These early films, which show the stirrings of the genius to come, remain the hidden treasures of a European cinema on the cusp of a golden age.
With the discerning eye of a true artist and the investigatory skills of a great journalist, Malle takes us from a street corner in Paris to America’s heartland to the expanses of India in his astonishing epic Phantom India.
Centered on the modern sensibilities of the younger generation, these delicate family dramas are marked by an exquisite formal elegance and emotional sensitivity about birth and death, love and marriage, and all the accompanying joys and loneliness.
One of the greatest and least-known directors of all time, Raymond Bernard helped shape French cinema, at the dawn of the sound era, into a truly formidable industry. Wooden Crosses and Les misérables exemplify the formal and narrative brilliance of an unjustly overshadowed cinematic trailblazer.
These three independent films showed off Samuel Fuller’s genre diversity, gutter wit, and subversive force, and pointed the way to a controversial career in studio moviemaking.
One of Spanish cinema’s great auteurs, Carlos Saura brought international audiences closer to the art of his country’s dance than any other filmmaker, before or since.
Amid Japan’s economic collapse and U.S. occupation, Kurosawa managed to find humor and redemption existing alongside despair and anxiety in this series of pensive, topical dramas.
These elegant, bawdy films, made before strict enforcement of the Hays morality code, feature some of the greatest stars of early Hollywood, as well as that elusive style of comedy that would thereafter be known as “the Lubitsch touch.”
In his three fiction features—Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, Mr. Freedom, and The Model Couple—William Klein skewers the fashion industry, American empire, and governmental mind control with hilarious, cutting aplomb.
In these three droll domestic films—Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But . . . , and Passing Fancy—Ozu movingly and humorously depicts middle-class struggles and the resentments between children and parents.
A true artist who had deftly used the Soviet film industry to make statements both personal and universal, Shepitko remains one of the greatest unsung filmmakers of all time.
In these three films, something like social-realist farces, Kaurismäki surveys the working-class outcasts of his native Finland with detached yet disarming amusement.
In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar, two postwar—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions.
This selection of Rossellini’s history films presents Blaise Pascal, the three-part The Age of the Medici, and Cartesius—works that don’t just enliven the past but illuminate the ideas that brought us to where we are today.
A curious, compassionate storyteller who was fascinated by characters on the outskirts of society, Hiroshi Shimizu used his trademark graceful traveling shot to peek around the corners of contemporary Japan.
A producer, writer, and director who navigated toward subjects of major historical significance and mythical distinction, Alexander Korda specialized in stately period drama with surprising satire. These films are exemplars of grand 1930s moviemaking.
This bruised and bloody collection represents a standout cross section of the nimble nasties Nikkatsu had to offer, action potboilers modeled on the western, comedy, gangster, and teen-rebel genres.
Makavejev’s films about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, raucous, and ribald. Across these first three films, he investigates love, death, and work; the legacy of war and the absurdity of daily life in a Communist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen.
Over the past four decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman has created one of cinema’s most distinctive bodies of work—formally daring, often autobiographical films about people and places, time and space.
This collection of Gabriel Pascal’s productions of Shaw’s work includes Major Barbara, Androcles and the Lion, and Caesar and Cleopatra, starring such luminaries of the big screen as Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, Wendy Hiller, and Rex Harrison.