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.
On a particularly festive Bastille Day in the City of Light, flower seller Anna (Annabella) and hack driver Jean (George Rigaud) fall in love, and all seems right with the world—until a seductive former girlfriend, Pola (Pola Illéry), returns to Jean’s life.
Wong Kar Wai’s loose sequel to In the Mood for Love combines that film’s languorous air of romantic longing with a dizzying time-hopping structure and avant-sci-fi twist.
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.
After a nine-year absence from the director’s chair, Catherine Breillat returned with 36 fillette, having lost none of her power to push both boundaries and buttons.
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.
The simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final installment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy.
A distant land shrouded in myth and rumor, America looms large in the cultural imagination of a quiet Castilian village, whose impressionable inhabitants dream of benefitting from the country’s postwar plans to aid Europe.
Janus Films is proud to present a touring retrospective spanning Abbas Kiarostami’s nearly five-decade career. This series includes new restorations, undertaken by the Criterion Collection and MK2, of The Koker Trilogy,Taste of Cherry,The Wind Will Carry Us, and rarely screened shorts and documentaries.
In 2000, Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS.
The latest existential epic from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) is a masterclass in moral and philosophical inquiry.
Pier Paolo Pasolini proved himself a radical with his very first feature, in which he courted controversy by applying Catholic iconography and the liturgical music of Bach to a grim neorealist story set in Italian society’s lowest depths.
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.
In his bold yet playful feature debut, and in one of the great overlooked gems of the French New Wave, Jacques Rozier satirizes several major cultural currents of early-60s France: its political blindness, romantic escapism, and commercial corruption.
Trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing slice-of-life drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
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.
While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Paula Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home.
Giving voice to the anguish of a nation fighting for its soul, Usmar Ismail’s AFTER THE CURFEW follows the descent into disillusionment of a former freedom fighter who is unable to readjust to civilian life following the revolution that gave Indonesia its independence from the Netherlands.
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.
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.
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.
Winner of the 1982 Cesar Award for Best Short Film, Les Photos d'Alix is Jean Eustache's playful meditation on the ambiguity of images and the elusiveness of interpretation.
As legions of birds fall from New Delhi's darkening skies, and the city smolders with social unrest, two brothers race to save a casualty of the turbulent times: the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to their city's ecosystem.
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.
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.
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival
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.
In Among Gray Stones, Kira Muratova crafts a dreamlike coming-of-age tale, adapted from a short story by legendary Ukrainian writer Vladimir Korolenko.
During the rehearsals for the production of the tragedy Andromaque, the leading actress and her director, a couple behind the scenes, can't find a way to leave their personal problems at home.
After attempting suicide, a young woman (Amira Casar) makes a startling proposition to the man (Rocco Siffredi) who rescued her: she will pay him to watch her naked body over the course of four nights as long as he provides “impartial” commentary about what he sees.
In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left 30,000 dead, Kiarostami returned to the village of Koker where his camera surveys not only the devastation but the teeming life that continues in its wake.
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 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.
The life, art, and inner world of Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky is explored through the filmmaker’s own words and images in this appropriately hushed and reverent tribute to a cinematic titan.
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.
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 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.
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.
Wong Kar Wai’s scintillating debut feature is a kinetic, hyper-cool crime thriller graced with flashes of the impressionistic, daydream visual style for which he would become renowned.
Shepitko’s emotionally overwhelming final film won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and has been hailed around the world as the finest Soviet film of its decade.
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.
Widely considered Kira Muratova’s masterpiece, The Asthenic Syndrome is also Soviet cinema’s grand avant-comic opus, a deconstructive portrait of the nation in the final, frenzied stages of the communist experiment.
A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding
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.
The warmth and wit of celebrated playwright turned auteur Marcel Pagnol (The Marseille Trilogy) shines through in this enchanting slice-of-life comedy.
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.
Titled after James Baldwin’s assertion that the legacy of slavery is imprinted on his very name and identity, Trinidad-born British director Horace Ové’s provocative documentary captures Baldwin (accompanied by comedian and activist Dick Gregory) lecturing an audience at London’s West Indian Students’ Centre about America’s racist history, its impact on contemporary social divisions and foreign imperialism, and the possibilities for revolutionary resistance against oppression.
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.
No painter electrified the 1980s art scene like Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York street kid whose visionary blending of expressionism, pop art, and the radical new aesthetics of hip-hop and graffiti propelled him to international fame before a tragic early demise.
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.
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.
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting self-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey through her life, career, and artistic philosophy.
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.
Across three different time periods, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with
different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay). Visually audacious director Bertrand
Bonello (Saint Laurent, Nocturama) fashions his most accomplished film to date: a sci-fi
epic, inspired by Henry James' turn-of-the-century novella, The Beast in the Jungle, and
suffused with mounting dread and a haunting sense of mystery.
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.
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time.
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.
Michael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation.
Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the
hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he
attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape
of Weimar-era Germany.
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.
When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure.
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.
Between the international triumphs of La strada and Nights of Cabiria, Federico Fellini made this fascinatingly unique film, which has been long overlooked.
Enter a legend. Bruce Lee’s return to the Hong Kong film industry after a decade in America proved to be his big breakthrough, launching him to instant superstardom and setting a new standard for kung fu heroics.
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.
During planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist of the crop, as well as his femme-fatale-ish girlfriend, played by the Hollywood star Doris Dowling.
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.
One of the first films to herald the arrival of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Miloš Forman’s stylistically inventive debut narrative feature follows the bumbling teenager of the title (Ladislav Jakim) over the course of a directionless summer as he starts (and fails at) a new job, flirts awkwardly, and grows increasingly exasperated with his parents.
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.
Mike Leigh announced himself as a unique, powerful new voice in British cinema with Bleak Moments, a stunning debut and a masterpiece of understated melancholy.
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.
One of the major works of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE is a work of indelible humanity and searing political resonance. Invited to document the progress of postwar Vietnamese society, a Japanese photojournalist (George Lam) initially finds a picture-perfect image of communist contentment.
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.
The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution.
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.
Firebrand auteur Nagisa Ōshima offers a devastating vision of moral rot within postwar Japanese society in the form of a hauntingly sad family tragedy.
The first feature by Leos Carax (made when he was just twenty-three years old) is an intoxicating, lusciously stylized evocation of a nocturnal Paris populated by moody misfits and lost souls.
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.
“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread.
With this landmark debut feature, director Ebrahim Golestan delivered a jolt of modernism to pre-revolution Iranian cinema, laying the groundwork for the country’s first, still often overlooked new wave.
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.
When the patriarch of the Toda family suddenly dies, his widow discovers
that he has left her with nothing but debt and married children who are
unwilling to support her--except for her most thoughtful son, just
returned from China.
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.
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog
desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult
films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to
build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle.
In the last days of World War II, a Japanese platoon sustains morale through the Burma campaign by singing traditional songs, accompanied by the delicate harp-playing of Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui).
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.
Several years after returning to the Czechoslovak film industry from political excommunication, Věra Chytilová crafted one of her finest satires with 1982’s Calamity, a seemingly conventional sex comedy that takes covert aim at the Communist government’s institutional rot.
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.
Reuniting after six years, former university flatmates/current young professionals Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) confront old friends and haunts as they tour London in search of Hannah’s prospective new apartment.
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.
In this modern-day fairy tale and rediscovered Czech New Wave cult classic, an ordinary Bohemian village is visited by a magician (Jan Werich), his beautiful assistant Diana (Emília Vásáryová), and a magic cat with the power to reveal people in colors that indicate their true natures.
Having framed his first two features as seaside holiday films, Rozier used the third, The Castaways of Turtle Island, to mock the tourist industry and the increasingly popular “going native” movement among first-world vacationers.
Michael Haneke's adaptation of Franz Kafka's absurdist novel follows a land surveyor as he struggles with the increasingly difficult and bureaucratic practices of the local authorities.
The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides.
In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father (Makhourédia Guèye), the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith.
The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity.
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.
Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave.
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.
Claire Denis drew on her own childhood experiences growing up in colonial French Africa for her multilayered, languorously absorbing feature debut, which explores many of the themes that would recur throughout her work.
For his acclaimed follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani once again turned his camera on a slice of New York City rarely seen on-screen: Willets Point, Queens, an industrial sliver of automotive-repair shops that remains perpetually at risk of being redeveloped off the map.
An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out of his ear, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him.
Adapted from actress and musician Cristiane Felscherinow’s harrowing account of her teenage years, Cristiane F. depicts the impact of West Berlin’s mid-to-late-70s heroin epidemic on one of its youngest and luckiest survivors.
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.
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.
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.
Directed by the visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-Capped Star tells the story of a family who have been uprooted by the Partition of India and come to depend on their eldest daughter, the self-sacrificing Neeta (Supriya Choudhury).
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.
Ostensibly also a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise.
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.
This widely acclaimed film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a stunning, senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in present-day Belarus, teenage Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko, in one of the screen’s most searing depictions of anguish since Renée Falconetti’s Joan of Arc) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance.
Adapting the acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan, playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter lends his trademark unnerving dialogue and air of creeping menace to this spellbinding study of power, control, and the frighteningly thin line between pleasure and pain.
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.
A landmark of independent cinema, Compensation is Zeinabu irene Davis’s moving, ambitious portrait of the struggles of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of loving relationships at the bookends of the twentieth century.
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.
Art versus commerce, friendship versus status, independence versus conformity—values clash and collide in Edward Yang’s study of an increasingly Westernized country heading into the twenty-first century without moral guideposts.
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.
Czechoslovak New Wave iconoclast Juraj Herz’s terrifying, darkly comic vision of the horrors of the Nazi racial ideology stars a supremely chilling Rudolf Hrušínský as the pathologically morbid Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium director in 1930s Prague who believes fervently that death offers the only true relief from human suffering.
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.
One of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s spellbinding international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of the emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration.
Spending most of her days at home following the birth of her son but curious as ever about the people and places that surrounded her, Agnès Varda found inspiration for Daguerréotypes just outside her door: on Paris’s rue Daguerre, where she had lived and worked since the 1950s.
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.
With its droll humor and bittersweet emotional heft, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Mottola announced the arrival of an unassumingly sharp-witted new talent on the 1990s indie film scene.
Sibling bonds are both rekindled and tested in the achingly alive feature debut from Diana Peralta. Rita (Sasha Merci) and Carolina (Darlene Demorizi), two high-spirited sisters raised in New York, travel to the Dominican Republic to reunite with their estranged brother Dante (Héctor Aníbal) and to clean out their grandparents’ old home before it is sold and knocked down.
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.
Kazuo Hara’s interest in iconoclastic figures living in opposition to mainstream society led him to begin work on A Dedicated Life, an intimate, fly-on-the-wall portrait of the controversial writer Mitsuharu Inoue, a sometimes charming, sometimes combative, often frustrating novelist esteemed as one of postwar Japan’s literary lions.
“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning Demonlover, a postmodern neonoir thriller and media critique in which nothing—not even the film itself—is what it appears to be.
In making DEPRISA, DEPRISA, director Carlos Saura populated his cast with actual denizens of the Madrid streets to tell the story of youth on the edge of doom.
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.
The original Godzilla team of director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited for this kaiju extravaganza, which features no fewer than eleven monsters
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.
Master filmmaker Satyajit Ray explores the conflict between fanaticism and free will in DEVI (“The Goddess”), issuing a subversively modern challenge to religious orthodoxy and patriarchal power structures.
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.
With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave.
One of Hungary’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Márta Mészáros, drew on her own wartime experiences to craft this haunting portrait of a young woman coming of age amidst a turbulent historical moment.
