After moving onto a ship with her new husband Jea, Juliette soon tired of life at sea and slips off into the Paris nightlife. Furious Jules sets off, leaving her behind, but beomes overcome by the longing for his wife, while shipmate Pere goes searching for her. The only feature directed by the tragically short-lived Jean Vigo, this is a haunting romantic fable about a young couple — Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo — who spend their life on a battered barge on the Seine. Not much happens, except wise old salt Michel Simon helping out, but it has a genuinely weird feel, combining dingy realism with an almost magical eroticism. It has improved with age, its occasional fuzziness adding a further patina to its strange texture. Vigo, who had made the shorts A Propos De Nice and Zero De Conduite, died at 29 just when the film was coming out. Source - Empire

Stalker itself had a catastrophic history. While it's a well-known part of the film's legend that it had to be shot twice after the original film stock was ruined in the lab, it's less talked about that the entire production had by then already had to vacate its original location in northern Tajikistan after a major earthquake. Touched as such by disaster in its early life, the film would end up embraced by it. While the last month saw Tokyo's drinking water deemed unfit for children, the toxic legacy of eventually filming near a chemical plant outside the Estonian capital of Tallinn has been blamed for killing both lead actor Anatoli Solonitsyn and in 1986, just a few months after Chernobyl, Tarkovsky himself. Source - The Guardian

A woman visits her rich uncle before taking her vows as a nun. When he dies, he leaves his estate to her and his son. She becomes a nun and opens up the estate to house some wretched derelicts. When the wretches nearly rape her, she rethinks her religious calling. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

Director Cristian Mungiu's drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days unfolds in Romania in the late '80s, during the last waning days of Communist rule. Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu play, respectively, Otilia and Gabita, two female friends and students who share a Bucharest flat. They soon find themselves saddled with an overwhelming problem: Gabita is expecting. With abortion illegal in Romania at that time, the women seek an illicit termination at the hands of one Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) in a seedy Romanian hotel -- but Bebe refuses to accept money in return for his services and demands a certain "alternate" commodity instead. Source - Nathan Southern, Rovi

Even in 1945, Marcel Carnà (C)'s Children of Paradise was regarded as an old-fashioned film. Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1840s, Jacques Prà (C)vert's screenplay concerns four men in love with the mysterious Garance (Arletty). Each loves Garance in his own fashion, but only the intentions of sensitive mime-actor Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault) are entirely honorable; as a result, it is he who suffers most, hurdling one obstacle after another in pursuit of an evidently unattainable goal. In the stylized fashion of 19th-century French drama, many grand passions are spent during the film's totally absorbing 195 minutes. The film was produced under overwhelmingly difficult circumstances during the Nazi occupation of France, and many of the participants/creators were members of the Maquis, so the movie's existence itself is somewhat miraculous. Children of Paradise has gone on to become one of the great romantic classics of international cinema. Source - Hal Erickson, Rovi

"L'Avventura" created a stir in 1960, when Kael picked it as the best film of the year. It was seen as the flip side of Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." Both directors were Italian, both depicted their characters in a fruitless search for sensual pleasure, both films ended at dawn with emptiness and soul-sickness. But Fellini's characters, who were middle-class and had lusty appetites, at least were hopeful on their way to despair. For Antonioni's idle and decadent rich people, pleasure is anything that momentarily distracts them from the lethal ennui of their existence. Kael again: "The characters are active only in trying to discharge their anxiety: Sex is their sole means of contact." Source - Roger Ebert

‘Cléo from 5 to 7’ (1962) was French new waver Agnès Varda’s second feature and is filled with the beauty of Paris’s natural light. ‘Hold on, pretty butterfly!’ says Cléo (Corinne Marchand, pictured), a fretful and fame-occupied singer, to herself as she prepares to  roam the city for two hours while awaiting a possibly momentous doctor’s verdict. It’s experimental and free-wheeling in design – Varda gives us overlapping dialogue, parodic inserts, a documentarist’s eye mixed with a painter’s, found sound and Michel Legrand’s songs, and juxtaposes frippery with political reality. Quietly touching and profound, it epitomises the youthful delight Varda always shows for the tools at her disposal and her sensitive and easeful way of expressing the sways and shifts of life, love and desire. Source - Time Out

