Susan (Jane Fonda) is an American journalist working as a French correspondent for a radio network; her husband, Jacques (Yves Montand), was once a major filmmaker during the French New Wave, but now supports himself directing television commercials as he tries to come to terms with his political responsibilities. Jacques tags along when Susan visits a sausage factory to interview ...

Traffic examines the effect of drugs as politics, business, and lifestyle. Acting as his own director of photography, Steven Soderbergh employs an innovative, color - coded cinematic treatment to distinguish the interwoven stories of a newly appointed drug czar and his family, a West Coast kingpin's wife, a key informant, and cops on both sides of the US/Mexican border. Rarely ...

When thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) meets his true love in pickpocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins), they embark on a scam to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). But when Gaston becomes romantically entangled with Mme. Colet, their larcenous ruse is jeopardized and Gaston is forced to choose between two beautiful women. Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch's masterful touch ...

In Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory, the incomparable Alec Guinness inhabits the role of Jock Sinclair, a whiskey-drinking, up-by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. Sinclair is a lifetime military man, who expects respect and loyalty from his men. But when Basil Barrow (John Mills, winner of the Best Actor award at the 1960 Venice Film festival) - an ...

"Quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers,” said Jean-Luc Godard of Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ugetsu, a ghost story like no other, is surely the Japanese director’ s supreme achievement. Derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, this haunting tale of love and loss - with its exquisite blend of the otherworldly and the real - is ...

Shot on location with a cast of nonprofessional actors, Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece follows Umberto D., an elderly pensioner, as he struggles to make ends meet during Italy's postwar economic boom. Alone except for his dog, Flike, Umberto strives to maintain his dignity while trying to survive in a city where traditional human kindness seems to have lost out ...

In Rene Clair's irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. This witty exploration of love and human foibles, told primarily through song, captures the flamboyant atmosphere of the city with sophisticated visuals and groundbreaking use of the new technology of movie sound. An ...

In this pitch-black comedy from legendary writer-director Preston Sturges, Rex Harrison stars as Sir Alfred De Carter, a world - famous symphony conductor consumed with the suspicion that his wife is having an affair. During a concert, the jealous De Carter entertains elaborate visions of vengeance, set to three separate orchestral works. But when he attempts to put his murderous ...

Vagabond, directed by Agnes Varda is the dark disturbing story of a female drifter named Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire). The film opens as Mona's frozen body is found in a drainage ditch and proceeds to tell her story in a series of flashbacks and semi-documentary style "interviews" with the people who have known Mona during the last few weeks of her ...

Federico Fellini's directorial debut (co-directed with veteran Alberto Lattuada), Luci del Varietà is a bittersweet drama about a bunch of misfits in a traveling vaudeville troupe. The group of actors, dancers, and performers struggle to make it from town to town, playing to minimal crowds. Their comedic leader, Checco Dal Monte (Peppino De Filippo) just wants his act to be ...

A thief, murderer, and charming lady - killer, Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) is on the run from the police. Director Shohei Imamura turns this fact - based story, of the seventy - three - day killing spree of a remorseless man from a devoutly Catholic family, into a cold, perverse, and at times diabolically funny tale of the primitive coexisting ...

Once beloved Third - Reich era starlet Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, the forgotten star encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain - swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Krohn comes to discover the dark secrets behind ...

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. As he struggles to unearth the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right - wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation. Starring ...

Banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican, Luis Buñuel's irreverent vision of life as a beggar's banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece. In it, novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism. Winner of the ...

W. C. Fields' prolific career placed him at the forefront of slapstick comedy. Gathered here are six gems that feature the comic genius at his peak: The Golf Specialist, Pool Sharks (silent), The Pharmacist, The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Barber Shop, and, of course, the notorious The Dentist. This unique collection will delight new generations of viewers with Fields' ...

Nicolas Roeg's mystical masterpiece chronicles the physical, spiritual, and emotional journey of a sister and brother abandoned in the harsh Australian outback. Joining an Aborigine boy on his walkabout - a tribal initiation into manhood - these modern children pass from innocence into experience as they are thrust from the comforts of civilization into the savagery of the natural world.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour - a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern postwar Ginza district, who entertains businessmen after work. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a ...

The film that catapulted Bergman to the forefront of world cinema is the director's richest, most humane movie. Traveling to receive an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg (masterfully played by the veteran Swedish director Victor Sjostrom), is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and accept the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, ...

"God, why did you desert me?" With Winter Light, master craftsman Ingmar Bergman explores the search for redemption in a meaningless existence. In this stark depiction of spiritual crisis, small - town pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bjornstrand) performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. When he is asked to assist with a troubled parishioner's (Max von Sydow) debilitating fear ...

Screenwriter Bruce Robinson made his directorial debut with this British comedy. Withnail (Richard E. Grant) is an unsuccessful, pill-popping actor; "I", or Marwood (Paul McGann), is Withnail's roommate and another equally underemployed actor. The time is 1969: Withnail is fast becoming a burned-out relic of the sixties, while Marwood is trying to reassimilate into society. The two take a trip ...