Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1954 • Japan
Starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa

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...

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 2006 • Spain
Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Yohana Cobo

Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER is set in Madrid’s lively working-class neighborhoods, where three generations of women survive wind, fire, and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity, and a limitless vitality...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1972 • West Germany
Starring Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional regi...

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1953 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck

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...

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 Wong Kar Wai • 1997 • Hong Kong
Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing

One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Leslie Cheun...

Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1960 • Japan
Starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan

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 hoste...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1985 • France
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss

Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnès Varda pieces together Mona’s sto...

Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard

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-en...

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1964 • Italy
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris

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 spirit...

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1938 • Soviet Union
Starring Nikolai Cherkasov, Nikolai Okhlopkov, Andrei Abrikosov

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 van...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima

One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...

Directed by Alain Resnais • 1959 • France, Japan
Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from Alain Resnais is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a ...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1957 • Sweden
Starring Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Gunnar Björnstrand

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a g...

Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli • 1965 • Italy
Starring Stefania Sandrelli, Mario Adorf, Jean-Claude Brialy

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 delight...

Directed by Robert Bresson • 1959 • France
Starring Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie

This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of P...

Directed by François Truffaut • 1962 • France
Starring Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

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 Truffau...

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 Charles Chaplin • 1942 • United States
Starring Charles Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain

Charlie Chaplin’s comedic masterwork—which charts a prospector’s search for fortune in the Klondike and his discovery of romance (with the beautiful Georgia Hale)—forever cemented the iconic sta...

Directed by René Clair • 1931 • France
Starring Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France

One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair’s À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old ja...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1953 • Sweden
Starring Åke Grönberg, Harriet Andersson

Ingmar Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival of humiliation in SAWDUST AND TINSEL, one of the master’s most vivid early works and his first of many collaborations with the g...

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy
Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef

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 o...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...