The story of the movie is thin as paper: Galoup, a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion, has to deal with his jealousy when a new recruit called Sentain becomes a hero in the eyes of his men. Alongside Galoup's soldiers, the only other important player in this bizarre drama is Forestier, Galoup's superior, who he obviously admires, but who doesn't share his resentment for Sentain. Gradually, Galoup's envy for Sentain becomes too much for him to take, and his downward spiral begins. Denis depicts, with great sense for details, how the military routines dominate every aspect of the legionnaires' (and especially Galoup's) life. Source - IMDB

"City of God" churns with furious energy as it plunges into the story of the slum gangs of Rio de Janeiro. Breathtaking and terrifying, urgently involved with its characters, it announces a new director of great gifts and passions: Fernando Meirelles. Remember the name. The film has been compared with Scorsese's "GoodFellas," and it deserves the comparison. Scorsese's film began with a narrator who said that for as long as he could remember he wanted to be a gangster. The narrator of this film seems to have had no other choice. Source - Roger Ebert

The film was denied a theatrical release in mainland China by the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television due to its critical portrayal of various policies and campaigns of the Communist government. To Live was screened at the 1994 New York Film Festival before eventually receiving a limited release in the United States on November 18, 1994.  It is the first Chinese film that had its foreign distribution rights pre-sold. Source - Wikipedia

Andrei Rublev (alternately transliterated as Andrei Rublyov) is an epic film created by the Soviet-era director, Andrei Tarkovsky. It was financed and created during a brief cultural thaw in East-West relations, marked by the end of Kruschchev's reign. Within reason, the 205 minute director's cut represents exactly what Tarkovsky wanted in the movie. Unfortunately for Tarkovsky and for us, Kruschev was deposed shortly after filming began, and the 205 minute version was not seen until twenty five years after its creation. The Breszhnev-era censors first trimmed 15 minutes from it, then censors and marketers trimmed more. The shortest known version has been truncated to 145 minutes. Even more sadly, Tarkovsky was never again to get approval for the projects he really wanted to film, or an adequate budget to film the ones that did get approved. Source - The Pieta of Filmmaking

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. Source - Letterboxd

The film addresses a great array of human-centred themes such as the eager search for guidance during adolescence, the angst resulting from social detachment, the everyday hardships of parenthood, the pursuit of a satisfying individual and collective identity together with the ennui and frustration prompted by failing to do so, the volatility of young love and friendships, the self-aggrandising tendencies commonplace in teenage-made myths, and, especially, the fatal and irreversible consequences of an aimless life and a bewildering upbringing. Edward Yang also tackles highly sensitive political issues like the rise of Western culture to the detriment of Taiwan's traditions, the wide-spreading of unrest and violence stirred by socio-political uneasiness, the strained coexistence among social classes trying to deal with an uncertain future, the consequent yearn of migrating towards an expectedly-better country, and the proliferation of self-ruled quasi-political organisations (in this case, youth gangs) as a way to substitute an unconvincing State. Source - Wikipedia

Spirited Away takes influences from “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” and uses them to fashion a highly original story about a 10 year-old girl, Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase), who, along with her parents, ventures through a tunnel that leads to the world of spirits. After a witch, Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette), turns Mom and Dad into pigs, Chihiro must find a niche in the spirit world, where humans are not well thought-of, and figure out a way to convince Yubaba to change her parents back into humans and send them all home. With help from Haku (Jason Marsden), Yubaba’s boy apprentice, and Lin (Susan Egan), a “big sister” type, Chihiro gets a job at Yubaba’s bathhouse for sprits, and there her quest to aid her family begins. But, as complications arise, she finds additional tasks to perform and other allies willing to help her. Source - ReelViews

