An adaptation of Abbe Prevost's classic French novel 'Manon Lescaut', updated to post-World War II France, in which a former French Resistance activist rescues Manon from villagers who want to lynch her for collaborating with the Nazis. They move to Paris, but their relationship quickly turns stormy after they get involved in profiteering, prostitution and murder...

In Italy, the gambler and professor of poetry Daniele Dominici arrives in the seaside town of Rimini and is hired to teach for four months in the Liceu replacing another teacher. His relationship with his mate Monica is in crisis and he spends most of the time with his new acquaintances and gamblers Giorgio Mosca, Marcello and Gerardo Pavani. In classroom, he meets the gorgeous nineteen years old mysterious student Vanina Abati, who is Gerardo's girlfriend, and he feels a great attraction for her. They meet and know each other outside class, and they fall in love for each other. Their relationship leads to a tragic end.

Bombing during World War II resulted in whole urban populations fleeing to the countryside, and this created a meeting of urban and rural cultures. Shinji (a young boy evacuated from Tokyo) and his new schoolmates (who are villagers) don't exactly know what is going on in the war. They see the B-29 bombers and the glow of cities on fire, but the problems of being separated from one's mother and surviving among one's peers loom larger than international politics.

Dublin, June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus, amateur poet and catholic meets on a tipical Irish day Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man. Bloom is like his lost father. Bloom'll spend the day in a funeral, visit some pubs and finish in Bella Cohen's brothel. His wife's waiting for him to come back in the bed, as Penelope did in Ithaca with Ulysses.

A chance encounter brings Carlo Caremoli (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Roberta (Eleonora Rossi Drago) together when a German plane flies over the beach they are at one day and scares everyone. Roberta’s daughter frightened by the incident finds comfort with Carlo who agrees to walk both of them home. Roberta is a navy officer’s widow and Carlo is the son of a prominent leader in the fascist party. The two come form completely different worlds; still there is an undeniable attraction that neither can ignore. Can their love overcome the war rages on all around them or will their secret love affair ultimately drive them apart?

This wicked adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel is classic Luis Buñuel. Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, a beautiful Parisian domestic who, upon arrival at her new job at an estate in provincial 1930s France, entrenches herself in sexual hypocrisy and scandal with her philandering employer (Buñuel regular Michel Piccoli). Filmed in luxurious black-and-white Franscope, Diary of a Chambermaid is a raw-edged tangle of fetishism and murder—and a scathing look at the burgeoning French fascism of the era.

A visionary and evocative medieval epic, Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees is just as powerful and engrossing a film as his more famous Marketa Lazarová. It chronicles the tale of a young boy forced to join the Order of the Teutonic Knights. As he grows into a man his desire to return to his homeland leads him to abandon the Crusaders, only to be pursued by a fanatical former comrade and pay a terrible price for his rejection of the Holy Order. With its resplendent black-and-white cinematography and highly convincing recreation of 13th-century Europe, the film is a raw and haunting moral fable which raises questions about the conflict between human nature and dogmatism.

Even today, the Marquesas Islands beckon travelers yearning for an exotic and authentic Polynesian experience. Imagine the wonder of 1928 audiences when White Shadows in the South Seas took them thousands of miles from home to that remote Eden of rolling waves and palm-fringed beaches. The first of W.S. Van Dyke’s famed filmed-on-location adventures (the others: The Pagan and Trader Horn) tells a dramatic tale of foreign interlopers – a booze-sodden doctor and a rapacious pearl trader – who bring destruction to a vibrant Pacific culture. The film features synchronized music and sound effects plus spectacular, Academy Award®-winning cinematography that captures a paradise in peril.

Distinguished as being 'banned forever' in its native Czechoslovakia, Nemec's film is a masterpiece of barbed, darkly sinister wit. As a biting satire of governmental and institutional power and with its astute observations of human nature and conformity, it is a film whose relevance continues to this day. Considered the most politically dangerous film made during the short flowering of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s.

Set in feudal Japan, this atmospheric and violent ghost story (whose title literally translates as The Black Cat in the Bush) begins with the brutal murder of two women by a band of mercenary samurai, whose leader is subsequently tracked down, seduced, and murdered by a young woman possessed by the shape-shifting specter of his victim. Called upon to avenge the warrior's death is none other than the woman's former husband, who has been ordered by his superiors to assassinate the guilty party.

In this mesmerizing collage of silent Italian melodrama, found-footage filmmaker Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate) affectionately captures the spirit of the World War One-era cinema diva. In all-but-lost gems such as La donna nuda (1914), and Tigre reale (1916), superstars such as Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli portrayed heroines teetering dangerously between defiant indulgence in sexual passion and hysterical remorse at their own cruelties. Delpeut’s inventive celebration of Black Romanticism is both striking and heartbreaking in its composition —a beautifully woven narrative of tempted fate and self-torment, elegantly guided by Loek Dikker’s original score.

Filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) is a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Exquisitely photographed and passionately acted, Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience.

Starring Ryu Chishu, Mikaheri no Tou realistically explores the nature of children's education. Set in a mountain boarding school, the film tells various stories about the school's teachers and problem students.

Andy Griffith makes a spectacular film debut in this searing drama as Lonesome Rhodes, a philosophical country-western singer discovered in a tanktown jail by radio talent scout Patricia Neal and her assistant Walter Matthau. They decide that Rhodes is worthy of a radio spot, but the unforeseen result is that the gangly, aw-shucks entertainer becomes an overnight sensation not simply on radio but, thereafter, on television. As he ascends to stardom, Rhodes attracts fans, sponsors and endorsements by the carload, and soon he is the most powerful and influential entertainer on the airwaves. Beloved by his audience, Rhodes reveals himself to his intimates as a scheming, power-hungry manipulator, with Machiavellian political aspirations...

In an idyllic provincial town of occupied France, two German soldiers come upon the secluded home of an old man (Jean-Marie Robian) and his niece (Nicole Stephane), in search of a boarding house. One evening, a German officer named Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) introduces himself as the new household tenant. Despite their deliberate silence towards the German stranger, von Ebrennac is respectful and considerate, stopping by the living room to greet the residents before retiring to his room for the evening: admiring their home, sharing the warmth of a fire. Soon, he changes his evening ritual by changing into civilian clothes before visiting them, politely knocking before imposing himself into the company of the old man, smoking his pipe, and his niece, engrossed in knitting. As in Ingmar Bergman's Persona, he fills the silence by speaking casually about his life: his past love, beliefs, literature, music. He reveals that he is a great admirer of French culture, believing that the German occupation is an equitable union of two nations that will contribute to the greatness of Europe, and that France will heal the pervasive cruelty of his country. However, during a highly anticipated trip to Paris, von Ebrennac learns the underlying plans of his compatriots, and is forced to reconcile with his allegiance and culpability.