Few directors have portrayed the agonies and epiphanies of growing up as poetically - and scandalously - as Louis Malle. Laced with autobiographical details, Murmur of the Heart ; Lacombe, Lucien ; and Au revoir les enfants tell stories of youth, set against the tumult of World War II and postwar France. Controversial, tragic, amusing, and poignant, ...

In a dusty, under - populated California resort town, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a naive and impressionable Southern waif begins her life as a nursing home attendant. There, Pinky finds her role model in fellow nurse "Thoroughly Modern" Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), a misguided would - be sophisticate and hopeless devotee of Cosmopolitan and Woman's Day magazines. When Millie accepts ...

At once a compelling piece of anti - isolationist propaganda and a quick - witted wartime thriller, 49th Parallel is a classic early work from the inimitable British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. When a Nazi U - boat crew, headed by the ruthless Eric Portman, is stranded in Canada during the thick of World War II, ...

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (Otto e Mezzo) turns one man's artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a director whose film - and life - is collapsing around him. An early working title for the film was La Bella Confusione (The Beautiful Confusion), and ...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's beloved classic A Canterbury Tale is a profoundly personal journey to Powell's bucolic birthplace of Kent, England. Set amid the tumult of the Second World War, yet with a rhythm as delicate as a lullaby, the film follows three modern - day incarnations of Chaucer's pilgrims - a melancholy "landgirl," a plainspoken American GI, and ...

Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge—The Life and Art of John Cassavetes is a detailed journey through the career of one of film’s greatest pioneers and iconoclasts. Assembled from candid interviews with Cassavetes' collaborators and friends, rare photographs, archival footage, and the director's own words, the film paints a revealing portrait of a man whose fierce love, courage, and dedication changed ...

At the beginning of the 1960s, renowned film director Ingmar Bergman began work on what were to become some of his most powerful and representative works—the Trilogy. Already a figure of tremendous international acclaim for such masterworks as The Seventh Seal , Wild Strawberries , and The Virgin Spring , Bergman turned his back on the abundant ...

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, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others' lives. A coming - of - ...

On April 14, 1912, just before midnight, the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg. In less than three hours, it had plunged to the bottom of the sea, taking with it 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. A Night to Remember depicts the ship's final hours in an unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord's book of the same name.

With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching A nos amours is one of his greatest achievements. 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 ...

One of the all - time comedy classics, Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte 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. Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, A Nous la Liberte ...

In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds in color with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Ugetsu). Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover ...

With A Woman is a Woman (Une Femme est une femme), compulsively innovative director Jean - Luc Godard presents "a neorealist musical - that is, a contradiction in terms." Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean - Paul Belmondo, and Jean - Claude Brialy at their peak of popularity, A Woman is a Woman is a sly, playful tribute to - ...

John Cassavetes’ devastating drama details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself. Starring Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands (in two of the most harrowing screen performances of the 1970s) as a married couple, deeply in love, yet unable to express their love in terms the other can understand, the film is ...

Eisenstein drew on history, Russian folk narratives, and the techniques of Walt Disney to create this broadly painted epic of Russian resilience. This story of Teutonic knights vanquished by Prince Alexander Nevsky's tactical brilliance resonated deeply with a Soviet Union concerned with the rise of Nazi Germany. Widely imitated - most notably by Laurence Olivier's Battle of Agincourt re - ...

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 - ...

Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson is the hunky Thoreau - following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk's heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small - town America. Sirk utilizes expressionist colors, reflective surfaces, and frames - within - frames to convey the loneliness and isolation of a matriarch trapped by the snobbery of her children ...

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Godard's irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to kill the inventor of fascist computer Alpha 60.

In this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the Fascist period, Federico Fellini's most personal film satirizes his youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge, all set to Nina Rota's classic, nostalgia - tinged score. The Academy Award - winning Amarcord remains one of cinema's enduring treasures.

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. The film follows Frame along her inspiring journey, from a poverty - stricken childhood to a misdiagnoses of schizophrenia and electroshock therapy to, finally, international literary fame. Beautifully capturing the color ...