Not only hugely important in film history - it was the first foreign-language movie ever to be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture - but a sorrowful, acutely thoughtful, and wholly imperishable masterpiece, Renoir’s drama about First World War fortunes and the demise of Old Europe holds up sublimely: better, even, than La Règle du jeu (1939), which is more often called his crowning achievement.The friendship forged between Pierre Fresnay’s French captain and Erich von Stroheim’s refined German commandant lends a core of humanity as vulnerable as it is profound; and the feelings between Jean Gabin’s escapee mechanic and the farm widow Elsa (wonderful Dita Parlo) have all the purity of a great silent romance. Source - Telegraph

The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s lavish, leisurely historical drama about waning aristocracy in 19th-century Italy. The details of clothing, architecture, and bric-a-brac are so carefully and meticulously recreated, they generate a sense of you-are-there immediacy. In The Leopard, it’s not the audience but one of the characters himself who’s acutely aware, at all times, that he’s experiencing ancient history as it unfolds. He knows he’s in a period piece, even when we forget. Source - AV Film Club

Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are angels who watch over the city of Berlin. They don't have harps or wings (well, they usually don't have wings) and they prefer overcoats to gossamer gowns. But they can travel unseen through the city, listening to people's thoughts, watching their actions and studying their lives. While they can make their presence felt in small ways, only children and other angels can see them. They spend their days serenely observing, unable to interact with people, and they feel neither pain nor joy. One day, Damiel finds his way into a circus and sees Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a high-wire artist, practicing her act; he is immediately smitten. After the owners of the circus tell the company that the show is out of money and must disband, Marion sinks into a funk, shuffling back to her trailer to ponder what to do next. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

Amid the Babel of un-synched language spouted by its multiple characters, Tati tells us a story of a man, M Hulot, trying to negotiate a city, Paris, that doesn’t exist. Only Hulot (Tati, of course), and an American tourist, Barbara (Barbara Dennek) seem to notice that the steel and glass skyscrapers of the soaring sixties have hidden the real city, obscuring its landmarks and dividing its citizens. Tati goes to a business meeting, is diverted to a furniture show, meets an old friend who invites him home for a drink, attends the opening of a restaurant, meets a girl and loses her, all in the space of 24-odd hours.

Source - Silent London

Arguably his warmest film, “All About My Mother” represents a loving tribute to women in their various shapes, ages, classes, and professions.  On the surface a woman’s melodrama, the movie covers the entire range of emotions: loss, grief, reconciliation, camaraderie, and redemption.  It depicts a circle of women who confront with forceful courage all kinds of ills: terminal disease (AIDS), abandonment by husbands and lovers, old age and dementia, unplanned pregnancy, and death. Well-balanced, the film mixes elements of comedy and drama, sentiment and humanity in equal measure, all contained in a multi-layered narrative of extraordinary cohesiveness and emotional power. Source - Emanuel Levy

At its height, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security — the infamous ‘Stasi’ — had around 100,000 full-time employees and recruited, by fair means or foul, hundreds of thousands more ‘informants’. Ordinary members of the public were coerced into spying on their friends, family and neighbours; some through their love for the Communist system, but most through blackmail or fear of disappearing into a forgotten cell. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this story begins in the Orwellian year of 1984.

Source - Empire

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own. It was released 50 years ago, but it's as fresh as a glass of ice-cold water. Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand are the ascetic Crusader knight and his cynical squire who return from the wars after 10 years to find their country ravaged with plague and the population panicking about the coming apocalypse. The knight is confronted by the cowled figure of Death, who agrees to a game of chess, and lets the knight stay alive for as long as he can stave off checkmate. It's an inspired conceit, a seriocomic masterpiece on its own, which Bergman carries off with absolute conviction. Woody Allen's honourable homage in Love and Death brought out its latent black comedy, though a batsqueak of this is present in Bergman. Source - The Guardian

A wild, intensely cinematic ride into two men’s burning desire to get even, “Old Boy” falls slightly short of Korean helmer Park Chan-wook’s previous feature, the gripping psychodrama “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002). Working with different scripters this time out, Park addresses his favorite theme of revenge as more of a game as a loutish businessman, locked up by a mysterious organization, tries to unravel the mystery when he’s released. Major festival positioning looks in the cards, but business outside Asia looks to be rather specialized for this meaty meal, strongly laced with cringe-inducing violence and dark sexual currents. Source - Variety

