Chantal Akerman
Edition: DVD
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.
Raymond Bernard
France
Edition: DVD
One of the greatest and least-known directors of all time, Raymond Bernard helped shape French cinema into a truly formidable industry at the dawn of the sound era. Wooden Crosses and Les misérables exemplify the formal and narrative brilliance of an unjustly overshadowed cinematic trailblazer.
Basil Dearden
United Kingdom
Edition: DVD
In the late fifties and early sixties, Basil Dearden created a series of gripping, groundbreaking, even controversial films that dealt with racism, homophobia, and the lingering effects of World War II, noir-tinged dramas that burrowed into corners of London rarely seen on-screen.
Samuel Fuller
United States
Edition: DVD
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.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
United States
Edition: DVD
Jean-Pierre Gorin established
his personal voice with this trio of fascinating,
nontraditional documentaries.
Jean Grémillon
France
Edition: DVD
Though little known outside of France, Jean Grémillon was a consummate filmmaker from his country’s golden age.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland
Edition: DVD
In these three films, something like social-realist farces, Kaurismäki surveys the working-class outcasts of his native Finland with detached yet disarming amusement.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland
Edition: DVD
In the late eighties, Aki Kaurismäki, a master of the deadpan, fashioned a waggish fish-out-of-water tale about a U.S. tour by “the worst rock-and-roll band in the world.”
Allan King
Canada
Edition: DVD
Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema’s best-kept secrets. It was with his cinema-verité-style documentaries that King left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of people whose lives are in flux are riveting and at times emotionally overwhelming.
William Klein
France
Edition: DVD
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.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan
Edition: DVD
These are unforgettable depictions of a postwar Japan troubled by identity crises and moral corruption on scales both intimate and institutional.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan
Edition: DVD
Koreyoshi Kurahara’s free-form approach to moviemaking was perfectly suited to the radical spirit of the 1960s, when he was one of the biggest hit makers working at the razzle-dazzle, youth-oriented Nikkatsu studios.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan
Edition: DVD
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.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan
Edition: DVD
Years before Akira Kurosawa changed the face of cinema with such iconic works as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, he made his start in the Japanese film industry with four popular and exceptional works, created as World War II raged.
Ernst Lubitsch
United States
Edition: DVD
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.”
Norman Mailer
United States
Edition: DVD
Norman Mailer is remembered for many things— his novels, his essays, his articles, his activism, his ego. one largely forgotten chapter of his life, however, is his late-sixties kamikaze-style plunge into making experimental films.
Dušan Makavejev
Yugoslavia
Edition: DVD
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.
Louis Malle
Edition: DVD
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.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy
Edition: DVD
These haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan
Edition: DVD
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.
Mikio Naruse
Japan
Edition: DVD
Mikio Naruse is one of the most popular directors in the history of Japanese cinema, a crafter of heartrending melodramas often compared with the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan
Edition: DVD
Often called the Godard of the East, Japanese director Nagisa Oshima was one of the most provocative film artists of the twentieth century, and his works challenged and shocked the cinematic world for decades.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan
Edition: DVD
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.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan
Edition: DVD
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.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy
Edition: DVD
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.