Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, PIERROT LE FOU (“Crazy Pierrot”) is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
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Chungking Express
Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 1994 • Hong Kong
Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi KaneshiroThe whiplash, double-pronged CHUNGKING EXPRESS is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro ...
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Yi Yi
Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey OgataThe extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...
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Ugetsu
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1953 • Japan
Starring Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori, Kinuyo TanakaBy 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 ...
