1950 
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.
François Truffaut
France,
1959
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Luis García Berlanga
Spain,
1952
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.
Usmar Ismail
Indonesia,
1954
DCP
This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Chester Erskine
United Kingdom,
1952
DVD
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.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1956
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1959
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Keisuke Kinoshita
Japan,
1958
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1950
DVD
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.
Claude Chabrol
France,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Between the international triumphs of La strada and Nights of Cabiria, Federico Fellini made this fascinatingly unique film, which has been long overlooked.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Marcel Camus
France,
1959
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
The often unruly in-betweenness of adolescence is the subject of this bittersweet comedy from director Luis García Berlanga.
Luis García Berlanga
Spain,
1954
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.
Anthony Asquith
United Kingdom,
1951
DVD
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).
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1956
DCP, 16 mm, DVD
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.
Jacques Becker
France,
1952
35 mm, DVD
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.
Orson Welles
France,
1955
35 mm, DVD
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.
Claude Chabrol
France,
1959
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart.
Mikhail Kalatozov
Soviet Union,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Kô Nakahira
Japan,
1956
DVD
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.
Juan Antonio Bardem
Spain,
1955
DVD
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.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
France,
1955
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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).
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1955
DCP, 16 mm
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1956
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1951
35 mm, DVD
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.
Max Ophuls
France,
1953
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Jean Renoir
France,
1956
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
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.
Louis Malle
France,
1958
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
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.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1952
DCP, Blu-ray, 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.
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1959
35 mm, DVD
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
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1952
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1959
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1950
35 mm, DVD
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
Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan,
1955
DCP
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.
Jean Renoir
France,
1955
16 mm, DVD
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.
Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan,
1953
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1955
DVD
_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.
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Motoyoshi Oda
Japan,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray
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).
Jean Renoir
France,
1953
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1959
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
René Clair
France,
1955
DCP
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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1957
DCP, Blu-ray
The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa’s trademark deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action, and compassionate humanity.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
David Lean
United Kingdom,
1954
35 mm, DVD
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.
Ronald Neame
United Kingdom,
1958
DVD
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.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1959
35 mm, DVD
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.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1957
DVD
_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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1955
35 mm, DVD
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.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Masaki Kobayashi’s pitiless take on Japan’s professional baseball industry is unlike any other sports film ever made.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1951
DVD
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This eye-popping escapade revolves around a scientist and his doomsday machine—and the pirates who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it.
Karel Zeman
Czechoslovakia,
1958
Blu-ray
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.
Sergei Eisenstein
Soviet Union,
1958
35 mm, DVD
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.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Karel Zeman
Czechoslovakia,
1955
Blu-ray
“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.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1957
DVD
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.
Gillo Pontecorvo
Italy,
1959
DVD
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).
Charles Chaplin
United Kingdom,
1957
35 mm
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.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm
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.
Mikhail Kalatozov
Soviet Union,
1959
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Max Ophuls
Germany,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom,
1958
DCP
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.
Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan,
1953
DCP
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.
Louis Malle
France,
1958
35 mm, DVD
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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, DVD
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 Bergman
Sweden,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Robert Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time in A Man Escaped.
Robert Bresson
France,
1956
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Vittorio De Sica
Italy,
1951
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Luis García Berlanga
Spain,
1957
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.
Alf Sjöberg
Sweden,
1951
DVD
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.
François Truffaut
France,
1957
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Jacques Tati
France,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another.
Jacques Tati
France,
1953
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan,
1955
DCP
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).
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1950
DCP
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.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1958
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Alain Resnais
France,
1955
DVD
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).
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1952
DVD
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.
Luchino Visconti
Italy,
1957
DVD
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.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1955
DVD
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).
Jean Cocteau
France,
1950
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Robert Bresson
France,
1959
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Max Ophuls
France,
1952
DVD
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.
Agnès Varda
France,
1955
DCP, DVD
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 Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Albert Lamorisse
France,
1956
35 mm, DVD
In Richard III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life
Laurence Olivier
United Kingdom,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Jean Renoir
France,
1951
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Luis García Berlanga
Italy,
1956
Soldiers, chambermaids, poets, prostitutes, aristocrats—all are on equal footing in Max Ophuls's multicharacter merry-go-round of love and infidelity.
Max Ophuls
France,
1950
DVD
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.
Toshio Masuda
Japan,
1958
DVD
In the first part of the epic Samurai Trilogy, Toshiro Mifune thunders onto the screen as the iconic title character.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1954
Blu-ray, DVD
Toshiro Mifune furiously embodies swordsman Musashi Miyamoto as he comes into his own in the action-packed middle section of the Samurai Trilogy.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1956
Blu-ray, DVD
Toshiro Mifune plays a large-nosed samurai who woos a princess in Hiroshi Inagaki's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1959
35 mm
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.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1953
DCP, DVD
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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DVD
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 Kurosawa
Japan,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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 Bergman
Sweden,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1955
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1951
DVD
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 survive in the face of persecution.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1954
DCP, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1956
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
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.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1950
DCP, DVD
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.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1951
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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 Bergman
Sweden,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
David Lean
United States,
1955
35 mm, DVD
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.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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_.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1950
DCP, DVD
A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Yasujirō Ozu’s final film in black and white is perhaps the darkest, most psychologically complex of his masterful family portraits.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
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.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1950
DVD
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.
Keisuke Kinoshita
Japan,
1954
DVD
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.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This neorealist masterpiece by Vittorio De Sica follows an elderly pensioner as he strives to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic recovery.
Vittorio De Sica
Italy,
1952
Blu-ray, DVD
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).
Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada
Italy,
1950
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Emilio Fernández
Mexico,
1951
DCP
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.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
France,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
While at a summerhouse, awaiting their husbands’ return, three sisters-in-law recount stories from their respective marriages.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1952
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1955
DVD
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.
Albert Lamorisse
France,
1953
35 mm, DVD
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 Bergman
Sweden,
1957
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
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.
Luis Buñuel
1953
DCP