Directed by François Truffaut • 1962 • France

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession. The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring...

Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli • 1965 • Italy

Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style's Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the ...

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1953 • Japan
Starring Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori, Kinuyo Tanaka

By the time he made UGETSU, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other directors of a younger generation. And with this exquisite ...

Directed by Jean Vigo • 1933 • France

So effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo's enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema's great acts of rebellion. Based on the director's own experiences as a ...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1947 • United Kingdom

This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A group of nuns, played by some of Britain's finest actresses, includin...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELL meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner ...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1990 • Iran

Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real...

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1953 • France

In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive cargo to a faraway oil fire, each bump and jolt test...

Directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard • 1938 • United Kingdom

Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a "proper lady" in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the pl...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1945 • France

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris' theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious wom...

Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1966 • Czechoslovakia

Maybe the New Wave's most anarchic entry, Vera Chytilovà's absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two brash young women. Believing the world to be "spoiled," they embark on a series of pranks in which nothing, food, clothes, men, war, is t...

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1938 • Soviet Union

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 reson...

Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom

After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) begin a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-enshrouded setting, swooning Rachmaninof...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1963 • Italy

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. 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 e...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1957 • Sweden

Disillusioned and exhausted after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight (Max von Sydow) encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman's st...

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1964 • Italy

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological ag...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1950 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori

A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, RASHOMON is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people give different accou...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1939 • France

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis' country château lays bare some ugly tr...

Directed by Jane Campion • 1990 • New Zealand

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-str...

Directed by Laurence Olivier • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom

In RICHARD III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life. Olivier is diabolically captivat...

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy

One of the most influential political films in history, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalate...

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1954 • Japan

When an idealistic governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord, he is cast into exile, his wife and children left to fend for themselves and eventually wrenched apart by vicious slave traders. Under Kenji Mizoguchi's dazzling direction, this classic Japa...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1962 • France

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman's life, CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 is a spirited...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1955 • Sweden

After fifteen films that received mostly local acclaim, the 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) at last ushered in an international audience for Ingmar Bergman. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to na...