This is the latest in Seoul Selection's series on Korea's ranking filmmakers. Written by Kim Young-jin, one of Korea's foremost film critics, the book-which includes interviews, a biography, filmography and synopses-examines the cinematic world of Lee Chang-dong, widely hailed as one of Korea's top directors, despite having produced only four films to date. Lee's films embrace the scars of Korean history and reality as well as the illusory nature of the film medium. His latest work "'Secret Sunshine,'" a comeback film of sorts as Lee returns to directing after a stint as Korea's Minister of Culture, has been invited to the Cannes Film Festival. His filmography includes "'Green Fish,'" "'Oasis,'" and "'Peppermint Candy.'"

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell's and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. While it continues to provide the best introduction to the fundamentals of serious film study, the eighth edition has been revised be more classroom friendly by introducing film techniques earlier in the text, followed by the chapters on Film Genres. Supported by a text-specific Tutorial CD-ROM with video clips, Film Art is automatically packaged with this outstanding student learning tool.

An inspired rendering of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) deftly transplants the story of an inept police chief turned heartless killer and his scrappy mistress from the American South to French West Africa. Featuring pitch-perfect performances by Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert, this striking neonoir straddles the line between violence and lyricism with dark humor and visual elegance.

Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson is the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk’s heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America. Sirk utilizes expressionist colors, reflective surfaces, and frames-within-frames to convey the loneliness and isolation of a matriarch trapped by the snobbery of her children and the gossip of her social-climbing country club chums. Criterion is proud to present this subversive Hollywood tearjerker in a special edition.

Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a secret group of radical utopians, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp—a terrible mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal that inspired him to write the novel The House of the Dead.

Told from the point of view of a fictitious narrator—a convict serving a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife—The House of the Dead describes in vivid detail the horrors that Dostoevsky himself witnessed while in prison: the brutality of guards who relish cruelty for its own sake; the evil of criminals who enjoy murdering children; and the existence of decent souls amid filth and degradation. More than just a work of documentary realism, The House of the Dead also describes the spiritual death and gradual resurrection from despair experienced by the novel’s central character—a reawakening that culminates in his final reconciliation with himself and humanity.

Also included in this volume is Dostoevsky’s first published work, Poor Folk, a novel written in the form of letters that brought Dostoevsky immediate critical and public recognition.

Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926) designed some of the world’s most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. Here their artistry melds in a unique, enthralling cinematic experience. Less a documentary than a visual poem, Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture, including his massive, still-unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. With camera work as bold and sensual as the curves of his subject’s organic structures, Teshigahara immortalizes Gaudí on film.

Under the Volcano follows the final day in the life of self-destructive British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force) on the eve of World War II. Withering from alcoholism, Firmin stumbles through a small Mexican village amidst the Day of the Dead fiesta, attempting to reconnect with his estranged wife (Jacqueline Bisset) but only further alienating himself. John Huston’s ambitious tackling of Malcolm Lowry’s towering “unadaptable” novel gave the incomparable Finney one of his grandest roles and was the legendary The Treasure of the Sierra Madre director’s triumphant return to filmmaking in Mexico.

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.

The subtitle of this collection of stories—"Four Short Novels"—announces their ambition: each unfolds over decades, tracking with dispassionate precision how youthful notions come to define, and even defeat, a life. Two women seal their friendship by seducing each other's teen-age son; an aged counsellor recounts the decay of a mysterious ancient civilization ruled by a handsome but foolish despot; an impoverished black girl bears the child of a middle-class white boy, and is welcomed by his self-consciously liberal family. Lessing's scathing intelligence ranges widely, but her tales tend to wobble under the weight of her ideas. She is at her best in the final story, which extends from England to the outposts of empire in South Africa and India during the Second World War. A British soldier has a brief affair with an officer's wife, and in later years becomes obsessed with the idea that he might have fathered a son, a possibility that appears to him as the key to the life he should have led. ~The New Yorker

When an idealistic governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord, he is cast into exile, his wife and children left to fend for themselves and eventually wrenched apart by vicious slave traders. Under Kenji Mizoguchi’s dazzling direction, this classic Japanese story became one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, a monumental, empathetic expression of human resilience in the face of evil.

The Roman composer Mazzocchi is one of those figures known only to musicologists, and it is a pity, for this disc contains first-rate music.

Mazzocchi has several strikes against him – first, his production is exclusively vocal, and so inaccessible to listeners who don't know Italian or Latin or both. More importantly, even at this late stage in the early music (and perhaps due to reason number one), most of his work still remains inaccessible in modern editions (for example, the book of madrigals from 1638, with 24 works was only excerpted with a modern edition presenting six). The late (1664) collection of Sacrae Cantiones is available complete.

Drag racing east from L.A. in a souped-up ‘55 Chevy are the wayward Driver and Mechanic (singer/songwriter James Taylor and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, in their only acting roles), accompanied by a tagalong Girl (Laurie Bird). Along the way, they meet Warren Oates’s Pontiac GTO-driving wanderer and challenge him to a cross-country race—the prize: their cars’ pink slips. Yet no summary can do justice to the existential punch of Two-Lane Blacktop. Maverick director Monte Hellman’s stripped-down narrative, gorgeous widescreen compositions, and sophisticated look at American male obsession make this one of the artistic high points of 1970s cinema, and possibly the greatest road movie ever made.

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, crackling personalities of rising stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and anything-goes crime narrative, Jean-Luc Godard’s debut fashioned a simultaneous homage to and critique of the American film genres that influenced and rocked him as a film writer for Cahiers du cinéma. Jazzy, free-form, and sexy, Breathless (À bout de souffle) helped launch the French New Wave and ensured cinema would never be the same.

Shoah is Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.

Absent from the film is any imagery shot at the time the Holocaust occurred. There is only Lanzmann and his crew, filming in private spaces and now-dormant zones of eradication to extract testimony from a series of survivors, witnesses, and oppressors alike. Through his relentless questioning (aided on occasion by hidden camera), Lanzmann is able to coax out material of unparalleled emotional truth that constitutes both precious oral history and withering indictment.

Shoah (the title is a common designation for the Holocaust, and a Hebrew word that can be translated as “Catastrophe” or “Annihilation”) was the first of Lanzmann’s films to analyse the effects of the death camps on individual lives and the world at large. It represents an aesthetic achievement in line with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, combining inquiry, rage, and mourning to create a monumental portrait of shame and grief. Shoah locates within the present a direct line to the horrors of the past, and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful films of all time.

The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present, for the first time on DVD in the UK, Claude Lanzmann’s 550-minute masterpiece in a four-disc set.

Lamenting the state of the horror genre in Korea, director Ahn Byung Ki of APT and Phone said he was the only one left making horror films who was truly interested in the genre. But he didn't just come to the table with empty words; he gave a chance to like-minded people to do the genre justice, producing One Day Suddenly - 4 Horror Stories. Ahn created four different stories, all adapted from Yoo Il Han's works and exploring different subtexts of the horror genre, and gave four young directors their first shots at directing true horror.

This four-disc limited edition comes with all four films on separate discs. Each disc also includes audio commentary, making of, director and cast interviews, photo gallery, and theatrical trailers for the film.