new job in Sicily. With the separation come loneliness, nostalgia, and, perhaps, some new perspectives that might rejuvenate their love.

A college student attempts to cheat on his final exams by scribbling notes on his shirt; naturally his best-laid plans go awry.

In the high-octane, unorthodox romance I Hate But Love (Nikui anchikusho), a celebrity (played by megastar Yujiro Ishihara), dissatisfied with his personal and professional lives, impulsively leaves fast-paced Tokyo to deliver a much-needed jeep to a remote village.

One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an explora­tion of death.

Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity.

_I Live in Fear_ presents Toshiro Mifune as an elderly, stubborn businessman so fearful of a nuclear attack that he resolves to move his reluctant family to South America. Kurosawa depicts a society emerging from the shadows but still terrorized by memories of the past and anxieties for the future.

On his deathbed, a wealthy businessman announces that his fortune is to be split equally among his three illegitimate children, whose whereabouts are unknown to his family and colleagues.

This utterly unclassifiable film—assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, made during the Nazi occupation—is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces.

Born in a rural farming village in 1918, Tomé survives decades of Japanese social upheaval, as well as abuse and servitude at the hands of various men. Yet Shohei Imamura refuses to make a victim of her, instead observing Tomé as a fascinating, pragmatic creature of twentieth-century Japan.

Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), cursed by generations before her and neglected by her common-law husband, falls prey to a brutal home intruder. But rather than become a victim, she forges a path to her own awakening. _Intentions of Murder_ is gripping and audacious.

With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.

A graphic portrayal of insatiable sexual desire, In the Realm of the Senses, set in 1936 and based on a true incident, depicts a man and a woman consumed by a transcendent, destructive love while living in an era of ever escalating imperialism and governmental control.

The marvelously moody Intimidation (Aru kyouhaku) is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.

With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa's _In Vanda’s Room_ takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires.

After years of crime reporting, screenwriting, and authoring pulp novels, Samuel Fuller made his directorial debut with the lonesome ballad of Robert Ford (played by Red River’s John Ireland), who fatally betrayed his friend, the notorious Jesse James.

The debut feature by the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is a poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth.

In Fellini’s semiautobiographical masterpiece, five young men linger in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small seacoast town. They while away their time spending the lira doled out by their indulgent families on drink, women, and nights at the pool hall.

One of Ozu's most popular films, I Was Born, But . . . is a blithe portrait of the financial and psychological toils of one family, as told from the rascally point of view of a couple of stubborn little boys.

Masaki Kobayashi’s pitiless take on Japan’s professional baseball industry is unlike any other sports film ever made.

Shimizu’s exquisite silent drama tells of the humiliating social downfall experienced by Sunako after jealousy drives her to commit a terrible crime. With its lushly photographed landscapes and innovative visual storytelling, this film shows a director at the peak of his powers and experimentation.

A sex-obsessed young woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, a gun-crazy wannabe gangster—these are just three of the irrational, oddball anarchists trapped in an underground hideaway in Oshima’s devilish, absurdist film.

Whether seen as an exacting character portrait or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, _Jeanne Dielman_ is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

The world-famous artist Takashi Murakami made his directorial debut with Jellyfish Eyes, taking his boundless imagination to the screen in a tale of friendship and loyalty that also addresses humanity’s propensity for destruction.

Chris Marker's _La Jetée_ is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel told in still images.

In her provocative first feature, Chantal Akerman stars as an aimless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend.

After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by a mysterious, diabolical doppelgänger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell—literally. The gory _Jigoku_ created aftershocks that are still reverberating in contemporary world horror cinema.

_Jimi Plays Monterey_ and _Shake! Otis at Monterey_, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker's _Monterey Pop_ companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology.

Jaromil Jireš’s brilliant adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel tells the fragmentary tale of a man expelled from the Communist Party because of a political joke.

Among the most influential films of the postwar era, Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) charts the declining marriage of a couple from England (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) on a trip in the countryside near Naples.

With _Jubilee,_ legendary British filmmaker Derek Jarman channeled political dissent and artistic daring into a revolutionary blend of history and fantasy, musical and cinematic experimentation, satire and anger, fashion and philosophy.

Combining stylish sixties modernism with silent-cinema touches and even a few unexpected sci-fi accents, Judex is a delightful bit of pulp fiction and a testament to the art of illusion.

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession.

Giulietta Masina plays a betrayed wife whose inability to come to terms with reality leads her along a hallucinatory journey of self-discovery in Fellini’s first color feature, a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories.

This Korda brothers film is the definitive version of Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of fables, starring Sabu as Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, who can communicate with all the beasts of the jungle.

A gripping disaster film and a stirring plea for international cooperation, Kameradschaft cemented G. W. Pabst’s status as one of the most morally engaged and formally dexterous filmmakers of his time.

“Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives,” announces a narrator, foretelling the tragedy that unfolds as a war-ravaged company of Home Army resistance fighters tries to escape the Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw. Kanal was the first film about the Warsaw Uprising.

