Rainer Werner Fassbinder, already the director of almost twenty films by the age of twenty - nine, paid homage to his cinematic hero, Douglas Sirk, with this updated version of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Lonely widow Emmi Kurowsky (Brigitte Mira) meets Arab worker Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love - ...

With Masculin feminin, 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 each other. French new wave icon Jean - Pierre Leaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would - be intellectual struggling to forge ...

Director Robert Bresson chose Uruguayan nonactor Martin LaSalle for his leading man in Pickpocket. LaSalle's inexperience works against the film for some viewers, though Bresson himself was satisfied because his star proved himself a quick study in the art of lifting wallets (a genuine pickpocket was engaged as "technical adviser"). Essentially, the story is a character study of a cocky ...

John Cassavetes' directorial debut revolves around an interracial romance between Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), a light - skinned black woman living in New York City with her two brothers, and Tony (Anthony Ray), a white man. The relationship crumbles when Tony meets Lelia's brother Hugh (Hugh Hurd), a talented dark - skinned jazz singer struggling to find work, and discovers the ...

The release of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) in 1959 shook world cinema to its foundations. The now-classic portrait of troubled adolescence introduced a major new director in the cinematic landscape and was an inaugural gesture of the revolutionary French New Wave. But The 400 Blows did not only introduce the world to its precocious director—it ...