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, ...

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 ...

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 - ...

A Moment of Innocence is a poetic and often comic re-construction of an incident that dramatically affected the lives of two people. In 1974, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, then a 17-year-old rebel against the Shah's regime, stabbed a young policeman during a botched attempt to steal the cop's gun. Makhmalbaf spent five reflective years in prison, and was freed after the ...

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 - ...

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 - ...

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.

The astounding success of Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman revolutionized the foreign film market and turned Brigitte Bardot into an international star. Bardot stars as Juliette, an 18 - year - old orphan whose unbridled appetite for pleasure shakes up all of St. Tropez; her sweet but naive husband Michel (Jean - Louis Trintignant) endures beatings, insults, and mambo ...

In 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. Fabricated entirely in Rome's famed Cinecitta studios, And the Ship Sails On (E la nave va) reaches spectacular new visual heights with its stylized re ...

Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky's epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia's greatest icon painter. Too experimental, too frightening, too violent, and too politically complicated to be released officially, Andrei Rublev has existed only in shortened, censored versions until the Criterion Collection created a complete 205 - minute director's cut special edition.

In 1999, Polish director Andrzej Wajda received an Honorary Academy Award for his body of work—more than thirty-five feature films, beginning with A Generation in 1955. Wajda’s second film, Kanal—the first ever made about the Warsaw uprising—secured him the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and started him on the path to international acclaim, secured with the release of his masterpiece, ...

Jean - Pierre Melville's masterpiece about the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation went unreleased in the United States for thirty - seven years before its triumphant theatrical debut in 2006. Atmospheric and gripping, Army of Shadows is Melville's most personal film, featuring Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean - Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret as intrepid underground fighters ...

On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, 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. But a mistake stalls his ...

A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, director 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. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of ...