Márta Mészáros’ follow-up to Diary for My Children picks up the story of teenage Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), the director’s alter-ego, as she defies the wishes of her Stalinist aunt (Anna Polony) and leaves Hungary in order to pursue her dream of becoming a filmmaker in Moscow.
The heartrending final installment of Márta Mészáros’ autobiographical Diary trilogy continues to trace the journey of Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), a young orphan, through the tumult of postwar Hungary.
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.
Deceptively simple in form and content, Eustache’s Une Sale Histoire is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal and universal desires.
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.
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom.
Infused with the spirit of rock ’n’ roll and rebellion, this music-driven counterculture snapshot unfolds to a near wall-to-wall soundtrack of late 1960s-early 1970s Hungarian psych and folk as it traces the odyssey of a young woman (Jaroslava Schallerová, star of the Czech New Wave classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) who, on the eve of her marriage to a factory worker (Márk Zala), experiences a final moment of freedom when she runs away with a touring band.
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.
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
Jim JarmuschUnited States,
1986
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
With brash stylistic exuberance, this first feature from Bahram Beyzaie helped usher in the Iranian New Wave. When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Mr. Hekmati finds that he is a fish out of water.
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.
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).
Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima.
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.
Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival, Metin Erksan’s wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops.
A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/ romance.
Adapted by Anthony Harvey from the controversial one-act play by Amiri Baraka, and nominated for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, the British independent feature Dutchman remains as provocative today as it was in 1966.
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.
The first Godzilla film directed by Jun Fukuda, who would go on to direct four more, is fast-paced and light in tone, and builds to a riveting race-against-time finale.
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).
A long unsung landmark of Finnish cinema, inspired by actual events, Eight Deadly Shots is the magnum opus of writer-producer-director-actor Mikko Niskanen.
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.
Childhood friends Pietro and Bruno experience maturity, loss, and the rediscovery of an unbreakable connection when they reunite in adulthood to build a cabin on the rugged slopes of the Italian Alps.
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.
For his feature debut, twenty-four-year-old Louis Malle brought
together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative
cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles
Davis.
In ELISA, VIDA MÍA (“Elisa, My Dear”), Carlos Saura explores one of his recurring obsessions—interplay between past and present, memory and reality—through a spellbinding portrait of a complex father-daughter relationship.
Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II.
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.
Eustache’s final film – commissioned for the French television series Contes Modernes (Modern Tales) – is a sharp satire of contemporary man’s dehumanization at the hands of specialized psychology.
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.
The singular French director Maurice Pialat puts his distinctive stamp on the lost-youth film with this devastating portrait of a damaged foster child.
“Life is a beastly mess,” states the great Laurence Olivier in this
superb drama of the seedy music-hall life. He plays Archie Rice, a
third-rate vaudevillian whose song-and-dance routines are crusty,
unappealing, and decidedly boring.
One of the seminal films of the surrealist art movement, ENTR’ACTE (1924) brought together three of the great French artists of its time: Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, and René Clair.
With his first film in seven years, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End, Moonlighting) directs one of his most free and visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a nomadic gray donkey named EO.
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.
As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness.
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.
Luis García Berlanga’s penultimate film is a raucous screwball satire in which a prison in Valencia hosts an event recognizing the political prisoners jailed during Franco’s reign.
In the rural alpine hamlet of Mizubiki, not far from Tokyo, Takumi and his daughter, Hana, lead a modest life gathering water, wood, and wild wasabi for the local udon restaurant.
This masterpiece of black humor, beloved in Spain but too little seen elsewhere, threads a scathing critique of Franco-era values through a macabre farce about an undertaker who marries an executioner’s daughter and reluctantly takes over her father’s job so the family can keep their government-allotted apartment.
The kung fu crusaders known as Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung), Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh), and Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) return in this gritty, postapocalyptic sequel to the blockbuster Hong Kong action hit The Heroic Trio.
Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and assistant in a photographer’s studio, running errands, and, briefly, exchanging glances with a pretty middle-class girl.
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.
When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship.
Visionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (The Story of Film: An Odyssey) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists.
Mark CousinsUnited Kingdom,
2018
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
A triumph at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, the revelatory debut feature from codirectors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nigeria.
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.
Orson WellesUnited States,
1975
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN, Karel Zeman conjures the adventures of the legendary, boastful baron, whose whirlwind exploits take him from the moon to eighteenth-century Turkey to the belly of a whale and beyond.
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.
Kazakh New Wave director Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar is a hypnotic epic about one of world history’s crucial military battles. In the early thirteenth century, Genghis Khan conquered Otrar, a major city in the old Persian kingdom of Khwarazm and a gateway to the West.
Béla Tarr’s debut feature—undertaken when the director was a twenty-two-year-old student at Balázs Béla Studio—is a raw, unflinching social drama that exposes Hungary’s broken domestic culture as well as the Communist regime’s byzantine policies.
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.
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.
In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents.
Kiarostami’s fascination with both Tehrani car culture and the uses of power in postrevolutionary society combine in this documentary about a traffic officer assigned to enforce driving restrictions in central Tehran (a locale near the director’s office at Kanoon).
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.
Rozier’s final film is a joyful compendium of his major themes and strategies as well as one of the funniest depictions of the theater ever committed to celluloid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Miloš FormanCzechoslovakia,
1967
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
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.
Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mind-set.
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems.
Bruce Lee is at his most awe-inspiringly ferocious in this blistering follow-up to his star-making turn in The Big Boss, which turned out to be an even greater success than its predecessor.
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.
One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone
An epic, lyrical ode to videographers who raise the quotidian to the highest levels of art, André Bonzel’s Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By (2021) is a personal and historical exploration of the home movie in all its unvarnished glory.
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.
An intoxicating, time-bending experience bathed in the golden glow of oil lamps and wreathed in an opium haze, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous period reverie traces the romantic intrigue, jealousies, and tensions swirling around a late 19th century Shanghai brothel, where the courtesans live confined to a gilded cage, ensconced in opulent splendor yet forced to work to buy back their freedom.
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.
Kinuyo Tanaka’s third film as a director tells the story of Fumiko Nakajo, an ill-fated female tanka poet whose life was brought to a premature end by breast cancer. S
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.
The rarely screened Four Nights of a Dreamer is Robert Bresson’s great forgotten masterpiece, a stark yet haunting ode to romantic idealism and the capriciousness of love.
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.
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.
Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, FUNNY GAMES spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men.
Released five years after Bruce Lee’s death, this eccentrically entertaining kung fu curio combines footage from an unfinished project directed by and starring Lee with original material shot by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse to create an entirely new work that testifies to the actor’s enduring place in the pop culture imagination.
Following a car accident, a megawealthy businessman (José Luis López Vázquez) is left paralyzed and with no memory of who he is or of anything connected to his previous life—including the number to a certain secret Swiss bank account.
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.
Written and directed by George Stevens Jr., GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER’S JOURNEY is a moving portrait of the life and work of one of the greatest Hollywood filmmakers of the twentieth century.
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.
After laying waste to an alien civilization on Venus, the three-headed, lightning-emitting space monster Ghidorah brings its insatiable thirst for destruction to Earth, where fierce foes Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra must join forces in order to deal with the unprecedented threat.
Jim Jarmusch combines his love for the ice-cool crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki with the philosophical dimensions of samurai mythology for an eccentrically postmodern take on the hit-man thriller.
Jim JarmuschUnited States,
1999
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The first Hungarian film directed by a woman, Márta Mészáros’ debut feature is an assured expression of many of her recurring themes: broken families, the relationships between parents and children, and the search for stability in an uncertain world.
Mai Zetterling’s cinema reached new heights of exuberant experimentation and fierce political engagement with this pointed and playful touchstone of 1960s feminist cinema.
Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the ever-curious French cinema icon explores the little-known world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who survive by foraging for that which society throws away.
Agnès Varda’s charming follow-up to her acclaimed documentary The
Gleaners and I is a deceptively unassuming grace note that takes us deeper
into the world of those who find purpose and beauty in the refuse of society.
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.
The struggle between the strictures of religion and our own brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychological epic from director Hlynur Pálmason.
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.
Toho Studios followed the enormous success of the original Godzilla with this sequel, efficiently directed by Motoyoshi Oda as a straight-ahead monsters-on-the-loose drama.
An alien invasion prompts a tag-team battle between Godzilla and Anguirus, the planet protectors, and King Ghidorah and the new monster Gigan, a cyborg with scythe-like claws, an abdominal buzz saw, winglike back fins, and pincerlike mandibles.
Intended to address the crisis levels of pollution in postwar Japan, Godzilla vs. Hedorah finds the King of the Monsters fighting an alien life form that arrives on Earth and steadily grows by feeding on industrial waste.
Godzilla’s evil twin Mechagodzilla first reared its head in this Jun Fukuda–directed film. A robot designed by aliens to conquer Earth, the enduringly popular villain has since been resurrected by Toho Studios several times.
Nuclear testing unleashes mayhem on the undersea kingdom of Seatopia, causing a series of environmental disasters that nearly wipes out Rokuro, the schoolboy protagonist at the center of this film.
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.
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.
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).
The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of cinematic visionary Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love and survival in the age of late capitalism.
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.
An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider.
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.
Les Grandes Manoeuvres is a wonderfully autumnal work from Rene Clair -- it was also his first film in color, and he uses the production design and the story, coupled with the range of available hues to impart a dreamlike quality to plot, a romantic escapade by a vain military officer on the eve of World War I. Michele Morgan (Passage To Marseilles, The Chase) is the object of Gerard Phillipe's affections in this wistful tale of a world and an era gone by.
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.
Éric Rohmer captures the ache of summertime sadness with exquisite poignancy in this luminous tale of self-exploration, the fifth film in his Comedies and Proverbs cycle.
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.
Years before L’avventura, his international breakthrough, Michelangelo Antonioni crafted his first masterpiece with Il grido, a raw expression of anguish that remains one of Italian cinema’s great underappreciated gems.
“Guelwaar” is the nickname of Pierre Henri Thioune (Thierno Ndiaye), a political radical and agitator whose criticism of Senegal’s reliance on foreign aid ruffles the feathers of the powers-that-be.
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts.
Like In the Mood for Love, The Hand is set in the hazy Hong Kong of the 1960s, but its characters couldn’t be more different from the earlier film’s restrained, haunted lovers.
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.
A powerful affirmation of the immersive potential of cinema, HAPPY HOUR is a slow-burning epic chronicling the emotional journey of four thirtysomething women in the misty seaside city of Kobe, Japan.
One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again.
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.
When a soldier returns home at the end of World War II, he refuses to
forgive his wife for prostituting herself one night in order to pay off
medical bills after their son's sudden illness.
In this psychologically rich character study, written and directed by Satyajit Ray, Bengali film star Uttam Kumar draws on his real-world celebrity to play Arindam Mukherjee, a matinee idol on the brink of his first flop.
The supernova star power of Hong Kong cinema icons Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh, and Anita Mui propels this gloriously unrestrained action extravaganza from genre maestro Johnnie To, which injects its martial-arts mayhem with a blast of comic-book lunacy.
French television series Les enthousiastes asked art afficionados to offer their thoughts and interpretations about paintings that they themselves selected.
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.
A darkly comic portrait of late Thatcher-era London, High Hopes examines the different lives of a pair of siblings: Cyril (Philip Davis), a caustic motorcycle courier who takes pride in his working class roots, and Valerie (Heather Tobias), a high-strung aspirant to upper-middle class materialism.
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.
In Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there
Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband Pedro (Per Oscarsson) live comfortably in an ultramodern brutalist home that is suddenly upended when she inherits a trove of old furniture from her family.
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.
The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzād finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony where inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from the rest of the world.
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.
Evidently the first installment in a series that didn’t continue, this instructional film shows idle twelve- and sixteen-year-old brothers learning how to improve their surroundings by painting an old door.
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.
Carlos Saura’s international breakthrough is a tour de force of psychological tension in which three men, all veterans of the Spanish Civil War, reunite in the village of Castille for a day of drinking and rabbit hunting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A visionary work of Eastern Bloc science fiction, this mesmerizing Czechoslovak adaptation of a novel by Stanisław Lem melds Cold War ideology and utopian futurism into a tour de force of space-age modernism.
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death.
This heartrendingly compassionate tragedy from Rainer Werner Fassbinder traces the final days in the life of Elvira (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman spurned by her former lover, as she reaches out desperately for understanding.
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.
Wong Kar WaiHong Kong,
2000
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Initially conceived as one third of a triptych about food, In the Mood for Love was expanded into a stand-alone feature that won immediate recognition as a modern-day classic.
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.
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.
Two of Hong Kong cinema’s most iconic leading men, Tony Leung and Andy Lau, face off in the breathtaking thriller that revitalized the city-state’s twenty-first-century film industry, launched a blockbuster franchise, and inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.
The first of two sequels to follow in the wake of the massive success of Infernal Affairs softens the original’s furious pulp punch in favor of something more sweeping, elegiac, and overtly political.
Tony Leung and Andy Lau return for the cathartic conclusion of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which layers on even more deep-cover intrigue while steering the series into increasingly complex psychological territory.
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.
Part crime thriller, part family farce, Louis Garrel's The Innocent shows with panache and pathos the dangerous lengths two men go, and the outlandish lies they tell, for the women they love.
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.
Something of a late-career companion to 8½,Federico Fellini’s penultimate film is a similarly self-reflexive (and self-deprecating) journey through both the director’s dream life and his cinematic world—which are, here as always in Fellini’s work, inextricably entwined.
One of the most beloved films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, this digressive, easygoing slice of life takes place over the course of a weekend in a provincial town where a musician returns, along with his glamorous lover, to visit an old friend.
Aliens from Planet X make an irresistible offer to the people of Earth: let them borrow Godzilla and Rodan to help defeat King Ghidorah, and in return they will provide a cure for all known human disease.
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.
French cinema firebrand Leos Carax has spent 40 years making galvanizing movies that float in the beautifully perplexing nether space between reality and artifice, from Boy Meets Girl (NYFF23) and Lovers on the Bridge (NYFF30) to Holy Motors (NYFF50) and the recent musical Annette.
En route to his wedding, Fadinard (Albert Préjean) parks alongside a country lane, where his horse chews on the hat of a married woman (Olga Chekhova) engaging in a tryst with a solemn, decorated lieutenant (Geymond Vital).
Navigating the deadly waters of Stalinist politics, Eisenstein was able
to film two parts of his planned trilogy about the troubled
sixteenth-century tsar who united Russia.
Navigating the deadly waters of Stalinist politics, Eisenstein was able
to film two parts of his planned trilogy about the troubled
sixteenth-century tsar who united Russia.
Agnès Varda’s tender evocation of the childhood of her husband, Jacques Demy—a dream project of his that she realized when he became too ill to direct the film himself—is a wonder-filled portrait of the artist as a young man and an enchanting ode to the magic of cinema.
The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin.
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.
In this preternaturally assured feature debut by Carlos Reygadas, a man (Alejandro Ferretis) travels from Mexico City to an isolated village to commit suicide; once there, however, he meets a pious elderly woman (Magdalena Flores) whose quiet humanity incites a reawakening of his desires.
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.
Based on a novel by the legendary Marcel Pagnol, JEAN DE FLORETTE is (alongside MANON OF THE SPRING) the first installment in a rich, engrossing epic of greed and deception set amid the bucolic splendor of the Provence countryside.
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.
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.
Even in this early work, Tati was brilliantly toying with the devices (silent visual gags, minimal yet deftly deployed sound effects) and exploring the theme (the absurdity of our increasing reliance on technology) that would define his cinema.
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.
A beguiling mix of natural history and science fiction, this early feature by Karel Zeman follows four schoolboys on an awe-inspiring expedition back through time, where they behold landscapes and creatures that have long since vanished from the earth.
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 riot of ecstatic imagery, performance, and set design, the only film by the visionary dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar is a revolutionary celebration of Indian dance in its myriad varieties and a utopian vision of cultural renewal.
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.
The only film among Kenji Misumi’s seventy-plus titles to feature a contemporary setting, Ken explores the conflict between ancient traditions and modern values in a Japanese society torn from its roots.
Raizô Ichikawa plays the reluctant warrior to perfection in Kenki, the final installment of Kenji Misumi's “Sword Trilogy” and, as adapted from another Renzaburô Shibata novel, a brazenly unique hybrid of the samurai, supernatural, and romance genres.
Seeking to invigorate the American documentary format, which he felt was rote and uninspired, Robert Drew brought the style and vibrancy he had fostered as a Life magazine correspondent to filmmaking in the late fifties. He did this by assembling an amazing team—including such eventual nonfiction luminaries as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—that would transform documentary cinema.
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.
An epic chanbara (sword fighting film) in compact form, Kiru depicts the life of Shingo Takakura (Raizô Ichikawa), a master samurai with a mysterious past and an unvanquishable combat technique.
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.
Made concurrently with Agnès Varda’s portrait of Jane Birkin, Jane B. par Agnès V.,Kung-Fu Master! is a true family affair, achieving a sense of of lived-in intimacy by casting the actor’s real-life relatives, including daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, as themselves.
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.
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.
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.
With her first film in a decade, the fearless 75-year-old French auteur Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, The Last Mistress) proves she’s as provocative as ever with her Cannes-stirring film, which drives down the dark road of uncontrollable passion.
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.
Having chronicled the heady abandon of adolescence in COLD WATER, renowned French auteur Olivier Assayas turned his attention to another in-between stage of life: the moment when the seemingly endless possibilities of young adulthood begin to give way to the anxieties of middle age.
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.
Set along the Turkish-Syrian frontier, this terse, elemental tale of smugglers contending with a changing social landscape brought together two giants of Turkish cinema.
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.
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.
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.
Director René Clair’s last silent feature, adapted from another Eugène Labiche play, is one his finest comic adventures. Young lawyer Fremissin (Pierre Batcheff) must overcome his debilitating meekness in order to win the hand of the beautiful Cecile (Véra Flory), who has been betrothed against her will to the bestial Garadoux (Jim Gérald), his former legal client.
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.
The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent.
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.
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.
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.
Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is a university graduate, and the husband
of a woman of some means, but he has rejected middle class dreams, and
operates a candy stall at the local flea market.
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.
Peter BrookUnited Kingdom,
1963
DCP, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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).
Released a year after the American occupation of Japan ended, Tanaka’s directorial debut explores the professional and personal conflicts of Reikichi (Masayuki Mori), a repatriated veteran who searches for his lost love (Yoshiko Kuga) while translating romantic letters from Japanese women to American GIs.
In 1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini took to the streets of Italy, armed with a camera and microphone, to interview a cross section of ordinary Italians about their attitudes towards sex and sexuality.
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 film about the tragic love of Ogin who is the daughter of a master of the Japanese tea ceremony (Sado), Sen no Rikyu and a Christian Samurai lord Takayama Ukon, based on a novel by Kon Toukou.
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.
Leos Carax’s delirious saga of l’amour fou burns with an intoxicating stylistic freedom as it traces the highs and lows of the passionate relationship that develops between a homeless artist (Juliette Binoche) who is losing her sight and a troubled, alcoholic street performer (Denis Lavant) living on Paris’s famed Pont-Neuf bridge.
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.
The title of Mai Zetterling’s boldly iconoclastic debut feature—adapted from a cycle of seven novels by the provocative feminist writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna—drips with irony. In 1915, three pregnant women from varying social backgrounds (Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gio Petré) enter a maternity ward.
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 breathtaking vision of Cuban revolutionary history wrought with white-hot intensity, Humberto Solás’s operatic epic tells the story of a changing country through the eyes of three women, each named Lucía. I
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.
Investigating revolutionary Patrice Lumumba's brief tenure as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the machinations behind his shocking assassination, legendary Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck discovers critical flashpoints where a nation's officially curated narratives intersect with repressed truths.
Raoul PeckCongo, The Democratic Republic of the,
1991
DCP, Blu-ray
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.
The themes, images, and cultural vernacular of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz continue to haunt David Lynch’s filmography—from his early short The Alphabet to his recent television series Twin Peaks: The Return.
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.
Ingmar BergmanSweden,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Edward Yang’s penultimate film is an acerbic, sprawling tragicomedy, a poison love letter to Taipei as a rising cosmopolis of big money, big dreams, and big cons. Once more focusing on directionless youth, Yang depicts the four immature toughs who share the same apartment and, frequently, the same women.
By land, by sea, by air . . . In Rozier’s quirkiest comedy, a Brazilian dancer’s (Rosa-Maria Gomes) invalid train ticket for a journey from Paris to Saint-Nazaire sparks a shaggy dog story that encompasses the adventures of a quick-tempered boatman (Yves Afonso), his highfalutin attorney (Lydia Feld), a scheming talent agent (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), and several other memorable characters as they converge and disperse via various modes of transportation throughout a series of unpredictable coincidences.
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.
Adapted from Belgian mystery master Georges Simenon’s 1934 novel and codirected by Tarr’s wife, Ágnes Hranitzky, The Man from London centers on everyman railway operator Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), whose observation tower affords him a godlike view of the dockside terminus.
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.
A modest miracle of twenty-first-century neorealism, the acclaimed debut feature by Ramin Bahrani speaks quietly but profoundly to the experiences of those living on the margins of the American dream. Back in his home country of Pakistan, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi, elements of whose own life story were woven into the script) was a famous rock star.
When a man chases down his stolen movie camera, the thief commits
suicide by jumping off a building. But after the police take the camera
as evidence, it becomes unclear if there was ever a thief in the first
place.
This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans.
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.
The second installment in the sprawling rural tragedy that began with JEAN DE FLORETTE, MANON OF THE SPRING follows a beautiful but shy shepherdess (Emmanuelle Béart) as she plots vengeance on the men whose greedy conspiracy to acquire her father’s land caused his death years earlier.
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.
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vančura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence.
After her husband disappears in the last days of World War II, Maria uses her beauty and ambition to prosper in 1950s Germany. The first part of Fassbinder’s “postwar trilogy” is a heartbreaking character study as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.
With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and one another.
A pair of blind masseurs, an enigmatic city woman, a lonely man and his ill-behaved nephew—The Masseurs and a Woman is made up of crisscrossing miniature studies of love and family at a remote resort in the mountains.
Brought pristinely to the screen by Jonathan Demme, this compellingly abstract reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Bygmester Solness features Shawn (who also wrote the adaptation) as a visionary but tyrannical middle-aged architect haunted by figures from his past,
Before he turned to the story of Joan of Arc, the Danish cinema genius Carl Theodor Dreyer fashioned this ahead-of-its-time examination of domestic life.
Kati Outinen is memorably impenetrable as Iris, whose grinding days as a cog in a factory wheel, and nights as a neglected daughter living with her parents, ultimately send her over the edge. The Match Factory Girl closes out the “Proletariat Trilogy” with a bang—and a whimper.
