The 400 Blows
Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a 14-year-old troublemaker living with his mostly neglectful mother, who's having an affair, and his friendly aloof stepfather in their cramped Paris apartment. When he's not running away or cutting class, Antoine is accused by his school teacher of plagairism and lying. Later Antoine and a friend steal a typewriter, and when Antoine's caught trying to return it, he's to a detention home for troubled kids. His parents write him off as a lost cause. But Antoine, whom François Truffaut admits is a biographical character, is a typical boy. He's curious, passionate (about cinema, naturally) and angst-ridden, a deliquent and a dreamer, and finally an adrift soul longing for love, guidance, and a purpose in life.

Get details on the complete Adventures of Antoine Doinel DVD Collection.

8 1/2
Legendary director Federico Fellini's 1963 film is loosely based on his own life and centers on Guido, a filmmaker whose last project became a smash hit. However, the pressure to follow it up is great, and the more that expectations build, the more Guido begins to panic. Marcello Mastroianni plays the lead role in what many consider to be Fellini's greatest artistic accomplishment.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Based on the journals of Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is director Werner Herzog's hallucinatory tale of Spanish colonialists searching for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, in 16th-century Peru. When the travellers reach an impasse, a scouting party is assembled to search for any traces of the mythical empire. As they attempt to forge their way through the dense jungle, more and more of the party falls ill while their ruthless leader, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), grows increasingly insane.

Widely considered to be Herzog's finest film, AGUIRRE, which shares much in common with Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW, highlights the director's visionary approach to filmmaking. Like Coppola's film, accounts of AGUIRRE's shooting are laced with legendary incidents, such as the time Herzog reportedly held a gun to Kinski's head to get him to finish a scene. Whatever transpired between Herzog and Kinski, it made for astonishing cinema, as evidenced by the actor's haunting performance and the entire film's powerfully hypnotic mood.

All About My Mother
Single mother Manuela is devastated by the sudden loss of her 17-year-old son in a car accident, so she leaves Madrid for Barcelona to find her late child's estranged father.

Amelie
Bursting with imagination and having seen her share of tragedy and fantasy, Amelie is not like the other girls. When she grows up she becomes a waitress in a Montmartre bar run by a former dancer. Amelie enjoys simple pleasures until she discovers that her goal in life is to help others. To that end, she invents all sorts of tricks that allow her to intervene incognito into other people's lives, including an imbibing concierge and her hypochondriac neighbor. But Amelie's most difficult case turns out to be Nino Quicampoix, a lonely sex shop employee who collects photos abandoned at coin-operated photo booths.

Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein's film of the famed Odessa revolt has been one of the landmarks of cinema since its release. Commissioned by the government to commemorate the failed uprising of 1905, it's without stars or even actors in the usual sense, exemplifying the collectivism it celebrates. The Battleship Potemkin has just returned from the war with Japan, its crew near mutiny because of brutal treatment and bad rations. When they're served maggot-infested meat one morning, the sailors finally rebel. One of the sailors, Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov), dissuades the officers from firing upon the mutineers, and they join the rest of the crew in revolt. Hearing of the mutiny, the people of Odessa send supplies to express their solidarity with the crew and gather en masse to mourn a slain sailor. The czar's troops arrive to dispel the crowd. In perhaps the most famous sequence in film history, the director rhymically intercuts shots of the troops marching machinelike down the Odessa steps with shots of innocent citizens being killed and wounded, in a brilliant embodiment of the director's theories of montage. Aside from CITIZEN KANE, perhaps the most perfectly constructed film ever made, the film's vision of tyranny and rebellion remain as powerful today as it was in 1925.

Belle De Jour
Bored with her stable-yet-milquetoast husband, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) spices up her afternoons by going to work in a high-class brothel, always arriving home by 5 p.m. to avoid raising any suspicion.

The Bicycle Thief
Set in post–World War II Italy, this landmark drama follows a father who finds a desperately needed job delivering cinema posters. But when his bicycle is stolen, he's forced to take his son out into the streets to look for it, as he's too poor to buy another.

Blow-up
A hip young London photographer (David Hemmings) spends his days taking pictures (and more) with various women and his nights shooting from cheap hotels. One day he photographs a couple arguing in a park, and upong blowing up the pictures, discovers he may have captured a murder.

Blue
When the composer husband and daughter of Julie (Juliette Binoche) are killed in a car accident, she just wants to withdraw from the world. But eventually she discovers that there are people who care about her, and in the process, she finds a new way of healing: finishing her husband's last piece of music.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
In this silent, classic example of early German expressionism, this cinematic landmark relates the stylized tale of a Dr. Caligari, a fairground showman who hypnotizes an innocent villager--turning him into a sleepwalking "zombie"--and compels him to carry out fiendish murders. Inarguably a landmark in world cinema, Robert Weine's one-of-a-kind thriller features fantastical, heavily stylized sets, antirealist acting, and evocative subjective camerawork.