Inner torment and troubled marriages mark the life and work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. But his films aren't simply personal essays; their cinematic strength lies in their ability to embrace other art forms, while using every filmmaker's tool to bring his themes home. The spirit of Dickens is evident in the social and domestic landscapes of Fanny And Alexander, the story of two children trapped in a turbulent family. The vibrant family Christmas, the acerbic clergyman's house and the treasure trove of a Jewish antique shop could have jumped from the pages of his novels, although in fact the last words come from a play by Strindberg.

Source - Empire

The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena) takes place in a Castilian village in 1940. The Spanish Civil War has ended but the stink still hangs in the air, the specter of mechanized death barreling through in the form of a black locomotive as the inhabitants mourn their private losses. Primarily told from the perspective of a little girl, the film explores her dreamy desire to make sense of her world by creating her own Frankenstein monster. Torrent conveys emotional complexities in what is essentially a story about a child realizing death -- the curiosity and sadness skirting horror, gliding into uncertain acceptance. Director Víctor Erice encourages another evocative performance from Tellería, who gives Isabel a mischievous, vaguely menacing air. Source - PopMatters

Master Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang directs this intelligent family drama about the regrets and malaise of middle age, which recalls his 1991 masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day both in scope and in depth of observation. The film focuses on N.J. (Wu Nien-jen, a noted writer-director in his own right) a partner in a computer firm who is married to Min-min (Elaine Jin) and has two kids, teenager Ting-ting (Kelly Lee) and young Yang-yang (Jonathan Chang). His company, though successful, demands constant innovation to stay afloat, which includes collaborating with renowned Japanese games designer Ota (Issey Ogata). The liaison work is assigned to N.J. in spite of the fact that work is the last thing on his mind. When Min-min's mother (Tang Ru-yun) suddenly falls into a coma, N.J., Min-min, and others in the family are forced to reevaluate their lives. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

When the sailors of Russian battleship The Potemkin are given rotten meat by the ship's quartermaster, it's the final straw for the abused crew. Mutiny follows and before long St. Peterburg is in full-scale revolt. Denied a certificate by the British censors in 1926 and so frowned upon by the government that a distributor who tried to secure the film was "visited" by Scotland Yard, Battleship Potemkin has been seen almost exclusively in this country at film societies and workers' clubs. This is, essentially, the first time it has gone on general release here. Eisenstein's masterpiece is a film that many like to discuss knowledgeably, but surprisingly few have seen. Source - Empire

Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy come to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent masterpieces of the silent era. Chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc in the hours leading up to her execution, Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer depicts her torment with startling immediacy, employing an array of techniques—expressionistic lighting, interconnected sets, painfully intimate close-ups—to immerse viewers in her subjective experience. Anchoring Dreyer’s audacious formal experimentation is a legendary performance by Renée Falconetti, whose haunted face channels both the agony and the ecstasy of martyrdom. Source - The Criterion Collection

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro returns to the phantasmagorical cinema that defined such early fare as Cronos and The Devil's Backbone with this haunting fantasy-drama set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and detailing the strange journeys of an imaginative young girl who may be the mythical princess of an underground kingdom. Her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), recently remarried to sadistic army captain Vidal (Sergi Lpez) and soon to bear the cruel military man's child, shy young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is forced to entertain herself as her recently-formed family settles into their new home nestled deep in the Spanish countryside. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

