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 ...

Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss between two boys living in Nazi - occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie - until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer - director Malle's own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, ...

Seven years after the death of his wife, company executive Aoyama is invited to sit in on auditions for an actress. Leafing through the resumes in advance, his eye is caught by Yamazaki Asami, a striking young woman with ballet training. On the day of the audition, she's the last person they see. Aoyama is hooked. He notes her number ...

A stunning union of two of Sweden's national treasures, Autumn Sonata pairs Ingmar Bergman with Ingrid Bergman for their only joint effort. Ingrid plays a mother who, after forsaking her family for a music career, attempts a reconciliation with her oldest daughter (Liv Ullmann) through a night of painful revelation. Sven Nykvist contributes glorious Eastmancolor cinematography to this quietly beautiful ...

De Nadie tells the story of Maria, a Central American immigrant who is forced to leave her home in search of a better life for her family. On her way to the United States, she must cross Mexico were she experiences a nightmare. This documentary profiles the courage of Central American immigrants and the injustice committed to them as they ...

While on vacation with their parents, Anais tags along with Elena as she explores the dreary seaside town. Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student,who seduces her with promises of love, and the ever - watchful Anais bears witness to the corruption of her sister's innocence. Precise and uncompromising, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl is a bold dissection of sibling rivalry ...

Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. Charged by a coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humor, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values ...

Rene Clement's Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play. At once mythical and heartbreakingly real, this unique film features astonishing performances by its child stars and was honored with a special foreign language film Academy Award in 1952.

Nineteenth - century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir's exhilarating tale of the opening of the world - renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women - an Egyptian belly - dancer and a naive working girl turned cancan star. This celebration ...

Carl Dreyer's last film neatly crowns his career: a meditation on tragedy, individual will and the refusal to compromise. A woman leaves her unfulfilling marriage and embarks on a search for ideal love - but neither a passionate affair with a younger man nor the return of an old romance can provide the answer she seeks. Always the stylistic innovator, ...

A group of young men and women are admitted to one of France's "grandes écoles" where the administrative and political leaders of tomorrow are trained. They are the country's best students and will be the nation's elite if all goes as planned. But life is always more imaginative than they are. Grandes Ecoles, yes, grand romance, too, sometimes difficult. The ...

In her stunning debut feature, writer/director Jasmila Žbani explores the painful long-term effects of war on a Bosnian woman and her daughter. Esma is a single mother who lives with her 12-year-old daughter, Sara, in the Grbavica district of Sarajevo, a neighborhood once used as an internment camp during the Yugoslav wars. Unable to get by on government aid, Esma ...

Director Laurent Cantet follows up his critically acclaimed Time Out, set during an austere wintertime in France and Switzerland, with Heading South, set in Haiti during the late 1970s. Based on stories by Dany Laferriere, the heat comes not only from the summertime tropical setting. Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, and Louise Portal head a group of single middle-aged women who ...

A lovely young woman in a nightclub frequented by crass American businessmen takes a customer to her modest seaside shack for a night of pleasure for pay, only to be found out by her street vendor suitor; a tenant farmer is told that his crop has been sold to United Fruit and in frustration burns his fields; a middle-class student ...

In a career - defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor - sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture - with a liberal dose of Japanese lone - warrior mythology - maverick director Jean - Pierre Melville's masterpiece Le Samourai defines cool.

Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer - prostitute (Barbara Sukowa) exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out - she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor (Mario Ad'orf) against the new straight - arrow building commissioner (Armin Mueller - Stahl), Lola launches an outrageous plan to ...

When Katharina Blum spends the night with an alleged terrorist, her quiet, ordered life falls into ruins. Suddenly a suspect, Katharina is subject to a vicious smear campaign by the police and a ruthless tabloid journalist, testing the limits of her dignity and her sanity. Volker Schlond'orff and Margarethe von Trotta's powerful adaptation of Heinrich Boll's novel is a stinging ...