Children of Paradise
Filmed during the German occupation, this French milestone centers around the theatrical life of a beautiful courtesan and the four men who love her. Voted the "Best French Film in History" by the French Film Academy in 1990. Academy Award Nominations: Best Original Screenplay.

Cinema Paradiso: The Original Version
Guiseppe Tornatore's beloved Academy Award-winning film gets an anniversary re-release with 48 additional minutes. The touching story is about a famous Italian director who returns to the small Sicilian village where he was raised. He is reconnected to his past and is flooded with the poignant memories and emotions of his youth, particularly his love of the cinema.

Contempt
A veteran screenwriter takes on the difficult task of writing an ambitious adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, despite having to work with a difficult producer (Jack Palance) and a demanding director (Fritz Lang), all while his relationship with his wife (Brigitte Bardot) falls apart.

Das Boot
Das Boot tells the true story of a German U-boat and its crew on a mission to attack British destoyers in the Atlantic during World War II.

Eat Drink Man Woman
Mr. Chu is known as Taipei's greatest chef, but his home life is a wreck. Widowed 16 years ago, he still hasn't recovered and spends most of his time as a lonely homebody while cooking obsessively. His three daughters aren't much happier, but when they get together for a big Sunday dinner, they begin to address their various issues.

Fanny and Alexander
Director Ingmar Bergman had intended FANNY AND ALEXANDER to be his final theatrical film and a summing-up of sorts of his entire cinematic career. (It was followed by 1984's AFTER THE REHEARSAL, which was also made for Swedish television and subsequently released theatrically abroad.) FANNY AND ALEXANDER is the story of two children belonging to a wealthy, extensive theatrical family in provincial Sweden in the early years of the 20th century--10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister, Fanny (Pernilla Alwin). When their father dies unexpectedly during a performance and their mother decides to remarry, the children are forced to relocate to the austere (and possibly haunted) home of their stern and rather coldhearted stepfather, Bishop Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö). A means of escape is eventually provided by Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), a longtime friend of the Ekdahl family's who seems to possess magical powers. In this somewhat autobiographical movie--which was filmed in the director's hometown of Uppsala--the gifted, precocious Alexander is a stand-in for Bergman himself, who had a problematic relationship with his own father, a strict clergyman. At once festive, spooky, and bawdy--and uncharacteristically life-affirming--FANNY AND ALEXANDER is one of Bergman's most universally appealing and accessible works.

Farewell My Concubine
In Chen Kaige's adaptation of the Lilian Lee novel, Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) grow up enduring the harsh training of the Peking Opera Academy, where instructors regularly beat the children as a means of instilling in them the discipline needed to master the complex physical and vocal technique. As the two boys mature, they develop complementary talents: Dieyi, with his fine, delicate features, assumes the female roles while the burlier Xiaolou plays masculine warlords. Their dramatic identities become real for Dieyi when he falls in love with Xiaolou; the resolutely heterosexual Xiaolou, however, marries a courtesan, Juxian (Gong Li), creating a dangerous, jealousy-filled romantic triangle. Spanning 50 years from the early part of the 20th century to the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Kaige's passionate, exquisitely shot film captures the vast historical scope of a changing world (and the mesmerizing pageantry of the opera) while also providing the intimate and touching details of a unique, tender, heartrending love story.

Grand Illusion
Calling on his own experiences as an aviator in WWI as well as those of his comrades, Jean Renoir's antiwar masterpiece bids farewell to the class constrictions of European society and calls for the unity of humankind across class and national boundaries. Set in the German prison camps of WWI, the film stars Jean Gabin as Marechal, and Marcel Dalio as Rosenthal. Like the charming aristocrat de Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay), these two French aviators were shot down and now spend most of their time escaping from German prison camps before inevitably being recaptured. Between escapes, they do what they can to amuse themselves, which includes running a talent show, but after a tunnel they've dug is discovered, the three are sent to Wintersborn, a forbidding fortress of a prison, which is commanded by former ace pilot von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). The humane commandant practices noblesse oblige toward de Boldieu, hoping for an alliance across national lines. But he comes to learn that this phrase has a different meaning for the Frenchman. One of the great films of all time, GRAND ILLUSION perhaps most purely embodies director Jean Renoir's characterstic humanism, manifested less here in camera technique than an instinctive ability to educe truthful performances from his cast.