Just when it seemed impossible for Iranian filmmakers to express themselves meaningfully outside the bounds of censorship, Asghar Farhadi’s Nader and Simin, A Separationcomes along to prove the contrary. Apparently simple on a narrative level yet morally, psychologically and socially complex, it succeeds in bringing Iranian society into focus for in a way few other films have done. Like About Elly, which won Farhadi the best director award at Berlin two years ago and which went on to find release in many territories, it has the potential to engage Western audiences with the right handling. Politics are ostensibly out of the picture, though the whole premise is based on a middle-class couple’s divorce because the wife Simin (Iranian star Leila Hatami) wants to move abroad to find a better future for their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But that may not be the real reason for the separation. Nader (Peyman Moaadi, seen in About Elly) is a decent man but a stubborn one, and he neglects his wife. Too proud to ask her to stay with him, he lets her move back to her mother’s place while he and Termeh are left to look after his aged father with Alzheimer’s disease. He hastily hires a poor woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) as a daytime caretaker, who signs on without telling him she’s pregnant (or does she?).  Source - The Hollywood Reporter

The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's transcendent autobiographical poem The Mirror is a film that blends the themes of childhood memories, dreams, emotional abandonment and loss of innocence with slight touches of documentary footage which can be looked at as a political commentary on Russian history and of its people. The film shifts from three different timelines of the narrator life which are the pre war (1935), war (1940s), and post war (1960s-70s), as the narrator lays on his deathbed looking back at the life that he had lived. (He is never shown on the screen but heard through a series of poems which were written and recited by Tarkovsky's own father.) The three different timelines also slip in and out of different colors, black and white, sepia, and monochrome, with some scenes that include newsreel footage of wartime with Russia, China and Germany. Source - Classicartfilms.com

At the height of the street fighting in Algiers, the French stage a press conference for a captured FLN leader. "Tell me, general," a Parisian journalist asks the revolutionary, "do you not consider it cowardly to send your women carrying bombs in their handbags, to blow up civilians?" The rebel replies in a flat tone of voice: "And do you not think it cowardly to bomb our people with napalm?" A pause. "Give us your airplanes and we will give you our women and their handbags." "The Battle of Algiers," a great film by the young Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, exists at this level of bitter reality. It may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war; "The Battle of Algiers" has a universal frame of reference. Source - Roger Ebert

This beautiful family saga by the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien begins in 1945, when Japan ended its 51-year colonial rule in Taiwan, and concludes in 1949, when mainland China became communist and Chiang Kai-shek's government retreated to Taipei. Perceiving these historical upheavals through the varied lives of a single family, Hou proves himself a master of long takes and complex framing, with a great talent for passionate (though elliptical and distanced) storytelling. Given the diverse languages and dialects spoken here (including the language of a deaf-mute, rendered in intertitles), this 1989 drama is largely a meditation on communication itself, and appropriately enough it was the first Taiwanese film to use direct sound. It's also one of the supreme masterworks of the contemporary cinema, the first feature of Hou's magisterial trilogy (followed by The Puppet Master and Good Men, Good Women) about Taiwan during the 20th century. In Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese with subtitles. Source - Chicagoreader.com

For Werner Herzog, cinema is an active, participatory art—one in which the creation of a work requires the practitioner to actually live (or have already lived) it, as if truth comes most compellingly from an artist’s firsthand experience with his subject matter. Herzog’s fictional films are intrinsically linked to his documentaries in that, in both cases, the director is often not simply the storyteller but, also, a willing and essential participant, his presence fundamentally, messily tangled up in the final product. So it certainly goes with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, the German auteur’s 1972 tale about Spanish conquistadors’ ill-fated trip through Peru’s Indian-inhabited jungles and down the treacherous Huallaga river. A saga of adventurers—and, specifically, the titular madman (Klaus Kinski)—driven headlong into annihilation by their own hubris and desire for immortality, it’s the first of Herzog’s many features in which his (anti-)heroes function as loose proxies for himself, with the actual, arduous process of making the film (on location, in the middle of nowhere, and with the help of natives) mirroring the thrust of his plot about swashbucklers barreling into the untamed wild in search of greatness. As would again be the case with Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde’s Manoel da Silva, Aguirre is Herzog, Herzog is Aguirre, and never shall the twain truly be separated. Soure - Slant Magazine