With this giddily romantic, exquisitely stylized sophomore feature, Leos Carax cemented his status as one of the boldest filmmakers of his generation. In a world ravaged by STBO, a sexually transmitted disease only acquired by people having sex without any emotion, a rebellious young man (Denis Lavant) is recruited by a veteran criminal (Michel Piccoli) to steal the antidote.
A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher’s England, Mike Leigh’s Meantime was the culmination of the writer-director’s pioneering work in television.
One of the first Cuban films to achieve significant success abroad, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s intimate and densely layered Memories of Underdevelopment is a landmark work of the country’s cinema.
The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint.
In this anguished yet mordantly funny film, Fassbinder charts the decline of a self-destructive former policeman and war veteran struggling to make ends meet for his family by working as a fruit vendor.
In this captivating, skewed World War II drama from Nagisa Oshima, David Bowie regally embodies the character Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. This was one of Oshima’s greatest successes.
Nagisa OshimaUnited Kingdom,
1983
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity.
By turns charming and inventive, René Clair’s lyrical masterpiece about the journey of a winning lottery ticket had a profound impact on not only the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin but the American musical as a whole.
Once upon a time in postwar Italy . . . Vittorio De Sica’s follow-up to his international triumph Bicycle Thieves is an enchanting neorealist fairy tale in which he combined his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy.
Looking for ways to boost the local economy, leaders in the village of Fuentecilla set their hopes on a medicinal spa that was once a popular destination but has since fallen on hard times.
A senses-ravishing odyssey through the halls of time and memory, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime reflection on 20th century Russian history is as much a film as it is a poem composed in images, as much a work of cinema as it is a hypnagogic hallucination.
Hailed by film critics around the world as the greatest screen adapation of Victor Hugo's mammoth nineteenth-century novel, Raymond Bernard's dazzling, nearly five-hour Les misérables is a breathtaking tour de force, unfolding with the depth and detail of its source.
The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller.
Paul Schrader's visually stunning, collagelike portrait of acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted an impossible harmony between self, art, and society.
Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg's visually innovative, Cannes Grand Prix-winning adaptation of August Strindberg's renowned 1888 play brings to scalding life the excoriating words of the stage's preeminent surveyor of all things rotten in the state of male-female relations.
The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South are blended and simmered into a rich and fragrant fusion feast in Mira Nair’s luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot.
A decade after he broke through with BREAKER MORANT, Australian director
Bruce Beresford made another acclaimed film about the effects of
colonialism on the individual.
Described by director François Truffaut as “my first real film,” this exuberant, freewheeling short set the stage for the cinematic revolution of the French New Wave.
In 1977 France, the Ministry of the Future chooses two 'normal,' white, middle-class citizens, Claudine (Anémone) and Jean-Michel (André Dussolier), for a national experiment.
Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Paulette Goddard).
The Moment of Truth, from director Francesco Rosi, is a visceral plunge into the life of a famous torero—played by real-life bullfighting legend Miguel Mateo, known as Miguelín.
Mon oncle is a supremely amusing satire of mechanized living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
Bob Hoskins (who snagged an Oscar nomination for his performance) plays George, a small-time loser employed as a chauffeur to an enigmatic, high-class call girl in writer-director Neil Jordan’s brilliant, noir-infused love story.
On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the first Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new
era of rock and roll.
Devised by the Directors Guild of Japan, “The Moon Has Risen” is based on a screenplay jointly written by Yasujiro Ozu and Ryosuke Saito, and is Kinuyo Tanaka’s second feature film as a director.
An art-house sensation that paved the way for a wave of gritty addiction dramas, Barbet Schroeder’s feature debut is a sublimely fatalistic portrait of 1960s counterculture imploding.
This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet it anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.
One of the best and most literate movies from the great days of horror, The Most Dangerous Game stars Leslie Banks as a big-game hunter with a taste for the world’s most exotic prey—his houseguests.
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois.
After her husband kills his boss and himself, Mother Kusters becomes
drawn into the activities of the German Communist party and then a group
of anarchists.
Godzilla faces off against the benevolent insect monster-god Mothra in this clash of the titans, a crossover battle between two of Toho Studios’ most popular monsters—the last in which Godzilla would figure as a malevolent villain rather than a fearsome hero
Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. Bresson’s hugely empathetic drama is an essential work of French filmmaking.
Shimizu’s endearing road movie follows the long and winding route of a sweet-natured bus driver—nicknamed Mr. Thank You for his constant exclamation to pedestrians who kindly step out of his path—traveling from rural Izu to Tokyo.
David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.
David LynchUnited States,
2001
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
John Waters’ gloriously grotesque, unavailable-for-decades second feature comes to theaters at long last, replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema’s most memorably blasphemous moments.
Japanese golden-age greats Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine star in this rich melodrama centered on two sisters: the reserved, traditional Setsuko (Tanaka), unhappily married to an alcoholic wastrel, and the liberated, modern-minded Mariko (Takamine), who tries to shake up her sister’s life by reconnecting her with her old flame (Ken Uehara).
After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city.
Alain Resnais’s Muriel, or The Time of Return, the director’s follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad, is as radical a reflection on the nature of time and memory as its predecessor.
Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed Murmur of the Heart gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.
An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India’s most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker.
For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the conventions of period romance.
Jean-Pierre Gorin’s gripping and unique film about a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, is, like other works by the filmmaker, a probing look at a closed community with its own rules, rituals, and language.
Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between.
Louis MalleUnited States,
1981
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
My Life as a Dog is the story of Ingemar, a working-class twelve-year-old sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. There, with the help of the warmhearted eccentrics who populate the town, the boy finds both refuge from his misfortunes and unexpected adventure.
Jean Eustache’s second and final narrative feature, My Little Loves, follows Daniel (Martin Loeb) as he navigates the bewildering world of early adolescence.
In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, a pious Catholic engineer who unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, where his rigid ethical standards are challenged.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game.
Made with its director’s customary precision and wit, Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train is a triptych of stories that pay playful tribute to the home of Stax Records, Sun Studio, Graceland, Carl Perkins, and, of course, the King himself, who presides over the film like a spirit.
Jim JarmuschUnited States,
1989
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The third installment in Luis García Berlanga’s trilogy about the (mis)fortunes of the once wealthy, now destitute Leguineche family follows the Marquis of Leguineche (Luis Escobar) as he is forced to sell his palace in Madrid and move in with his son.
The brilliant and controversial Naked, from director Mike Leigh, stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter.
Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin's dazzling police procedural The Naked City was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir.
The setup is pure pulp: A former prostitute (a crackerjack Constance Towers) relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit in with mainstream society.
Robert Flaherty’s classic film tells the story of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family as they struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay region.
In early September three young Parisians – Caroline (Caroline Cartier), her cousin Kareen (Françoise Guégan), and Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) – travel to the sparsely populated oceanside town of Orouët for a carefree holiday.
Zatoichi is back—and in color! Hoping to leave violence behind, the blind masseur wanders to a village, where he meets an old friend fallen on hard times.
Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of New York City in the 1970s is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.
One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Alain Resnais' documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.
Outrageous and explosively controversial (the Venice Film Festival refused to screen it publicly, while John Waters has called it his favorite film), Mai Zetterling’s second feature is a blazing psychosexual odyssey with heaving Freudian flourishes.
Shot outside of Pittsburgh at a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood feature by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is one of the great stories of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time.
Five cities. Five taxicabs. Jim Jarmusch's lovingly askew view of humanity from the passenger seat makes for one of his most charming and beloved films.
Jim JarmuschUnited States,
1991
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In this unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna.
A defiant woman asserts her autonomy in the face of a disapproving society in Márta Mészáros’ complex look at the ways in which women’s bodies and minds are held in check by the strictures of patriarchy.
One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite his oppression at the hands of the Iranian government.
In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim the daughter she abandoned years before.
In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, who transforms herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist during a tumultuous decade in Japanese history.
Nobody’s Children is the first half of an overflowing diptych of melodramas chronicling the labyrinthine misfortunes of a couple torn cruelly apart by fate (and meddling villains).
In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father. À nos amours is one of Maurice Pialat's greatest achievements.
This “diary film,” as director Wim Wenders calls it, investigates the similarities of filmmaking craft to that of the Tokyo-based fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.
In Luchino Visconti’s exquisite Dostoyevsky adaptation, Marcello Mastroianni is a lonely city transplant and Maria Schell is a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise who meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion.
One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair's À nous la liberté tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old jail pal Emile) to upset his carefully laid plans.
Before paying homage to his grandmother Odette Robert in the autobiographical My Little Loves, Eustache made Numéro Zéro, a documentary portrait in which Robert answers questions about her difficult Bordeaux upbringing, contentious marriage, and traumatic wartime experiences.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s immortal tragedy blends eras, cultures, and influences to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves.
Carlos Saura returns to the potent themes of trauma and repression that run through nearly all of his 1970s films that deal, in one way or another, with the psychological effects of authoritarianism.
Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of contemporary American cinema’s most independent artists.
Writer-producer-director Tsui Hark’s sprawling vision of a changing nineteenth-century China begins with this riotously entertaining epic, a blockbuster hit that cemented Jet Li’s status as the greatest martial-arts superstar of his generation.
Having chronicled the social upheaval wrought by Western influence in the opening chapter of the Once Upon a Time in China series, Tsui Hark turned his attention to the perils of unchecked nationalism in his sensational follow-up, the rare sequel to equal the dizzying highs of its predecessor.
Jet Li’s third outing as the storied martial-arts hero Wong Fei-hung is an exhilarating celebration of Chinese culture peppered with a dash of international espionage.
A celebration of cinema’s centennial, One Hundred and One Nights finds Agnès Varda at her most playful. It is also perhaps her unlikeliest project: a star-studded comic fantasy with an extravagant sense of style and an adoring but slightly off-kilter perspective on the magic of filmmaking.
The only feature from the radical Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez—who also worked as an assistant director with Agnès Varda and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea before her untimely death at age thirty-one—is an extraordinary portrait of post-revolution Cuba.
This affectionate paean to young love is also a frank examination by Akira Kurosawa of the harsh realities of postwar Japan. During a Sunday trip into war-ravaged Tokyo, Yuzo and Masako look for work and lodging, as well as affordable entertainments to pass the time.
In Kaneto Shindo’s chilling folktale, a mother and her daughter-in-law eke out a desperate existence in the lonely marshes of war-torn medieval Japan. When a neighbor returns from the skirmishes, lust, jealousy, and rage—and a horrifying fate at the hands of an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask—ensue.
Yasujiro Ozu’s first talkie, the uncommonly poignant The Only Son is among the Japanese director’s greatest works, a simple story about a good-natured mother who gives up everything to ensure her son’s education and future.
In Carl Dreyer's Ordet, a farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter.
Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival.
Two bruised souls enact a tender, hesitant romance in Shimizu’s alternately poignant and playful wartime love story. A soldier is waylaid at a rural spa when he accidentally cuts his foot on the titular object. Soon enough he tracks down its lovely owner and finds himself smitten.
Jean Cocteau’s update of the Orpheus myth depicts a famous poet (Jean Marais), scorned by the Left Bank youth, and his love for both his wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa), and a mysterious princess (Maria Casarès).
Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director's often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father.
After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation.
This wry, melancholic comedy from Aki Kaurismäki, a clear-eyed response to the current refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a place to call home.
Expanding The Family Nest’s investigations of domestic dysfunction and despair, The Outsider marks Béla Tarr’s maturation as a chronicler of the manifold ways that social pressure deforms individual aspirations.
Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage with a fictional narrative, this immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-Day brings to life all the terrors and isolation of war with jolting authenticity.
