All Recommendations
The Magic Flute
Emanuele Luzzati was a talented artist, director and animator. One of his best known short films was 1978’s The Magic Flute set to the music from Mozart’s two-act opera. As a stage director, Luzzati had mounted a lavish 1963 full-scale production of the opera and fell in love with the music and the story. His animated The Magic Flute, made fifteen years later, was met with glowing reviews and multiple awards. He followed the completion of the film with a children’s picture book that succinctly retells the story. (by Joseph Crisalli)
Ikiru
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
La Jetée
A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.
Freaks
A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.
The Deer Hunter
A group of working-class friends decide to enlist in the Army during the Vietnam War and finds it to be hellish chaos -- not the noble venture they imagined. Before they left, Steven married his pregnant girlfriend -- and Michael and Nick were in love with the same woman. But all three are different men upon their return.
Bringing Out the Dead
Once called "Father Frank" for his efforts to rescue lives, Frank Pierce sees the ghosts of those he failed to save around every turn. He has tried everything he can to get fired, calling in sick, delaying taking calls where he might have to face one more victim he couldn't help, yet cannot quit the job on his own.
Mildred Pierce
A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
In this first film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, adapted from the manga by Kazuo Koike, we are told the story of the Lone Wolf and Cub's origin. Ogami Itto, the official Shogunate executioner, has been framed for disloyalty to the Shogunate by the Yagyu clan, against whom he now is waging a one-man war, along with his infant son, Daigoro.
Sanjuro
Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Kurosawa's tightly paced, beautifully composed "Sanjuro." In this companion piece and sequel to "Yojimbo," jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a proper samurai on its ear.
Carne
After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.
Rosetta
Young, impulsive Rosetta lives a hard and stressful life as she struggles to support herself and her alcoholic mother. Refusing all charity, she is desperate to maintain a dignified job.
Santa Sangre
A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his mother – the leader of a strange religious cult – and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.
Germinal
It's mid 19th century, north of France. The story of a coal miner's town. They are exploited by the mine's owner. One day the decide to go on strike, and then the authorities repress them.
L'Âge d'or
The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
With the help of an irreverent young sidekick, a bank robber gets his old gang back together to organise a daring new heist.
Bagdad Cafe
A German woman named Jasmin stumbles upon a dilapidated motel/diner in the middle of nowhere. Her unusual appearance and demeanor are at first suspicious to Brenda, the exasperated owner who has difficulty making ends meet. But when an unlikely magic sparks between the two women, this lonely desert outpost is transformed into a thriving and popular oasis.
The Piano Teacher
Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.
Kalifornia
A journalist duo go on a tour of serial killer murder sites with two companions, unaware that one of them is a serial killer himself.
Bananas
When a bumbling New Yorker is dumped by his activist girlfriend, he travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest rebellion.
Diabolique
The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school, Michel Delassalle, is murdered by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after Delassalle's corpse mysteriously disappears.