One of the biggest, strangest, maddest films in cinema history - Fritz Lang's 1927 film is a crazed futurist epic, a mythic sprawl with something of Jung and Wagner, and dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble. Metropolis predicts the ideologies of class and race of the 20th century, and there is a perennial frisson in the way the workers' leader Maria longs for a messianic figure who can find a middle way between the head and the heart, the bosses and the workers: he will be the Mediator, or the "Mittler" – a word that has a chilling echo with another real-life leader who at the time of Metropolis's premiere had a few seats in the Reichstag. The "Maschinenmensch" robot based on Maria is a brilliant eroticisation and fetishisation of modern technology and the current crisis in Dubai, whose economic boom was founded on a colossal import of globalised labour, makes Metropolis seem very contemporary. Source - The Guardian

Indian cinema lovers, particularly those who follow independent and/or South Indian film industries, often lament their national cinema, one of the most prolific in the history of film, is often boiled down to two main components in the public eye: Bollywood and Satyajit Ray. While that’s about as unfair or inaccurate as reducing American cinema to Hollywood and Paul Thomas Anderson, or the national film stables of France down to Jean Renoir and the French New Wave, it still gets the biggest points across to newcomers: To understand regional film movements, you start with the major stereotypes and follow those recommendations to the cinematic genesis points of what has historically been the most influential works from within a particular film culture. As far as influential classics go, Ray’s Pather Panchaliis one of the most recognizable auteur features of world cinema. Source - ExpressElevatorToHell

Jeanne Dielman examines a single mother's regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning and mothering over three days. The mother, Jeanne Dielman (whose name is only derived from the title and from a letter she reads to her son), has sex with male clients in her house daily for her and her son's subsistence. Like her other activities, Jeanne's sex work is part of the routine she performs every day by rote and is uneventful. But on the second day, Jeanne's routine begins to unravel subtly, as she drops a newly washed spoon and overcooks the potatoes that she's preparing for dinner. These alterations to Jeanne's existence prepare for the climax on the third day, during which she murders a client. Source - Wikipedia

In this classic German thriller, Hans Beckert, a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert’s heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seedy underworld network. With both cops and criminals in pursuit, the murderer soon realizes that people are on his trail, sending him into a tense, panicked attempt to escape justice. Source - Letteboxd

"Farewell My Concubine" is two films at once: An epic spanning a halfcentury of modern Chinese history, and a melodrama about life backstage at the famed Peking Opera. The idea of viewing modern China through the eyes of two of the opera's stars would not, at first, seem logical: How could the birth pangs of a developing nation have much in common with the death pangs of an ancient and ritualistic art form? And yet the film flows with such urgency that all its connections seem logical. And it is filmed with such visual splendor that possible objections are swept aside. Source - Roger Ebert

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same. 'Breathless' is not only Godard's feature-length debut, but also the film that changed everything, from the way we perceive and experience films to the techniques applied in making them. It is at once a celebration and love of cinema as well as an admission of guilt, of a filmmaker who wants to capture reality through a false and aesthetic medium which is influenced heavily by his own extensive knowledge. Godard makes this known from the very instant we see a white text announce the movie dedicated to Monogram Pictures, an American studio of low-budget features, and the cinematography displaying a documentary style. The critic-turned-director is quite literally dreaming of film, creating scenes as he goes along with a genuine sense of not knowing what will happen next. Source - HighDeFDigest

In this Federico Fellini film, Marcello Mastrioanni stars as Fellini's alter ego, here depicted as a gossip columnist. Having left his dreary provincial existence behind, Mastrioanni wanders through an ultra-modern, ultra-sophisticated, ultra-decadent Rome. Throughout his adventures, Mastrioanni's dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and fears are mirrored by the hedonism all around him. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

Two couples move into neighbouring apartments in '60s Hong Kong. With their spouses away much of the time, the remaining couple gradually discover they have much in common. This comes to include the shocking discovery that each of their partners are having an affair. They confide in each other forthwith, but will vow never to be unfaithful to their respective partners hold? Abandoning the overtly experimental style that has characterised his recent work, Wong Kar-Wai here opts for more traditional tactics in tracing the hesitant love affair between cuckolded Hong Kong neighbours, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Source - Empire

