The show must still go on in Nazi-occupied France in Truffaut’s elegantly mounted film that resists simplistic morality, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, as a theatre troupe attempts to keep art alive and unblemished in trying times.
A delirious, nihilistic reimagining of the ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ tale, this is one of Tsui’s boldest achievements, as he disregards continuity and legible mise-en-scène for a whirlwind, impressionistic, and psychic wound of a movie.
Revolutionary, overrated, or somewhere in between, Welles’s extraordinary debut turns power, ego, and misery into an enigmatic cradle-to-grave portrait of a larger-than-life figure—‘European’ in its artistic style, but fiercely American in its spirit of derring-do.
A haunting blend of morbid realism and the fantastique, Franju’s cult French psychological horror follows a surgeon who, with an accomplice, lures and kills young women for their facial skin, as he attempts to transplant it onto his disfigured daughter.
A pimpish young man who finds labour work to be ideological suspect tries to make ends meet by manipulating his lovers into sex workers in Pasolini’s harsh, unflinching debut feature, as his talky ‘neo-neorealist’ film offers a stinging commentary on Italy’s social and moral disintegration.
An editing masterclass that feels ahead of its time, this is Welles at his most playful and elusive—utterly fascinating if you surrender to his tricks, obvious or otherwise, as he slyly provokes with a thesis on fakery, expertise, illusion and truth.
A family patriarch is convinced after a night’s dream that his daughter-in-law is the incarnation of the Goddess Kali, in Ray’s quietly devastating attack on religious dogma, with 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore’s haunting gaze at the center of a tug-of-war between blind faith and rationalism.
Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
Oshima’s WWII anti-war melodrama feels more like theatre than cinema, as the quartet of compelling actors (Bowie, Sakamoto, Conti, and Kitano), queer undercurrents, and a highly emotional epilogue elevate it into something unexpectedly sublime.
A fervent, playful self-portrait that sees a bubbly yet wistful Varda at her most inventive, crafting a near-formless cinematic salute that reimagines what personal documentary filmmaking can be.
Eternality Tan 