Drama

One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the early 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu (a.k.a. The Crucified Lovers) is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Based on a...

Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. With austere simplicity, the director tells the story of the rape and murder of the...

Henry Fonda takes the title role in John Ford's fanciful yet inspiring screen treatment of the Great Emancipator's early life. Having just hung his shingle in Springfield, Illinois, the inexperienced backwoods lawyer must rely on little more than faith...

This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous. Le amiche (The Girlfriends) is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life,...

Unsparing and naturalistic drama from writer/director/star Barbara Loden (Elia Kazan's wife) filters a "road movie" story through the sensibilities of 1970s independent cinema. Having lost her job-and custody of her kids-rudderless working-class divorc?e...

Steven Soderbergh wrote and directed this witty, revealing, masterfully acted look at the sexual games people play. A philandering husband (Peter Gallagher), his frigid wife (Andie MacDowell), and his sultry mistress (Laura San Giacomo)-who is also his...

In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittoria de Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair's subsequent work on some of the masterpieces of...

Writer/director Sofia Coppola's acclaimed debut feature, based on Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, traces the tragic ends of the five beautiful teenage Lisbon sisters in a '70s Michigan suburb. Through narration by a now-grown man who worshipped the girls from...

A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher's England, Mike Leigh's 'Meantime' was the culmination of the writer-director s pioneering work in television and became his breakthrough theatrical release. Unemployment is rampant in London's...

Nineteenth-century Ohio accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) lands a new job at a frontier town called Machine, but before long he kills a man in self-defense, is pursued by bounty hunters, and is helped by an Indian who thinks Blake is the...

For his feature debut, twenty-four-year-old Louis Malle brought together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Deca?, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis. Taking place over the course of one restless...

In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L argent follows a counterfeit bill...