Directed by Vittorio De Sica • 1948 • Italy
Starring Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award-winning BICYCLE THIEVES, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar ...

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 Teinosuke Kinugasa • 1953 • Japan
Starring Kazuo Hasegawa, Machiko Kyo

A winner of Academy Awards for best foreign-language film and best costume design, GATE OF HELL is a visually sumptuous, psychologically penetrating work from Teinosuke Kinugasa. In the midst of epic, violent intr...

Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Rentaro Mikuni, Kuroemon Onoe

In the first part of the epic Samurai Trilogy, Toshiro Mifune thunders onto the screen as the iconic title character. When we meet him, Miyamoto is a wide-eyed romantic, dreaming of military glory i...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1954 • Italy
Starring Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart

With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in ...

Directed by Jacques Tati • 1958 • France, Italy
Starring Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie

Slapstick prevails again when Jacques Tati’s eccentric, old-fashioned hero, Monsieur Hulot, is set loose in Villa Arpel, the geometric, oppressively ultramodern home of his brother-in-law,...

Directed by Marcel Camus • 1959 • Brazil, France
Starring Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira

Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS (ORFEU NEGRO) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus ...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1960 • Sweden
Starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom

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. With austere simplicity, the...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1961 • Sweden
Starring Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family finds its fragile ties tested when daughter Karin (an astonishing Harriet Andersson) discovers her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) has been ...

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 Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos • 1965 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Idá Kaminská, Josef Kroner, František Zvarík

An inept Slovak peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and traged...

Directed by Jiří Menzel • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Václav Neckář, Josef Somr, Vlastimil Brodský

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds h...

ANDREI BOLKONSKY
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates o...

NATASHA ROSTOVA
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...

THE YEAR 1812
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of t...

PIERRE BEZUKHOV
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...

Directed by Costa-Gavras • 1969 • Algeria, France
Starring Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas

A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from t...

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1972 • France
Starring Fernando Rey, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and ima...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1973 • France, Italy

This carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the fascist period, the most personal film from Federico Fellini, satirizes the director's youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, an...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1975 • Soviet Union, Japan

The Russian army sends an explorer on an expedition to the snowy Siberian wilderness where he makes friends with a seasoned local hunter.

Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1979 • Germany
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler

Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the c...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1982 • Sweden
Starring Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Ewa Fröling

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended FANNY ...

Directed by Gabriel Axel • 1987 • Denmark
Starring Stéphane Audran, Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer

At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning BABETTE’S FEAST is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema. Dire...