Stuart CooperUnited Kingdom,
1975
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan, which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley.
In this cool, seductive jewel of the Japanese New Wave, a yakuza, fresh out of prison, becomes entangled with a beautiful and enigmatic gambling addict; what at first seems a redemptive relationship ends up leading him further down the criminal path.
Suffused with a lingering post–World War II disillusionment while also evincing the playfulness and fascination with theatrical performance and conspiracy that would become hallmarks for the director, Paris Belongs to Us marked the provocative start to a brilliant directorial career.
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball scene.
Eiffel Tower nightwatchman Henri Rollan descends to the streets one morning to discover the city frozen in time by a mad scientist: a taxi driver is caught mid-gear shift; a gendarme has dozed off with his hand outstretched to nab a pickpocket; a person on the brink of suicide is frozen in a dive toward the Seine.
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard.
The first of many films featuring the endearing single-dad Kihachi (played wonderfully by Takeshi Sakamoto), Passing Fancy is a humorous and heartfelt study of a close, if fraught, father-son relationship.
A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation of a number of years in the life of a family introduces us to both little Apu and, just as essentially, the women who will help shape him.
Luis García Berlanga takes aim at the decadence of the Spanish ruling class in this irreverent ensemble comedy, the second of three popular comedies the director made about the noble Leguineche family.
Saul J. Turell's Academy Award-winning documentary short Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces his career through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, "Ol' Man River."
Sacha Guitry plays four roles in this whirlwind of pageantry investigating the history of seven pearls, four of which end up on the crown of England and three of which go missing. The Pearls of the Crown rockets through four centuries of European history with imaginative, winking irreverence.
A manifesto of sorts for the Czech New Wave, this five-part anthology shows off the breadth of expression and the versatility of the movement’s directors.
People on Sunday, an effervescent, sunlit silent, about a handful of city dwellers (a charming cast of nonprofessionals) enjoying a weekend outing, offers a rare glimpse of Weimar-era Berlin, would influence generations of film artists around the world.
Pépé le moko is a wanted man: women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam, Pépé is safe from the clutches of the police, until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life. Pépé le moko is a landmark of poetic realism.
he first of Carlos Saura’s many collaborations with Geraldine Chaplin is a darkly comic psychological thriller that casts the actor in a VERTIGO-esque double role as both the glamorous, unattainable object of a rigidly conservative physician’s obsession and the unassuming nurse he attempts to make over in her image.
Catherine Breillat traces the shockingly violent disintegration of a May-December affair in Perfect Love, arguably her most realistic and disturbing study of romance gone wrong.
By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry.
Based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, this extraordinarily rich and innovative silent classic (which inspired Ingmar Bergman to make movies) is a Dickensian ghost story and a deeply moving morality tale, as well as a showcase for groundbreaking special effects.
Louis Malle called his gorgeous and groundbreaking Phantom India the most personal film of his career. And this extraordinary journey to India, originally shown as a miniseries on European television, is infused with his sense of discovery, as well as occasional outrage, intrigue, and joy.
Academy Award–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke shifted his focus from the social to the psychological for this riveting study of female sexuality and the dynamics of control, an adaptation of a controversial 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek.
A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers.
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema.
Peter WeirAustralia,
1975
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Co-directing with Jean-Michel Barjol, Eustache creates for Le Cochon a cinéma vérité record of a farming community's ritual slaughter of a pig in Pessac, the filmmaker's rural hometown.
A dazzling, unruly portrait of postwar Japan, Pigs and Battleships details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. The film is shot in gorgeously composed, bustling cinemascope.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black and white.
With its bracing blend of unflinching realism and aching humanity, Héctor Babenco’s electrifying look at lost youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society helped put the country’s cinema on the international map.
Widely considered one of the greatest works of Spanish cinema, this relentlessly paced satire chronicles an ill-advised charity campaign sweeping across a small industrial town on Christmas Eve.
Max Ophuls brings his astonishing visual dexterity and storytelling bravura to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure.
One of the first masterpieces of twenty-first century cinema, Jia Zhangke’s sophomore feature is an at once epic and intimate vision of the changing China of the 1980s.
A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry satire from Robert Altman.
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PlayTime, a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
A corrupt businessman blackmails the lovelorn reprobate Atsushi into watching over his suitcase full of embezzled cash while he serves a jail sentence. Rather than wait for the man to retrieve his money, however, Atsushi decides to spend it all in one libidinous rush.
A Poem Is a Naked Person is a work of rough beauty that serves as testament to Les Blank’s cinematic daring and Leon Russell’s immense musical talents.
Agnès Varda's discursive, gorgeously filmed debut—a graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village—was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the coming French New Wave.
The jaw-dropping set pieces fly fast and furious in Jackie Chan’s breathtakingly inventive martial-arts comedy, a smash hit that made him a worldwide icon of daredevil action spectacle.
Jackie Chan followed up the massive success of Police Story with an even bigger box-office hit. Having been demoted to a lowly traffic cop for his, ahem, unorthodox policing methods, Chan’s go-it-alone officer Ka-Kui quits the force in protest.
Perfect strangers Marie (Bulle Ogier) and Baptiste (Bulle’s daughter Pascale Ogier) run into each other three times on an otherwise ordinary day in Paris and decide that fate has brought them together.
Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family in controversial director Shohei Imamura’s comic treatment of voyeurism and incest.
Berit, a suicidal young woman living in a working-class port town, unexpectedly falls for Gösta, a sailor on leave. Haunted by a troubled past and held in a vice grip by her domineering mother, Berit begins to hope that her relationship with Gösta might save her from self-destruction.
When young Domenico ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company in Ermanno Olmi's tender coming-of-age story.
Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home.
Buddy Red Bow is struggling, in the face of persecution, by greedy
developers and political in-fighting, to keep his nation on a Montana
Cheyenne Reservation financially solvent and independent.
Horace Ové’s fiction-film debut marks a watershed in the history of British cinema: the nation’s first feature to be written and directed by a Black filmmaker and the first to focus on the perspective of Black characters.
Staking out territory on the cold winter streets of midtown Manhattan, West African immigrant Lucky (Prince Adu) uses the gift of gab and a hustler’s shrewdness to peddle designer knockoffs for Lebanese store owner Levon (Karren Karagulian).
The most acclaimed film by one of classic Argentine cinema’s foremost directors, Mario Soffici’s gut-punching work of social realism, shot on location in the dense, sweltering jungle of the Misiones region, simmers with rage against the oppression of workers.
Charles Laughton gulps beer and chomps on mutton, in his first of many iconic screen roles, as King Henry VIII, the ultimate anti-husband. Alexander Korda’s first major international success is a raucous, entertaining, even poignant peek into the boudoirs of the infamous king and his six wives.
La promesse is the breakthrough feature from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who would go on to become a force in world filmmaking. This is a brilliantly economical and observant tale of a boy’s troubled moral awakening.
Jean Vigo was twenty-five when he made this, his debut film, a silent cinematic poem that reveals, through a thrilling and ironic use of montage, the economic reality hidden behind the facade of the Mediterranean resort town of Nice.
This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by the versatile René Clément, stars Delon as Tom Ripley, a duplicitous American charmer in Rome.
Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a "proper lady" in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.
A sparkling four-way affair overflowing with dialogue that showcases writer-director Sacha Guitry’s wit, Quadrille stars Guitry as a magazine editor whose longtime girlfriend—to whom he plans to finally propose—is uncontrollably drawn to a handsome American movie star.
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Akira KurosawaJapan,
1950
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Filmed in 1976 but not released until 2000, A Real Young Girl is Catherine Breillat’s taboo-busting directorial debut and one of the boldest explorations of female sexuality ever committed to celluloid.
Albert Lamorisse’s exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris.
A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director (Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa).
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events. Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.
In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen), one worker’s terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers.
Charles Laughton once again teams up with Korda for this moving, elegantly shot biopic about the Dutch painter. Beginning when Rembrandt’s reputation was at its height, the film then tracks his quiet descent into loneliness and isolated self-expression.
In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, Anna, an accomplished filmmaker (played by Aurore Clément), makes her way through a series of European cities to promote her latest movie.
The rare early Kiarostami film made outside of Kanoon, and one of the most downbeat of his features, this adult drama concerns a civil servant besieged on two fronts: he’s accused of taking bribes, and his marriage is collapsing (Kiarostami has admitted this latter element was autobiographical).
In Jan Němec’s surreal fable, a picnic is rudely transformed into a lesson in political hierarchy when a handful of mysterious authority figures show up.
This raw psychological drama about an engineer unable to adjust to the world around him following his suicide attempt is at heart a scathing portrait of social alienation and moral compromise.
The four films Man Ray directed between 1923 and 1929, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L'Étoile de mer and Les Mystères du Château du Dé represent a high watermark of early European avant-garde cinema, a seminal nexus of experimental technique, surrealist narrative, and playful abstraction as suffused with dark eroticism.
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann, a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption.
A child is raised in Korea to avenge the death of his father’s first child in this decades-spanning tale of obsession and violence, the third collaboration between director Ermek Shinarbaev and writer Anatoli Kim.
Marta Mészáros explores class, gender, and generational conflict in Riddance, which stars Erzsébet Kútvölgyi as Jutka, a young factory worker who pretends to be a university student.
Working from a thoughtful script by Jack Nicholson, Monte Hellman fashioned this moody and tense western about a trio of cowhands who are mistaken for robbers and must outrun and hide from a posse of bloodthirsty vigilantes in the wilds of Utah.
A quick-witted and compelling dramatization of the troubled marriage of Catherine II (played by German actress Elisabeth Bergner, in her English-language debut) to Peter III (a randy Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and her subsequent ascension to the throne as Empress of Russia.
In one of Ingmar Bergman’s most stylized and political films, three traveling actors are accused of taking part in a performance deemed pornographic by the state’s authorities.
Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold.
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal
Jean Eustache's second narrative short continued to cement the template for his subsequent fictions: a portrait of emotionally immature men on the prowl for female companionship.
In one of Luis García Berlanga’s gentlest comedies, an aging American scientist (Oscar winner Edmund Gwenn) goes incognito, trading in his career as a prominent atomic-bomb expert for a tranquil retirement on the Mediterranean coast.
This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II.
Forty years after Wim Wenders asked leading filmmakers at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival to offer their thoughts on the future of cinema in his documentary Room 666, Lubna Playoust poses the same question—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—to a new generation of directors.
The Belgian filmmaking team of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne turned heads with ROSETTA, an intense vérité drama that closely follows a poor young woman struggling to hold on to a job to support herself and her alcoholic mother.
An epic masterwork of the silent era, Abel Gance’s La roue has in recent years been restored to its complete original form: a four-part, nearly seven-hour melodrama that reaches the heights of Greek tragedy.
Cantopop superstars Anita Mui Yim-fong and Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing display their iconic androgynous magnetism as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering queer melodrama master Stanley Kwan.
What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lovely and distinctly American film.
Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners.
Jean RenoirFrance,
1939
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A man receives a breakup letter from his sweetheart, who sends him back his photo, in pieces. The pained lover decides to reply. Fountain pen, penholder, desk, stamps, paper, and inkwell all contrive diabolically to thwart him.
In Toshio Masuda’s smash Rusty Knife, Yujiro Ishihara and fellow top Nikkatsu star Akira Kobayashi play former hoodlums trying to leave behind a life of crime, but their past comes back to haunt them when the authorities seek them out as murder witnesses.
The rare Kanoon film that doesn’t involve children, this unusual road movie was made during the revolution and afforded Kiarostami what may have been a welcome escape from the capital.