Hiroshima Mon Amour
In Alain Resnais's artistic adaptation of Margueurite Duras's HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, a French actress working in Japan meets a Japanese architect with whom she has an affair. Their relationship consists largely of conversations about the bombing at Hiroshima, the horrors that he and his family endured, and her perception of it back home in occupied France. With a camera that operates sometimes like a slide show, other times like a space vessel--switching easily in and out of flashbacks and gently blending footage of both Japan and France--the story unfolds more like a collection of memories than a chronological narrative. Perhaps the most dramatic scene is the unforgettable opener: An impeccably beautiful close-up in black and white depicts lovers writhing first in the ash of bomb fallout, which is washed away by rain, then, as their skin dries, they begin to perspire from making love. She--the nameless female lead (Emmanuele Riva)--remembers everything of the war. But He--the nameless male lead (Eiji Okada)--challenges her to determine if what she remembers is real or just a projection. As with most Marquerite Duras novels, it's hard to determine exactly what happened and what didn't. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is truly like a poem, using the emotional words of Duras to propel Resnais's ultrapowerful images.

Indochine
Taking place in 1930s Indochina (now known as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand), this film follows the story of French colonist Eliane (Catherine Deneuve), the owner of a rubber-tree plantation. Eliane's life is affected by the shifting political climate as well as the changes in her adopted daughter (Linh Dan Pham).

La Dolce Vita
In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

La Strada
A circus strongman named Zampano (Anthony Quinn) teams up with Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who soon becomes his mistress. He treats her poorly, and when the two join a circus, Zampano accidently kills a man, and she suffers a nervous breakdown.

La Terra Trema
An example of the neo-realism school of Italian cinema, this is the story of a Sicilian fisherman whose toils are exploited by the men of the fish market. Highly influential Italian director Luchino Visconti;s second film, LA TERRA TREMA is a powerful drama that integrates real Sicilian locals into the cast.

Life Is Beautiful
Conjuring keys and hats out of thin air, Guido (Roberto Benigni), a clever Jewish-Italian waiter, successfully courts Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), a beautiful local woman, in Fascist pre-WWII Italy. His life, however, is turned upside down a few years later when he, Dora, and their young son, Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), are sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Refusing to give up hope, Guido tries to protect his son's innocence by pretending that their imprisonment is just an elaborate game, with the grand prize being a tank.

For years the box-office champ in Italy and the country's most beloved slapstick comic, the Chaplinesque Benigni took a huge risk with LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. Many people worried that the film would be as offensive as plopping a cartoon character in Auschwitz. (A similar work--THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED, a Jerry Lewis film about a comedian in a concentration camp--turned out to be a disaster two decades earlier.) Although LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL did provoke some controversy, many people found the film to be a poignant, tragicomic story that profoundly reaffirmed the humanity of concentration camp victims. The film became the highest grossing foreign language film in the U.S. and established Benigni as an international star.

Like Water for Chocolate
A sensuous comic fable of a young Mexican woman's tortured life and her main influences--her domineering mother, her forbidden lover, and the overwhelmingly sensual power of food and cooking. Based on the novel by Laura Esquivel.

M
Fear stalks the streets of Berlin in the form of a serial child murderer whose grisly accomplishments are so heinous even the criminal minds of the underworld want him dead. Filmed in post-Weimar Germany during the infancy of the Nazi state, this tale of moral depravity serves not just as an allegory for the need of justice for all, but as an ominous foreshadowing of the sort of societal hysteria that leads to cultural witch hunts.

Ma Vie En Rose
This colorful, bittersweet film tells the story of 7-year-old Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), who believes he should have been born a girl. His parents, confused and frustrated, do everything they can to encourage Ludovic to be masculine, forcing him deeper into a fantasy world.

Manon of the Spring
This sequel to 1986's JEAN DE FLORETTE stars Emmanuelle Beart as Manon (the daughter of JEAN DE FLORETTE's protagonist). Manon has grown up to become a beautiful woman, a shy and resourceful shepherdess who lives in relative seclusion from the townspeople of her provencal village, haunted by the tragic death of her father (played by Gerard Depardieu in part one). An outsider, like her father, Manon stays high up in the rugged hills preferring the company of her sheep to her nearby neighbors César (Yves Montand) and Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil). One fateful day, Manon discovers the real reason why her father's spring ran dry and comes up with a powerful revenge to exact on the men responsible for her father's downfall. Manon's action changes her life forever and uncovers long-hidden family secrets that powerfully affect the local villagers. This charming and poignant fable, based on Marcel Pagnol's classic story is a richly filmed tale of a small triumph over tragedy. Emmanuelle Beart's beauty radiates throughout the film, she delivers a subtle and captivating performance. Once again, director Claude Berri films with a sensitive eye for the wild beauty of the French countryside that perfectly compliments the seductive and earthy beauty of its nubile young star.

