Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A lonely widow (Brigitte Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, Fassbinder expertly wields the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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News from Home
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...
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Battleship Potemkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1925 • Soviet Union
This incredibly influential Soviet silent film depicts a crew mutiny on the Russian Battleship Potemkin.
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The Apartment
Directed by Billy Wilder • 1960 • United States
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurrayJack Lemmon stars in one of Billy Wilder’s most beloved films as C. C. Baxter, a company man anxious to please his superiors at the New York insurance firm where he works—enough to let his boss...