The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin is the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is the perfect introduction to him.
While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses—then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. A landmark American documentary.
The true story of the death of Italy’s most wanted criminal and celebrated hero, Francesco Rosi’s groundbreaking political film is a startling exposé of Sicily and the tangled relations between its citizens, the Mafia, and government officials.
Hired by a yakuza boss to eliminate an accused debtor, Zatoichi fulfills his task, only to witness the victim’s sister paying the owed amount minutes later. When the crime lord tries to possess the woman along with the cash, the blind swordsman wrestles with the injustice he has caused.
A revolutionary bombshell by one of Africa’s first female directors, Sarah Maldoror’s electrifying chronicle of Angola’s awakening independence movement is a stirring hymn to those who risked everything in the fight for freedom.
A disillusioned Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) has turned his back on the samurai life, becoming a farmer in a remote village, while his nemesis Kojiro (Koji Tsuruta) now works for the shogun.
Toshiro Mifune stars as an aging swordsman in director Masaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, the gripping story of a peaceful man who finally decides to take a stand against injustice.
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil.
Paul Robeson moved his family to London in 1928, headlining six British films in twelve years. Robeson's first British production, Zoltán Korda's Sanders of the River, however, ended up an embarrassment, its story of an African tribal leader transformed into a celebration of the British Empire.
In Kurosawa's sly companion piece to Yojimbo, jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a "proper" samurai on its ear.
A complex journey into time and memory, Chris Marker’s mind-bending free-form travelogue roams from Africa to Japan, guided by associative editing and an unnamed narrator.
Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original.
Under Kenji Mizoguchi’s dazzling direction, this classic Japanese story became one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, a monumental, empathetic expression of human resilience in the face of evil.
French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud stars in Jean Eustache’s third narrative short as Daniel, a thief, schemer, and would-be ladies’ man who loafs around Paris with his ne’er-do-well friends in search of easy money and pretty young women.
“Today we fight to uphold our dignity and leave a name!” After filming the Brechtian musical spectacle West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, Mauritanian French director Med Hondo shifted to a more realistic, epic style to adapt Abdoulaye Mamani’s Sarraounia, a historical novel about the Battle of Lougou that unflinchingly depicts the horrors of colonial occupation and conflict.
A famous poet who hasn't written a word in two years unconsciously
plagarizes the work of Stefan George, he comes to believe he is the
reincarnation of the dead writer.
The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner and his performer girlfriend, Ingmar Bergman's film features dreamlike detours and twisted psychosexual power plays that presage the director's Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal.
A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides.
A trademark Cronenberg combination of the visceral and the cerebral, this phenomenally gruesome and provocative film about the expanses and limits of the human mind was the Canadian director’s breakout hit in the United States.
Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partners.
An expert observer of unembellished humanity, writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy with this exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships.
Shotgun weddings, kidnapping, attempted murder, emergency dental work—the things Don Vincenzo will do to restore his family's honor! Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned was the follow-up to his sensation Divorce Italian Style, and in many ways it's even more audacious.
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories.
One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits.
Akira KurosawaJapan,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction.
Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.
Ingmar BergmanSweden,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Catherine Breillat’s behind-the-scenes account of shooting Fat Girl stars Anne Parillaud as Breillat surrogate Jeanne, a director intent on getting her film’s most intimate sequence just right.
Lonely garbageman Nikkander (Matti Pellonpää) finds himself directionless after losing his friend and co-worker to a sudden heart attack; unlikely redemption comes in the form of plain supermarket cashier Ilona (Kati Outinen), with whom he begins a tentative love affair.
Widely considered the most important film in the history of Ukranian cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is a masterwork that boldly combines folkloric pageantry, fairy tale mysticism, and frenetic, hallucinatory cinematography.
Seeking a Pulitzer Prize, reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) has himself committed to a mental hospital to investigate a murder. As he closes in on the killer, insanity closes in on him. Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor masterfully charts the uneasy terrain between sanity and madness.
One of the greatest achievements in the cinematic revolution known as Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine stands as a timeless masterpiece of trenchant social observation and stirring emotional humanism.
The legendary midnight movie sensation that firmly embedded samurai mythology within American pop culture consciousness, this English-dubbed reedit of the first two films in the classic Japanese chanbaraseries Lone Wolf and Cub is a giddily entertaining, mesmerizingly gory classic of East-meets-West grindhouse mayhem.
Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair.
In this eerie, existential western directed by Monte Hellman and written by Carole Eastman, Warren Oates and Will Hutchins play a bounty hunter and his sidekick who are talked by a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) into leading her into the desert on a murkily motivated revenge mission.
An inept Czech peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and tragedy fuse in this scathing exploration of one cowardly man’s complicity in the horrors of a totalitarian regime.
A shocking, powerful film expanded from episode V of Kieslowski's legendary Decalogue, A Short Film About Killing considers societal violence in its many forms through the story of an idealistic young lawyer and the brutal murderer he is called to defend.
An expanded version of episode VI in Kieslowski's legendary Decalogue, this film examines love, longing and sex through the story of a young postal worker who spies on a promiscuous woman in an adjacent housing project.
New 2K digital restorations of six short films by Lynch: Six Men Getting Sick (1967), The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970), The Amputee, Version 1 and Version 2 (1974), and Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995),
Regarded as one of the most sexually provocative films of its day, Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence follows two sisters as they travel by train with Anna’s young son to a foreign country seemingly on the brink of war.
Jean-Pierre Melville began his superb feature filmmaking career with this powerful adaptation of an influential underground novel written during the Nazi occupation of France.
Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel’s wicked and wild take on the life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God.
Four sexually hungry high school students prepare for their university entrance exams in Oshima’s hypnotic, free-form depiction of generational political apathy, featuring stunning color cinematography.
A stylish paean to female destructiveness, De Palma’s first foray into horror voyeurism is a stunning amalgam of split-screen effects, bloody birthday cakes, and a chilling score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.
The independent, unsentimental Omocha and her sister, the more tradition-minded Umekichi, are both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi's film is an uncompromising look at the forces that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater, presents a day in the life of a loose-knit Austin, Texas, subculture populated by eccentric and overeducated young people.
French filmmaker Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin) never shied away from dipping his toes in the fanciful, but A Slightly Pregnant Man takes a full dive into the delightfully absurd.
In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to navigate the laws of attraction. During a weekend in the country, the women collude to force the men’s hands in matters of the heart.
Suspended between carefree youth and the harsh realities of the adult world, a teenage girl experiences an unsettling awakening in this haunting vision of innocence lost.
The first of Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi.
Truffaut made The Soft Skin at a time when he was immersing himself in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and that master’s influence can be felt throughout this complex, insightful, and underseen French New Wave treasure.
With Solaris, the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky created a brilliantly original science-fiction epic that challenges our conceptions about love, truth, and humanity itself.
A furious howl of resistance against racist oppression, the debut from Mauritanian director Med Hondo is a bitterly funny, stylistically explosive attack on Western capitalism and the legacy of colonialism.
In director Jun Fukuda’s second Godzilla outing, secret weather-control experiments create a radioactive storm and Godzilla must rescue monster hatchling Minilla from the giant mutant insects that result.
Legendary Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne explore loss, grief, resentment, and forgiveness in The Son, the crown jewel of their more than thirty-year career.
The ultimate Italian road comedy, Il sorpasso stars the unlikely pair of Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant as, respectively, a waggish, freewheeling bachelor and the straitlaced law student he takes on a madcap trip from Rome to Tuscany.
Italian cinema dream team Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against glamorous type and deliver two of the finest performances of their careers in this moving, quietly subversive drama from Ettore Scola.
Widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive is a visually arresting, bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life.
One of the most immersive and rarefied experiences in the history of cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker embarks on a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape.
In the sun-saturated San Fernando Valley, adult-film star Jane, a.k.a. Tess Steele (Dree Hemingway), hits the jackpot when she discovers several thousand dollars inside a thermos purchased at an elderly woman’s yard sale.
The State of Things is Wim Wenders’s highly personal film about filmmaking in Europe and America. It is about a film crew stranded at the westernmost tip of Europe.
Despite its relatively low budget, this portrait of Korean War soldiers dealing with moral and racial identity crises remains one of Samuel Fuller's most gripping, realistic depictions of the blood and guts of war, as well as a reflection of Fuller's irreducible social conscience.
Jean-Pierre Léaud returns in the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually love-struck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he embarks on a series of misadventures.
One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the early 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survivein the face of persecution.
This fleet, witty picaresque about a gambler and petty thief is a whimsical delight. Guitry himself stars as the tricheur looking back fondly on a life of crime, which he narrates with an effervescence matched by that of the film's skillful editing and cinematography.
In Seijun Suzuki's tragic love story, Harumi, volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate.
Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into a segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the language, and wrote a number of books in French, one of which, La permission, would become his stylistically innovative feature debut.
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 1934 silent classic.
Federico Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naive girl sold into the employ of a brutal strongman in a traveling circus, in this poetic fable of love and cruelty, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Based on the filmmaker’s own story, The Stranger involves a bourgeois couple who are taken off guard when a man claiming to be the wife’s long-lost uncle sends word that he will be coming to stay with them after years of travel.
Legendary Iranian New Wave director Bahram Beyzaie’s sophomore feature possesses both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream.
With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch's one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, Stranger Than Paradise, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema.
When a pickpocket steals a rookie detective’s gun on a hot, crowded bus, the cop goes undercover in a desperate attempt to right the wrong. Kurosawa’s thrilling noir probes the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.
For his final film, Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to bear on the heartbreaking tale of a brothel in Tokyo’s red light district, full of women whose dreams are constantly being shattered by the socioeconomic realities surrounding them.
Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.
Seattle, 1984. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: homeless and runaway teenagers living on the city’s margins
A dangerous love triangle comes into focus as, over the course of one fateful day, a possessive industrialist (Fernando Cebrián), his unfaithful wife (Geraldine Chaplin), and his flirtatious best friend (Juan Luis Galiardo) embark on a road trip from Madrid to the coast of Spain—who among them will make it back alive?
The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island.
Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery.
Inspired by the earthy eroticism of Harriet Andersson, in the first of her many roles for him, Ingmar Bergman had a major international breakthrough with this sensual and ultimately ravaging tale of young love.
Ingmar BergmanSweden,
1953
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In David Lean’s visually enchanting Summertime, Katharine Hepburn plays a lonely American spinster whose dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome—but married—Italian man while vacationing in Venice.
Ten years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Víctor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida García Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war.
In Rohmer's second “Moral Tale,” Bertrand bides his time in a casually hostile and envious friendship with college chum Guillaume. But when ladies’ man Guillaume seems to be making a play for the spirited, independent Suzanne, Bertrand watches bitterly with disapproval and jealousy.
Juan (Iñaki Aierra), a playwright obsessed by his torrid family history, attempts to work through the unresolved issues of his past by staging an autobiographical play entitled “Sweet Hours.”
With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Makavejev’s cult staple Sweet Movie is a full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching.
A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, after he walked away from a contract with Columbia in order to make his next film on his own terms.
Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature, Sweetie, which focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, Sweetie.
Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune star in the story of a wandering samurai who exists in a maelstrom of violence. A gifted swordsman plying his craft during the turbulent final days of shogunate rule in Japan, Ryunosuke (Nakadai) kills without remorse or mercy.
Legendary swordplay filmmaker Hideo Gosha's Sword of the Beast chronicles the flight of the low-level swordsman Gennosuke, who kills one of his ministers as part of a reform plot. His comrades then turn on him and, his sense of honor shaken, he decides to live in the wild, like an animal.
