Larisa Shepitko
Soviet Union
Edition: DVD
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan
Edition: DVD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sacha Guitry was once a household name. Something of a Gallic Noël Coward, this disarming, multitalented artist served up some of 1930s French cinema’s tastiest dishes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
In the thirties and forties, the young Indian actor known as Sabu (born Selar Shaik) captured the hearts of moviegoers in Britain and the United States as a completely new kind of big-screen icon.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
United States
Edition: DVD
Jean-Pierre Gorin established
his personal voice with this trio of fascinating,
nontraditional documentaries.
Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical.
Robert Downey Sr. emerged as one of the most irreverent filmmakers of the New York underground of the sixties, taking no prisoners in his rough-and-tumble treatises on politics, race, and consumer culture.
Jean Grémillon
France
Edition: DVD
Though little known outside of France, Jean Grémillon was a consummate filmmaker from his country’s golden age.
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.