With sixteen women to each man, the odds are against Andula in her desperate search for love - that is, until a rakish piano player visits her small factory town and temporarily eases her longings. A tender and humorous look at Andula's journey, from the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, Loves of a Blonde(Lasky jedne plavovlasky) immediately ...

Pipe - smoking Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati's endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati's wildly funny satire of vacationers determined to enjoy themselves includes a series of precisely choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers. The first entry in the Hulot series is a masterpiece of gentle slapstick.

Slapstick prevails when Jacques Tati's eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the ultramodern home of his brother - in - law, and in an antiseptic factory that manufactures plastic hose. Tati directs and stars in the second entry of the Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.

In the tradition of Big Night and Chocolat comes this "delicious romantic comedy!" that won over 10 international film awards and captured the hearts of moviegoers around the world. Martha is a single woman who lives for one passion: cooking. The head chef at a chic restaurant, Martha has no time for anything - or anyone - else. But, Martha's ...

Louis Malle's critically acclaimed Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur) gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy's sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming - of - age films ever made.

Also available as part of the 3 Films by Louis ...

My Life as a Dog tells the story of Ingemar, a working - class twelve - year - old sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. Once there, Ingemar finds refuge from his misfortunes and unexpected adventure with the help of the town's warmhearted eccentrics. A bittersweet evocation of the struggles and ...

In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer's Moral Tales series, Jean - Louis Trintignant plays Jean - Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world, drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After spotting the ...

Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) is a successful Jewish lawyer living in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Aware of the increasing dangers of remaining in Germany, Walter seeks exile on a farm in Kenya, while his socially prominent wife, Jettel (Juliane Koehler), and his young daughter, Regina (Lea Kurka), stay behind, as does his father, Max (Gerd Heinz), ...

Oh Dae-su is an ordinary Seoul businessman with a wife and little daughter who, after a drunken night on the town, is locked up in a strange, private “prison” for 15 years. No one will tell him why he’s there and who his jailer is, but he is kept in reasonably comfortable quarters and has a TV to keep him ...

Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, Rashomon is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife. Toshiro Mifune gives ...

These four classic films, from four masters of Japanese cinema, turn a genre upside down, redefining for a modern generation the meaning of loyalty and honor, as embodied by the iconic figure of the samurai.

Hiroshi Inagaki's acclaimed Samurai Trilogy is based on the novel that has been called Japan's Gone with the Wind. This sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth - century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) plays out against the turmoil of a devastating civil war. The Trilogy follows Musashi's odyssey from unruly youth to enlightened warrior. In the first ...

Hiroshi Inagaki's acclaimed Samurai Trilogy is based on the novel that has been called Japan's Gone with the Wind. This sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth - century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) plays out against the turmoil of a devastating civil war. The Trilogy (whose first part won an Academy Award) follows Musashi's odyssey from unruly ...

Hiroshi Inagaki's acclaimed Samurai Trilogy is based on the novel that has been called Japan's Gone with the Wind. This sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth - century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) plays out against the turmoil of a devastating civil war. The Trilogy (whose first part won an Academy Award) follows Musashi's odyssey from unruly ...

Toshiro Mifune stars as Isaburo Sasahara, an aging swordsman living a quiet life until his clan lord orders that his son marry the lord's mistress, who has recently displeased the ruler. Reluctantly, father and son take in the woman, and, to the family’s surprise, the young couple fall in love. But the lord soon reverses his decision and demands the ...

A seemingly simple assignment sends a warrior for hire into a labyrinth of danger and intrigue in this intelligent and expressive action vehicle from filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda.

Before Alfonso Cuaron brought us the international sensation Y tu mama tambien, he made his mark on Mexican cinema with the ribald and lightning - quick social satire Solo con tu pareja. Don Juan - ish yuppie Tomas Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho, from Bad Education) spends his nights juggling so many beautiful women that he can't keep their names straight ...

Jean-Pierre Leaud returns in the delightful Stolen Kisses, the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually love-struck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he stumbles into the unlikely profession of private detective and embarks on a series of misadventures. Whimsical, nostalgic, ...