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making.
Edward Yang’s mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present illuminates the precariousness of domestic life and the desperation of Taiwan’s globalized modernity.
At the beginning of Seijun Suzuki’s taut and twisty whodunit, a prison truck is attacked and a convict inside is murdered. The penitentiary warden on duty, Daijiro (Michitaro Mizushima), is accused of negligence and suspended, only to take it upon himself to track down the killers.
The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s raw, vérité Take Out, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggling to get by on the margins of post-9/11 New York City.
The concluding installment of the “Tales of the Four Seasons” tetralogy is a breezy take on the classic American romantic comedies that influenced Rohmer and his New Wave peers.
In the first film of “Tales of the Four Seasons,” a burgeoning friendship between philosophy teacher Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) and pianist Natacha (Florence Darel) is strained by jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue.
Zatoichi is hired to give a massage to a powerful political official who, he discovers, is mentally ill—a secret that the nobleman’s retinue is determined to keep at any cost.
Middle-aged Mr. Badii drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, searching for someone to rescue or bury him, in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami’s emotionally complex meditation on life and death.
With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, Richardson’s classic is a still startling benchmark work of realism.
As she roams the streets of Tehran in her car, a recently divorced woman (Mania Akbari) chauffeurs a rotating cast of passengers, from her combative young son to a heartbroken wife abandoned by her husband to a defiant young sex worker going about her job.
One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical
provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian
earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic
exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness.
In Godzilla’s last gasp of the Showa era, aliens retrieve Mechagodzilla’s remains and rebuild it with the aid of an unhinged biologist (a scenery-chewing Akihiko Hirata), in hopes of defeating Godzilla for possession of planet Earth.
In Fritz Lang’s landmark of mystery and suspense, Berlin’s star detective must connect the fragmented clues of an insane criminal mastermind’s last will: a manifesto establishing a future empire of crime.
A lost-and-found revelation from indie film and TV maverick Jan Oxenberg is a docu-fantasy narrative focused on the filmmaker’s hilarious, messy, Jewish family as they prepare to say goodbye to someone they love.
Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, That Hamilton Woman is a gripping account of the scandalous adulterous affair between the British Royal Navy officer Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) and the renowned beauty Emma, Lady Hamilton (Vivien Leigh).
In noirish darkness, a man commits a shocking robbery. But, as we soon learn, this seeming criminal mastermind is actually a sensitive everyman driven to desperation by the need to provide for his family.
In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth.
A TV crew from Tehran arrives in a remote Kurdish village to film an unusual funeral ceremony but are stymied when the old woman they expect to die clings to life.
Yasujiro Ozu’s frequent leading man Chishu Ryu is riveting as Shuhei, a widowed high school teacher who finds that the more he tries to do what is best for his son’s future, the more they are separated.
Among the first Japanese films to deal directly with the scars of World War II, this drama about a group of rank-and-file Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity was adapted from the diaries of real prisoners.
Prince Ahmad, cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place and the heart of a princess in Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, an eye-popping special-effects pioneer and one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made.
A landmark collaboration between writer H. G. Wells, producer Alexander Korda, and designer and director William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come is a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s follow-up to his international breakthrough THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN is a wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.
Kurahara adapted a novel by Yukio Mishima for Thirst for Love (Ai no kawaki), a tense psychological drama about a young woman who is widowed after marrying into a wealthy family.
In the devastating first film of the Three Colors trilogy, Juliette Binoche gives a tour de force performance as Julie, a woman reeling from the tragic deaths of her husband and young daughter.
Krzysztof Kieślowski closes his Three Colors trilogy in grand fashion with an incandescent meditation on fate and chance, starring Irène Jacob as a sweet-souled yet somber runway model in Geneva whose life intersects with that of a bitter retired judge, played by Jean‑Louis Trintignant.
The most playful and also the grittiest of Kieślowski’s Three Colors films follows the adventures of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant living in France. White is both a dark comedy about the economic inequalities of Eastern and Western Europe and a reverie about twisted love.
A trio of bumbling young men frolic at the beach. While they swim, their clothes are stolen and replaced with new outfits. Donning these, they are mistaken for undocumented Koreans and end up on the run from comically outraged authorities.
This enchanting Czech Christmas classic has become a Central European yuletide staple thanks to its perennial presence on television each holiday season.
Set in the impoverished back alleys of Victorian London, The Threepenny Opera follows underworld antihero Mackie Messer (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) as he tries to woo Polly Peachum and elude the authorities. Set to Kurt Weill's irresistible score, this film remains a benchmark of early sound cinema.
A vivid, visceral Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan.
Winner of the 1962 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly presents an unflinching vision of a family’s near disintegration and a tortured psyche further taunted by God’s intangible presence.
A highly unconventional romance that came on the spike heels of Almodóvar’s international sensation Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this is a splashy, sexy central work in the career of one of the world’s most beloved and provocative auteurs.
In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarfs.
Directed by visionary science-fiction animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) and designed by the legendary Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius) The Time Masters is a visually fantastic foray into existentialist space adventure.
The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it’s a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk’s message of hope and equality to a wider audience.
Robert EpsteinUnited States,
1984
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The Tin Drum, is Volker Schlöndorff’s visionary adaptation of Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s acclaimed novel, characterized by surreal imagery, arresting eroticism, and clear-eyed satire.
Thirty years in the making, Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell continues to follow one of the most indelible subjects of Streetwise, a groundbreaking documentary on homeless and runaway teenagers.
An orchestra violinist's dreams of becoming a celebrated soloist and fears of his own mediocrity get in the way of his marriage to the patient, caring Marta in Ingmar Bergman's heartbreaking To Joy.
ederico Fellini’s loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” stars Terence Stamp as an alcoholic actor who suffers from disturbing visions.
Low wage–earning dad Okajima is depending on his bonus, and so are his wife and children, yet payday doesn't exactly go as planned. Exquisite and economical, Yasujiro Ozu's film alternates between brilliantly mounted comic sequences and heartrending working-class realities.
In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is thwarted when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang.
A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu.
“My journey to Tokyo was no pilgrimage. I was curious to see if I could discover something from this time, whether something was left of his work, images perhaps, or people, even . . . Or if in the twenty years since Ozu’s death so much had changed in Tokyo that there was nothing left to be found.” —Wim Wenders
This spirited picaresque, evocatively shot in England’s rambling countryside and featuring an extraordinary ensemble cast, was a worldwide sensation, winning the Oscar for best picture on the way to securing its status as a classic of irreverent wit and playful cinematic expression.
TOMBOY tells the story of ten-year-old Laure (played by the amazing Zoé Héran) who moves to the suburbs and decides to pass as a boy among the pack of neighborhood kids.
In 1934, Jean Renoir stepped off
the soundstage and headed to the South of France where he captured vivid human
drama amidst the bucolic splendor and everyday social rituals of the Provence
countryside.
Though much of this film is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and school before he falls prey to tooth woes.
The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in director Mike Leigh’s extraordinary dramatization of the staging of the duo’s legendary 1885 comic opera The Mikado.
From two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Two Days, One Night) comes the story of two immigrants struggling to survive on the margins of society.
Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay was for the great Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg's Torment, a dark coming-of-age drama about a boarding-school senior, Widgren, terrorized by his sadistic Latin teacher.
Anna flees her home, where she has been victimized for years by her spineless father’s mean-spirited second wife, to be with her lover, an honest businessman yet to make his fortune. When he is accused of a murder he didn’t commit, the couple’s domestic tranquillity is upended.
Aki Kaurismäki’s film of the Leningrad Cowboys’ massive concert in Helsinki’s Senate Square with the 150-member Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble is a loving tribute to the rock band he made famous.
With his underappreciated first English-language film, a relationship drama shot near his island retreat of Fårö, Bergman delivered a compelling portrait of conflicting desires.
In King Hu’s grandest work, Yang (Hsu Feng), a fugitive noblewoman at risk of being captured and executed, hides in a small village and then must escape into the wilderness with a shy scholar and two aides. There, the quartet face a massive group of fighters and are joined by a band of Buddhist monks surprisingly skilled in the art of battle.
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's free-ranging assault on consumer capitalism and the establishment left tells the story of a wildcat strike at a sausage factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand).
A hot summer evening in Brussels: couples dance in bars and cafés, part outside homes, or escape together under the darkness of night; some discover or reignite romance, some end it, while still more grasp tightly to each other in the last moments of dying love.
In 1971, Norman Mailer, fresh from the controversy over his essay
“The Prisoner of Sex” and the backlash it received from leaders of the
women’s movement, convened with four prominent feminist thinkers and
activists—Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana
Trilling—at Manhattan’s Town Hall for a zeitgeist-defining battle of
wills and wits.
In this, his final outing, Hulot is employed as an auto company’s director of design, and accompanies his new product (a “camping car” outfitted with absurd gadgetry) to an auto show in Amsterdam.
Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is intimate in scale but epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.
An assignment from the Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession.
Adapted from selected stories by Arkady Koshko, The Tuner is Muratova’s pitch-black con-artist comedy as well as a veritable masterclass in slow-burn spontaneity Capitalizing on an overheard conversation, low-tier schemer Andrey (Georgiy Deliev) disguises himself as a piano tuner to access the apartment of Anna (Alla Demidova), a wealthy older woman.
A lifetime officer and an educated scion of an old military family battle each other to win the loyalties of a peacetime Scottish battalion. Ronald Neame’s portrayal of the rigid hierarchy of military life also examines the institutional contradictions and class divisions of English society.
One of Japan’s most popular and enduring classics, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes is an elegant, emotional chronicle of a teacher’s unwavering commitment to her students, her profession, and her sense of morality.
In the town of Twin Peaks, everyone has their secrets—but especially Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder.
Aided by the marvelous, impressionist-styled images of cinematographer Nestor Almendros and a swooning score by Georges Delerue, François Truffaut transforms his second adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché (author of Jules and Jim) into an overwhelming sensory experience.
The maverick Hollywood stylist André de Toth sharpened his craft in his native Hungary, where he directed five films, including this chic, dynamically paced melodrama studded with deco decor and jazzy musical interludes.
Two women, each at a critical crossroads in life and love, find refuge in their friendship with one another in this multilayered look at female solidarity.
This simple moral tale seems to prefigure Where Is the Friend’s House? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury.
In a bustling Mexican household, seven-year-old Sol is swept up in a whirlwind of preparations for the birthday party for her father, Tona, led by her mother, aunts and other relatives.
By the time he made Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other directors of a younger generation.
Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through the lilting songs of the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
In René Clair's irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.
John Huston's ambitious tackling of Malcolm Lowry's towering, “unadaptable” novel Under the Volcano follows the final day in the life of self-destructive British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force), on the eve of World War II.
In this musical melodrama set against the backdrop of a workers’ strike in Nantes, Dominique Sanda plays a young woman who wishes to leave her brutish husband (Michel Piccoli) for an earthy steelworker (Richard Berry), though he is involved with another.
One of the first great films of the twenty-first century, Jia Zhangke’s third feature (and his first shot on digital) sets an arresting tale of disaffected youth against the backdrop of a changing China.
In order to enable his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau) to see, Dr. Farber (Max von Sydow) invents a process that makes it possible to transmit the images recorded in the brains of sighted people directly into the visual systems of blind people. Farber’s son Sam (William Hurt) sets out on a journey around the world in order to “see” and record the various stations of his mother’s life for her. The Frenchwoman Claire (Solveig Dommartin) falls in love with him and sets out in pursuit of him. She, in turn, is followed by the author Eugene (Sam Neill), who is recording her adventure.