Before he left his mark on cinema forever with the revolutionary _The Battle of Algiers,_ Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo directed this uncompromising World War II drama about a young Jewish woman (Susan Strasberg) in a Nazi concentration camp.

Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan make a miraculous pair in this nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, a film that is, as its opening title card states, “a picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear.”

In this pitch-black action comedy by Kihachi Okamoto, based on the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa’s _Sanjuro,_ a pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute.

Forced out of the U.S. in 1952, Charlie Chaplin lashed back with this scathing satire of everything American—from McCarthyist witch hunts to CinemaScope and rock and roll—as he played his last full role, as a deposed and impoverished monarch seeking refuge in Manhattan (though the film was shot in the United Kingdom).

The King of Kings is the Greatest Story Ever Told as only Cecil B. DeMille could tell it. In 1927, working with one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, DeMille spun the life and Passion of Christ into a silent-era blockbuster.

Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road is about a friendship between two men: Bruno, a.k.a. King of the Road (Rüdiger Vogler), who repairs film projectors and travels along the inner German border in his truck, and the psychologist Robert, a.k.a. Kamikaze (Hanns Zischler), who is fleeing from his own past.

A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller, still one of the greatest feature debuts in film history.

In 1977, acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder entered the universe of the world’s most famous primate to create the entertaining, troubling, and still relevant documentary _Koko: A Talking Gorilla._

In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. Onibaba, Kuroneko (Black Cat) is a spectacularly eerie twilight tale.

After more than a decade of sober political dramas and socially minded period pieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories.

One of the first French films to address the issue of collaboration during the German occupation, Louis Malle’s brave and controversial _Lacombe, Lucien_ traces a young peasant’s journey from potential Resistance member to Gestapo recruit.

Gory revenge is raised to the level of visual poetry in Toshiya Fujita’s stunning Lady Snowblood.

More politically minded than the original, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is full of exciting plot turns and ingenious action sequences.

Pierre Etaix’s most radical film, and perhaps unsurprisingly the one that effectively ended his career in cinema, Land of Milk and Honey is a fascinating investigative documentary about post–May ’68 French society.

In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency.

Bernardo Bertolucci's _The Last Emperor_, about the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated.

Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping character study. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, this is Truffaut’s tribute to art overcoming adversity.

In Peter Weir's _The Last Wave_, Richard Chamberlain stars as Australian lawyer David Burton, who takes on the defense of a group of aborigines accused of killing one of their own.

In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope.

The great actress and Ozu regular Setsuko Hara plays a mother gently trying to persuade her daughter to marry in this glowing portrait of family love and conflict—a reworking of Ozu's 1949 masterpiece _Late Spring_.

One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, _Late Spring_ (Banshun) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter.

Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork.

A delightful cast of British all-stars, including Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, and Roger Livesey, brings to life this precisely cali­brated caper, which was immensely popular and influenced countless Hollywood heist films.

The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise, L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Alain Delon).

The singular French director Maurice Pialat puts his distinctive stamp on the lost-youth film with this devastating portrait of a damaged foster child.

A struggling Siberian rock band leaves the lonely tundra to tour the United States because, as they’re told, “they’ll buy anything there.”

Living in Mexico with a top-ten hit under their belts, the Leningrad Cowboys have fallen on hard times. When they head north to rejoin their manager (Kaurismäki mainstay Matti Pellonpää) for a gig in Coney Island, he has turned into a self-proclaimed prophet.

One of Bergman’s most satisfying marital comedies, A Lesson in Love stars the droll and sparkling duo of Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand as a couple deep into their married years and seeking fresh pastures.

This epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace, starring the astounding Kinuyo Tanaka as an imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution, was the movie that gained the director international attention, ushering in a new golden period for him.

LIGHTNING OVER WATER is a film about the last months in the life of American director Nicholas Ray, who is probably best known for his cult film “Rebel Without a Cause”. Wenders and Ray got to know each other at the set of “The American Friend” and became friends

Charlie Chaplin’s masterful drama about the twilight of a former vaudeville star is among the writer-director’s most touching films. Chaplin plays Calvero, a once beloved musical-comedy performer, now a washed-up alcoholic who lives in a small London flat.

An early work of independent Latin American filmmaking, Limite was famously difficult to see for most of the twentieth century. It is a pioneering achievement that continues to captivate with its timeless visual poetry.

Agnès Varda goes to Los Angeles, taking New York counterculture with her. In a rented house in the sun-soaked Hollywood Hills, a woman and two men delight in one another’s bodies while musing on love, stardom, and politics.

Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman met in 1965 during the filming of Persona. Both were married, and there was a difference in age: Liv was 25, and Ingmar was 47. But none of it mattered.

In this atmospheric tale of revenge from beyond the watery grave, a pirate-ransacked freighter’s violent past comes back to haunt a young woman living in a seaside town.

In Fassbinder’s satiric tribute to capitalism, Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute, launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale.