Jean-Pierre Léaud is Antoine, a tearaway kid perpetually in trouble both in school and at home: his troubled family circumstances are only revealed at the very end - a cool narrative coup. The film looks superb and Antoine's heartbreakingly open face is like Truffaut's monochrome Paris: beautiful, tough, innocent and yet worldly. There are too many great moments to list in full: the "Wheel of Death" scene at the fair, like the contraption itself, abolishes gravity and becomes weightlessly joyous. The faces of the children are unforgettable. The overhead shot of the kids in single-file behind the gung-ho PE teacher jogging through the Paris streets, gradually sneaking away to bunk off, is inspired, and so is Antoine's plagiarism of Balzac - a demonstration of literary good taste lost on his dullard schoolmaster. Source - The Guardian

On June 25, 1963, Federico Fellini's 8½, described at the time as a "provocative film for art house trade," made its way to theaters stateside. The film picked up two Oscars at the 36th annual Academy Awards ceremony, including best foreign language film. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below. 8½ is a grim fable of modern man, a true art picture and one that is likely to be limited in its general appeal but strong in the special houses where audiences want this sort of cerebral cinema. Source - The Hollywood Reporter

On the heels of the international success of "The Wedding Banquet," Ang Lee has directed the ambitious and entertaining "Eat Drink Man Woman." Again his focus is the family, and the universality of his themes should translate well commercially in both Eastern and Western markets. New tale centers on Chu (Sihung Lung), a master chef who’s literally lost his sense of taste. The widower lives in Taipei with his three adult daughters — each of whom, consciously or otherwise, is just itching to leave the nest. Source - Variety

Now often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu/Rules of the Game was not warmly received on its original release in 1939: audiences at its opening engagements in Paris were openly hostile, responding to the film with shouts of derision, and distributors cut the movie from 113 minutes to a mere 80. It was banned as morally perilous during the German occupation and the original negative was destroyed during WWII. It wasn't until 1956 that Renoir was able to restore the film to its original length. In retrospect, this reaction seems both puzzling and understandable; at its heart, Rules of the Game is a very moral film about frequently amoral people. A comedy of manners whose wit only occasionally betrays its more serious intentions, it contrasts the romantic entanglements of rich and poor during a weekend at a country estate. Source - Rotten Tomatoes

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication, writes Peter Bradshaw. Rashômon is about a court proceeding, recalled in flashback, relating to a mysterious crime. A bandit, Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune) is on trial for murdering a samurai (Mayasuki Mori) and raping his wife (Machiko Kyô) in the remote forest. Each of these three figures addresses the court, the dead man via a medium – an amazingly, electrifyingly strange conceit, carried off with absolute conviction. A fourth witness (Takashi Shimura) offers his own version, again different. But it is not just a matter of the witnesses being slippery: crucially, the bandit, the samurai and the samurai's wife each claim to have committed the murderous act themselves, the samurai by suicide. Truth, history, memory and the past … are these just fictions?Source - The Guardian

No story could be simpler. An old couple come to the city to visit their children and grandchildren. Their children are busy, and the old people upset their routines. In a quiet way, without anyone admitting it, the visit goes badly. The parents return home. A few days later, the grandmother dies. Now it is the turn of the children to make a journey. From these few elements Yasujiro Ozu made one of the greatest films of all time. "Tokyo Story" (1953) lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn't want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding. It does this so well that I am near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections. Soure Roger Ebert-

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty. Source - The Criterion Collection

A veteran samurai, who has fallen on hard times, answers a village's request for protection from bandits. He gathers 6 other samurai to help him, and they teach the townspeople how to defend themselves, and they supply the samurai with three small meals a day. The film culminates in a giant battle when 40 bandits attack the village. Any pub quiz clod can name the Magnificent Seven, even down to Brad Dexter. But only a true sensei of movie trivia can list all of the Seven Samurai — Takashi Shimura (Kambei), Toshiro Mifune (Kikuchiyo), DaisukeKato (Shichiroji), Yoshio Inaba (Gorobei), Seiji Miyaguchi (Kyuzo), Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi) and Isao Kimura (Katsushiro). Source - Empire