In making a film based on the life of a renowned eighteenth-century painter and woodblock portraitist, the great Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi created one of his most autobiographical statements on the artistic process as well as another of his trenchant observations about the place of women in Japanese society.
A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream.
Barbet Schroeder’s mesmerizing follow-up to More returns to themes of counterculture rebellion and experimentation—this time on a grand, almost mythic scale.
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result is nearly unclassifiable. Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.
A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation draws the attention of her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a clinically diabolical mind.
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career.
Made in collaboration with Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini’s directorial debut unfolds amid the colorful backdrop of a traveling vaudeville troupe whose quixotic impresario (Peppino De Filippo) is tempted away from his faithful mistress (Giulietta Masina) by the charms of an ambitious young dancer (Carla Del Poggio).
Director Shohei Imamura turns this fact-based story—about the seventy-eight-day killing spree of a remorseless man from a devoutly Catholic family—into a cold, perverse, and at times diabolically funny examination of the primitive coexisting with the modern.
The lush and breathtaking beauty of the Alps, filmed with painterly grace under natural light from frigid winter to redemptive spring, provides the physical and emotional backdrop for Vermiglio, Maura Delpero’s visionary film, which won the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet Veronika Voss lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. She meets a sportswriter, and the two develop an unlikely relationship. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, Veronika Voss is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama.
Basil Dearden’s unmistakably political taboo buster was one of the first films to address homophobia head-on, a cry of protest against British laws forbidding homosexuality.
Rarely screened in the United States and long due for rediscovery, Victims of Sin is famed Mexican director Emilio Fernández’s unique blend of film noir, melodrama, and musical.
This deadpan tragicomedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris is among the most beguiling films by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
Containing more than two thousand cuts and a wealth of inventive widescreen compositions, this coolly fragmented character study is a mesmerizing investigation of criminality and social decay.
Eleven years after the first La Rosière de Pessac, Jean Eustache filmed another documentary about his hometown’s annual coronation of a young woman of upstanding moral integrity.
As political and social tumult rocked France in May and June of 1968, Jean Eustache used his first documentary to focus on persistent tradition in the form of a centuries-old ceremony in his hometown of Pessac.
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden.
Novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism. Luis Buñuel’s irreverent vision of life as a beggar’s banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece.
Two strangers dressed as minstrels (Arletty and Alain Cuny) arrive at a castle in advance of court festivities—and are revealed to be emissaries of the devil, dispatched to spread heartbreak and suffering. Their plans, however, are thwarted by an unexpected intrusion: human love.
Vivre sa vie was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. Anna Karina plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute.
Four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route—a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.
This was the Japanese master’s first true homage to American crime movies, and it is a fleetly told, expressively shot work of humor and emotional depth.
A young sister and brother are abandoned in the harsh Australian outback and must learn to cope in the natural world, without their usual comforts, in this hypnotic masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg.
Nicolas RoegUnited Kingdom,
1971
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.
The 1992 presidential election was a triumph not only for Bill Clinton but also for the new breed of strategists who guided him to the White House—and changed the face of politics in the process.
The anarchic descent into amoral madness that is The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no kisetsu) sounded a lost generation’s cry for help and was one of the films that kicked off Japan’s cinematic sixties with a bang.
Cheryl Dunye made cinematic history with The Watermelon Woman, the first American feature to be directed by a black lesbian as well as an incisive, humorous critique of classic Hollywood's racist stereotypes.
This is a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits under terrible threat from modern forces.
After the back to back triumphs of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, Bruce Lee was given the chance to write, produce, and direct his third outing as a martial arts superstar.
In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who want to borrow a new suit to wear on a social outing before it’s turned over to its owner.
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.
One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance.
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour—a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern postwar Ginza district, and entertains businessmen after work.
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing trilogy of films set in the northern Iranian village of Koker takes a premise of fable-like simplicity—a boy searches for the home of his classmate whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday.
In The White Angel, Raffaello Matarazzo’s sequel to his blockbuster Nobody’s Children, the perpetually put-upon Guido and Luisa (Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson) return for a new round of trials and tribulations.
In the south of France, in a vast plain region called the Camargue, lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him.
After nearly a decade as American Vogue's most subversive fashion photographer, William Klein made this wild, pseudovérité incursion into the world of Parisian haute couture.
Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death.
Ingmar BergmanSweden,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In 1981, Jessie Maple became one of the first African American women to direct an independent film with this raw, unflinching portrait of heroin addiction and recovery. Shot on location in Harlem, Will stars Obaka Adedunyo as the title character, a former All-American basketball star who has fallen from grace because of his dependence on junk.
Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. "Wings of Desire" forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.
In Ingmar Bergman's stark depiction of spiritual crisis, small-town pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. Winter Light is beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist.
In this acclaimed adaptation of the novel by legendary Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, John Huston brings to life a world of vivid, poetic American eccentricity. Brad Dourif, in an impassioned performance, is Hazel Motes, who, fresh out of the army, attempts to open the Church Without Christ.
Two unemployed actors drown their frustrations in booze, pills, and lighter fluid. When an uncle offers his cottage, they escape the squalor of their flat for a week in the country. Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical cult favorite is intelligent, superbly acted, and hilarious.
In this art-house sensation, an amateur entomologist has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he spends the night with a young widow who lives at the bottom of a sand dune.
Having built his career as both an actor and director of silent cinema with comedic short films starring his wildly popular Little Tramp character, Charles Chaplin confounded audiences when he followed up his first feature, The Kid, with a serious melodrama—sans the Tramp!
Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters—Fusako, a war widow, and Natsuko, having an affair with a narcotics smuggler—who along with their younger friend Kumiko descend into prostitution and moral chaos amid the postwar devastation surrounding them.
Hailed by the New York Times on its Paris release as "one of the great films in motion picture history," Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses, France's answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I.
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession.
Originally made for German television, this recently rediscovered, three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.
An at once intimate and expansive exploration of globalization from visionary director Jia Zhangke, THE WORLD takes place in the eponymous theme park on the outskirts of Beijing, where iconic monuments from the Eiffel Tower to the Taj Mahal are reproduced for tourists.
What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions) in his surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
Glückstadt, in Northern Germany; Bonn; a palace along the Rhine; a housing project on the outskirts of Frankfurt; and finally the Zugspitze—these are the stations of the journey that the young Wilhelm Meister (Rüdiger Vogler) hopes will save him from the gloomy irritability and despondency that plague him in his hometown. In unfamiliar places, he thinks that he will be able to do what he has always had an uncontrollable drive to do—to write. He wants to become an author. With the journey, which his mother (Marianne Hoppe) gives him permission to make, he hopes to broaden his horizons and, above all, to find himself.
When a crew of scientists returns from Mars with a sample of the space spores that contaminated their ship, they inadvertently bring about a nightmarish earth invasion.
One of cinema’s great debuts, this film by the generation-defining Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke is a searing first expression of his signature theme: the disillusionment of people left behind by a society modernizing at whiplash speed.
The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral.
To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) turns a range war between two evil clans to his own advantage in Akira Kurosawa's visually stunning and darkly comic Yojimbo.
With its jazzy Michel Legrand score, pastel paradise of costumes, and divine supporting cast (George Chakiris, Grover Dale, Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, and Gene Kelly), The Young Girls of Rochefort is a tribute to Hollywood optimism from sixties French cinema’s preeminent dreamer.
At an Austrian boys' boarding school in the early 1900s, shy, intelligent Törless observes the sadistic behavior of his fellow students, doing nothing to help a victimized classmate—until the torture goes too far. Young Törless is adapted from Robert Musil's acclaimed novel.
Kenji Misumi, who directed the first installment of the Zatoichi series, returns with this tale in which the blind swordsman once again finds himself the protector of a child: a little girl pursued by both devious family members and bloodthirsty ruffians.
After arriving in a small village, Zatoichi finds himself accused of stealing the citizens’ hefty tax payments. To clear his name, he must face off against a corrupt official, a succession of hired blades, and a bullwhip-wielding titan.
An elderly prisoner accused of murder begs Zatoichi to find evidence of his innocence. The blind swordsman, for the first time, chooses not to help, but fate has other plans for him.
The wandering swordsman finds himself in a small village that serves as hideout for a band of fugitives who control the town officials and enforce brutal slave labor in the local silk mill.
A dying woman begs Zatoichi to reunite her son with the father he has never met, but when the blind masseur searches for the man, he discovers that he has been forced by a local yakuza boss to pay off his gambling debts in an unusual way: by painting illegal erotica.
Cowritten by star Shintaro Katsu, this adventure pits Zatoichi against one of his most diabolical foes: a blind yakuza boss whose reign of terror and exploitation has made him nearly mythic.
Star Shintaro Katsu sits in the director’s chair for this psychedelic and unremittingly bleak entry in the Zatoichi series, which is unlike any other in its grind-house grimness.
Zatoichi treks to a village that has always been a favorite spot of his, only to discover that it’s become a living hell, plagued by feuding father and son yakuza as well as the younger crime boss’s bodyguard—Toshiro Mifune’s scruffy, smart-mouthed, cash-hungry Yojimbo of legend.
The itinerant Zatoichi comes across a dying man, who begs the masseur to escort a young woman back to her family in Edo. The honorable swordsman agrees, but in so doing, he catapults himself between two warring yakuza clans, each with its own interest in kidnapping the girl.
Zatoichi triumphs at a village wrestling match, much to the chagrin of his yakuza opponents. The defeated gang members pay a hotheaded ronin to take out the masseur; unbeknownst to them, the hired assassin is married to a former flame of Zatoichi’s, further complicating matters.
Zatoichi arrives in a town where a gambling house is kidnapping its poor, debt-ridden patrons. A rival establishment moves to pay those debts and free the peasants, but this second house’s seemingly altruistic boss is actually laying the groundwork for a ruthless money-grabbing scheme.
Wearying of his wandering lifestyle, Zatoichi yearns to settle down; unfortunately, when he does so it’s in a town overrun by yakuza. He has an eye-opening encounter with the town’s blacksmith, who reveals himself to be the apprentice of the man who forged Zatoichi’s legendary cane sword.
The blind swordsman is shot and nursed back to health by kind strangers. He soon discovers that his saviors are caught between sparring crime lords; bound by honor, Zatoichi stays to ensure their safety.
Troubled by his violent past, Zatoichi begins a journey to a series of shrines for a dose of cleansing spirituality. But as always, trouble isn’t far behind, and the blind swordsman soon finds himself defending a widow from the self-interest of ruthless thugs and despicable townsfolk.
Nearing the village of his sensei, Zatoichi decides to pay the teacher a visit, only to learn that he has been murdered and his daughter forced into prostitution.
Zatoichi encounters a dying man, who asks the itinerant masseur to deliver a bag of money to his young son; he agrees to fulfill the request, finding the boy in a village terrorized by criminals.
Capping off Zatoichi’s feature film era before he made the transition to television in 1974, this chapter is suffused with melancholy, closing the series on a note of seriousness and emotional heft that it has well earned.
Based on a popular novel by Raymond Queneau that had been considered unadaptable, Malle’s audacious Zazie dans le métro, made with flair on the cusp of the French New Wave, is a bit of stream-of-consciousness slapstick, wall-to-wall with visual gags, editing tricks, and effects.
So effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema’s great acts of rebellion.
Among the strangest and most perturbing films of his overlooked Mexican period, Él is Luis Buñuel’s incisive portrait of paranoia, jealousy, and sexual obsession—a nightmarish tale of love gone wrong that prefigures the major themes of his 1960s and ’70s work.