Jacques Demy’s crystalline debut gave birth to the fictional universe in which so many of his characters would live, play, and love. It’s among his most profoundly felt films, a tale of crisscrossing lives in Nantes.

Max Ophuls’s final film, _Lola Montès_ is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

This exploitation-cinema classic took the action and graphic violence of the Lone Wolf and Cub series to delirious new heights.

In this distinctly lowbrow entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Itto Ogami is hired by the Owari clan to assassinate a tattooed woman who is killing her enemies and cutting off their topknots.

Balancing physical action with Buddhist musings on life and death, the most spiritual of the Lone Wolf and Cub films finds Ogami’s combat skills put to the test by five different warrior-messengers.

The third Lone Wolf and Cub film follows Itto Ogami and Daigoro as they stumble upon a crime scene involving a group of lowlife swordsmen from the watari-kashi class.

The inaugural film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series immediately thrust Itto Ogami into the ranks of the all-time great samurai movie icons.

In the final Lone Wolf and Cub film, star Tomisaburo Wakayama decided to make the sort of wild movie he’d always wanted to: one in which Lone Wolf battles zombies and Daigoro’s baby cart zips improbably across an icy landscape on skis.

Bob Hoskins, in his breakthrough film role, stars as a London racketeer fast losing control of his gangland empire; Helen Mirren shines as his classy moll.

In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding’s legendary novel about the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center.

When Katharina Blum spends the night with an alleged terrorist, her quiet, ordered life falls into ruins. Suddenly a suspect, Katharina is subject to a vicious smear campaign by the police and a ruthless tabloid journalist, testing the limits of her dignity and her sanity.

Crumb director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America.

This story of the tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist (Slobodan Aligrudic) in Belgrade is an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom.

In the luminous final chapter to Rohmer’s "Moral Tales," the bourgeois business executive Frédéric, though happily married to an adoring wife, cannot banish from his mind the multitude of attractive Parisian women who pass him every day. Then arrives Chloé, an audacious, unencumbered old flame.

For his feature debut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla), and his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel).

Antoine Doinel strikes again! In the final chapter of François Truffaut’s saga, we find Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now in his thirties, convivially concluding his marriage, enjoying moderate success as a novelist, and clinging to his romantic fantasies.

A deeply felt and luxuriously filmed fairy tale for grown-ups, _The Lovers_ presents Jeanne Moreau as a restless bourgeois wife whose eye wanders from both her husband and her lover to an attractive passing stranger.

A tender and humorous look at a young woman's journey from the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, _Loves of a Blonde_ immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and earned Milos Forman the first of his Academy Award nominations.

Working with his most celebrated actor, Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa faithfully adapts Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play, keeping the original’s focus on the conflict between illusion and reality.

Jean Renoir’s adaptation of Gorky’s classic proletariat play takes license with the dark nature of its source material, softening the play’s bleak outlook in a reaction to the rise of Hitler and the Popular Front in 1930s France.

A shimmering glass hotel at the top of a remote Provençal mountain provides the setting for a tragicomic tapestry about an obsessive love pentangle, whose principals range from an artist to a hotel manager to a dam worker.

In this bold, genre-defying horror-musical mashup — the playful and confident debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska — a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters are drawn ashore in an alternate '80s Poland to explore the wonders and temptations of life on land.

Peter Lorre stars as serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s harrowing masterwork _M_, a suspenseful panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.

Ingmar Bergman puts his indelible stamp on Mozart’s exquisite opera in this sublime rendering of one of the composer’s best-loved works: a celebration of love, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of man.

Ingmar Bergman's The Magician (Ansiktet) is an engaging, brilliantly conceived tale of deceit from one of cinema’s premier illusionists, a diabolically clever battle of wits that’s both frightening and funny.

A young provincial in search of adventure stumbles into the subterranean world of sadomasochism when he is implicated in a burglary of a Paris apartment in Barbet Schroeder's _Maîtresse_.

Wendy Hiller plays one of George Bernard Shaw’s most memorable and controversial characters, Barbara Undershaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her Christian charity organization.

This graceful study of a family at a turning point in history is a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs, shot in rich, vivid colors.

A romantic deadbeat has a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant in _Mala Noche_, Gus Van Sant's important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and a fascinating capsule from a period and place that continues to haunt its director's work.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s neorealist take on society’s marginalized and dispossessed, Anna Magnani delivers a powerhouse performance as a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son.

Controversial winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, _Man Bites Dog_ stunned audiences worldwide with its unflinching imagery and biting satire of media violence.

With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Robert Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time in A Man Escaped.

Mixing visceral, documentary-like realism with the narrative focus of Hollywood noir and melodrama, Manila in the Claws of Light is a howl of anguish from one of the most celebrated figures in Philippine cinema.

_Man Is Not a Bird_ is an antic, free-form portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor in a copper factory. This is one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts.

Marius and Fanny, two young shopkeepers on the harbor front of Marseille, always seemed destined to marry, but Marius cannot overcome his urge to break free and voyage on the open sea.