A man considers the fine line between friendship and family as he crosses France by foot in this comedy. Felix (Sami Bouajila) is a cheerful thirty-something from Normandy who is part Arab by birth and 100 percent French by inclination; Felix is also gay and HIV-positive, though the ups and downs of the characters on his favorite soap opera trouble ...

Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003, The Barbarian Invasions is a provocative look at the many ties that bind a group of friends and lovers. It's not easy for a narrow-minded professor (Rémy Girard) to reconcile with his equally stubborn son. But soon, father and son find themselves gathering with their wide and colorful circle of ...

By the age of thirty-four, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder had directed already twenty-two feature films. In 1978, he embarked upon a project to trace the history of postwar Germany in a series of films told through the eyes of three remarkable women. Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss—the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy—would garner him the ...

It's Helge Klingenfeldt's much-anticipated sixtieth birthday party, but no one is ready for the bombshell about to be delivered by his oldest son, Christian - a dark family secret that contributed to his twin sister's recent suicide.

Lars von Trier wrote (in four days) and directed this Danish comedy-drama about a group of Copenhagen eccentrics who find a therapeutic release and confront apathy via unacceptable, idiotic behavior which they call "spazzing."

Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. At a weekend hunting party, amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests and are mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs. The refusal of one of the ...

Based on the profoundly moving true story that captured the world's attention, The Sea Inside is about Spaniard Ramon Sampedro (played by Oscar Nominee Javier Bardem), who fought the 30-year campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity. The sea inside is the story of Ramon's relationship with two women: Julia (Belen Rueda) a lawyer who supports ...

After a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight challenges Death to a fateful game of chess. More than forty years after its initial release, Ingmar Bergman's stunning allegory of man's apocalyptic search for meaning remains a textbook on the art of filmmaking and an essential building block in any collection.

Victor Erice's spellbinding The Spirit of the Beehive (El espiritu de la colmena) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country's devastating civil war, six - year - old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of ...

Danzig, Germany, 1924. Oskar Matzerath is born with an intellect beyond his infancy. As he witnesses the hypocrisy of adulthood and the irresponsibility of society, Oskar rejects both, and, at his third birthday, refuses to grow older. Caught in a baffling state of perpetual childhood, Oskar lashes out at all he surveys with piercing screams and frantic pounding on his ...

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity, and of one father's need ...

Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste) brings his new wife Wanda (Brunella Bovo) to Rome on the least romantic honeymoon in history - a rigid schedule of family meetings and audiences with the Pope. But Wanda, dreaming of the dashing hero of a photo - strip cartoon, drifts off in search of the White Sheik, thus setting off a slapstick comedy worthy ...

One of the most celebrated screen adaptations of Shakespeare into film, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood re-imagines Macbeth in feudal Japan. Starring Kurosawa's longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune and the legendary Isuzu Yamada as his ruthless wife, the film tells of a valiant warrior's savage rise to power and his ignominious fall. With Throne of Blood, Kurosawa fuses one of Shakespeare's ...

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family's already fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), along with Karin's husband (Max von Sydow) and her younger brother (Lars Passgard) are unable to ...

The second feature from Lukas Moodysson, who directed the internationally acclaimed Fucking Åmål, Tillsammans is the tale of life on a Stockholm commune in the mid-'70s. After suffering more than her share of abuse from her husband, Rolf (Michael Nyqvist), Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren) takes her two children, Stefan (Sam Kessel) and Eva (Emma Samuelsson), to a commune run by her ...

Set amidst the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto, where survival is the primary objective, Tsotsi traces six days in the life of a ruthless young gang leader who ends up caring for a baby accidentally kidnapped during a car-jacking. Tsotsi is a gritty and moving portrait of an angry young man living in a state of extreme urban deprivation. His ...

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 ...

Marie, a professor of English literature in a Paris university, has been happily married to Jean for 25 years, although they have no children. During their summer vacations in the southwest of France, Jean leaves Marie sunbathing on the beach and goes to swim in the sea. When Marie turns back, she cannot find Jean. Has he left her? Committed ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...