Of all Paul Robeson's eleven starring film performances, by far his most iconic was his breakthrough in the big - screen adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. He was already a legend for his stage incarnation of Brutus Jones, a Pullman porter who powers his way to rule of a Caribbean island, but with this, his first sound - ...

The Fallen Idol was the first of three masterpieces to result from the legendary meeting of director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, who together would also create The Third Man and Our Man in Havana. Elegantly balancing suspense and farce, this tale of the fraught relationship between a boy and the beloved butler he suspects of murder is a ...

A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman's first color film The Firemen's Ball (Hori, ma panenko) is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire. A hilarious saga of good intentions confounded, the story chronicles a firemen's ball where nothing goes right - from a beauty pageant whose reluctant participants embarrass the organizers to a lottery from ...

Rossellini and co - writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings ofthe People's Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeouslyphotographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis's time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.

The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or) is a ravishing eighteenth - century comic fantasy about a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach, and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell'arte company. Master director Jean Renoir's sumptuous tribute to the theatre, presented here in the English version he favored, is set to the music of Antonio ...

19th - century English author James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that the wrong man was hanged twenty years earlier for a series of murders, but his investigations lead him to a horrible, and, for him, gruesomely inescapable secret.

Available only as part of the Monsters and Madmen Box Set.

A general and a princess must dodge enemy clans while smuggling the royal treasure out of hostile territory with two bumbling, conniving peasants at their sides; it's a spirited adventure that only Akira Kurosawa could create. Acknowledged as a primary influence on George Lucas' Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa's inimitably deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action and ...

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. As the ill-behaved Jimson searches for a perfect canvas, he determines to let nothing come between himself and the realization of his exalted vision. A perceptive examination of the struggle of artistic creation, ...

Oscar Wilde's comic jewel sparkles in Anthony Asquith's film adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. Featuring brilliantly polished performances by Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenwood, and Dame Edith Evans, the enduringly hilarious story of two young women who think themselves engaged to the same nonexistent man is given the grand Technicolor treatment. Seldom has a classic stage comedy been so ...

Ernest Hemingway's gripping short story "The Killers" has fascinated readers and filmmakers for generations. Its first screen incarnation came in 1946, when director Robert Siodmak unleashed The Killers, helping to define the film noir style and launching the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in this archetypal masterpiece. In 1956, then-film student Andrei Tarkovsky tackled the story with a ...

Ben Gazzara brilliantly portrays gentlemen's club owner Cosmo Vitelli, a man dedicated to pretenses of composure and self - possession. When he runs afoul of a small - time gangster, Cosmo is forced to commit a horrible crime in a last - ditch effort to save his beloved club and his way of life. Suspenseful, mesmerizing, and idiosyncratic, The Killing ...

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. Featuring text drawn directly from the Bible, a cast of thousands, and the great showman's singular ...

A conniving father and daughter meet up with the heir to a brewery fortune - a wealthy but naive snake enthusiast - and attempt to bamboozle him at a cruise ship card table. Their plan is quickly abandoned when the daughter falls in love with their prey. But when the heir gets wise to her gold - digging ways, she ...

In this best-loved of Hitchcock's British-made thrillers, a young woman on a train meets a charming old lady (Dame May Whitty), who promptly disappears. The other passengers deny ever having seen her, leading the young woman to suspect a conspiracy. When she begins investigating, she is drawn into a complex web of mystery and high adventure.

At last, Martin Scorsese's most personal masterpiece can be seen outside of the controversy it engendered, and be seen for what it is: a l5-year labor of love. Nikos Kazantzakis' landmark novel comes to breathtaking life in this moving and spiritual film. The all-star cast includes Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, and Willem Dafoe as Jesus.

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. He suspects the victim has been killed for violating a tribal taboo, but the defendants deny any tribal association. Burton, plagued by apocalyptic visions of water, slowly realizes his own involvement with the aborigines...and their ...

Making its long-awaited U.S. home video debut, Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is an epic on the grandest possible scale. The film recreates - with nostalgia, drama, and opulence - the tumultuous years of Italy's Risorgimento, when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose and formed a unified, democratic Italy. Burt Lancaster stars as the aging ...

The passions and pitfalls of a lifetime in the military are dramatized in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's magnificent epic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The film follows the exploits of pristine British soldier Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) as he battles to maintain his honor and proud gentlemanly conduct through romance, three wars, and a changing world. Vibrant ...

Internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew—Team Zissou—set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou’s partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. They are joined on their voyage by a young airline co-pilot, who may or may not be Zissou’s son (Owen Wilson), a beautiful ...

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. John Mackenzie's stylish thriller is a marriage of gangster flicks from both sides of the Atlantic.