Metropolis
The story is set in the year 2000, when subterranean humans slave away earning money for the rich, above-ground classes. Freder, the son of a wealthy tycoon, falls in love with Maria, one of the toiling masses, and begins to campaign for the rights of the lower classes. To thwart his efforts, a rich magnate creates a robot double of Maria, which he uses to mislead the rebellious proletariat.

My Life as a Dog
Lasse Hallström directed this Oscar-nominated film about 12-year-old Ingemar, a child with more neuroses than most people three times his age. When he's sent to the countryside to live with his easygoing uncle, he discovers that life isn't as bad as he's making it out to be.

Pierrot Le Fou
In this loosely plotted film from Jean-Luc Godard, a Parisian family man (Jean-Paul Belmondo) leaves his dull life behind and goes on the run with Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), who is being chased by violent mobsters.

Raise the Red Lantern
The old master of a powerful family in 1920's China supports three wives. Each has her own house within the closed world of the family compound, where every evening a red lantern is lit in front of the door of the wife with whom the master chooses to sleep. Let the rivalries begin.

Ran
For his 27th film, the "sensei" of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, transposes Shakespeare's KING LEAR to feudal Japan. RAN, which translates as "chaos" or "turmoil," is the tragic tale of Lord Hidetora, a warlord who decides to divide his empire among his three sons on the eve of his 70th birthday. However, Hidetora's youngest and most compassionate son, Saburo, defiantly objects to this hasty decision and is disowned by the proud, stubborn ruler. Once the two eldest sons take control of the empire, they quickly turn on their father and begin vying for total control over the land. As Hidetora is banished from his own kingdom in a bloody battle, he must confront the consequences of his violent, ruthless past. Ten years in the making, RAN represents the culmination of Kurosawa's career by revisiting his skill at adapting Shakespeare, as evidenced in THRONE OF BLOOD, and displaying the cinematic splendor of his other landmark films such as SEVEN SAMURAI and RASHOMON. With its magnificent costumes, breathtaking settings, and amazingly photographed battle sequences, the film is truly stunning. An epic on the grandest of scales, RAN is not only one of Kurosawa's finest films, it is a glorious masterpiece of Japanese cinema.

Rashomon
Akira Kurosawa's highly acclaimed film, set in feudal Japan, presents an intriguing tale of violent crime in the woods, told from the perspective of four different characters--a bandit (Toshirô Mifune), a woman (Machiko Kyô), her husband (Masayuki Mori), and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura). Only two things about the incident seem to be clear--the woman was raped and her husband is now dead. However, the other elements radically differ as the four participants and/or witnesses relate their own stories (with the dead man, eerily enough, speaking through a medium). As each account is revealed, what seemed black and white turns to various hues of gray, leading to surprising--and confounding--relevations.

A landmark of international cinema, RASHOMON won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, bringing both Kurosawa--and Japanese film in general--to the attention of Western audiences. From the rain-soaked opening sequence to its moving conclusion, the film is a stunning examination of truth and human nature. The entire cast is pitch-perfect, with regular Kurosawa lead actors Mifune and Shimura giving typically outstanding performances. While critics and cinephiles debate over exactly how many masterpieces Kurosawa directed, RASHOMON stands as one of the revered filmmaker's indisputably brilliant motion pictures. In fact, the film's influence is so pervasive that it has inspired everything from a high profile Hollywood remake (THE OUTRAGE starring Paul Newman) to numerous tributes in movies such as COURAGE UNDER FIRE and THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

Red
The final installment of a trilogy that includes White and Blue, Red interweaves the themes of chance, fate, and circumstance through the lives of the main characters (Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant) in ways they both can and cannot see.

Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run features a story told three times, each with a different result. The premise: A courier named Manni has left a bag of mob money on the subway by mistake, money that's due to be paid in 20 minutes. Manni calls his girlfriend, Lola (Franka Potente), for help in raising replacement funds before he has to face the gangsters.

The Seven Samurai
Set in the 1600s, The Seven Samurai tells the story of a small town that enlists seven samurai for protection from a band of murderous thieves.

The Seventh Seal
After returning from the Crusades, a knight named Antonius Block finds his country in disarray. He then walks into a scene right out of the Book of Genesis. Before long, he's playing chess with Death and having visions that foretell the end of the world.

The Shop on Main Street
In World War II Slovakia, an easygoing carpenter, Tono (Jozef Króner) is pressured to move up in the world by his ostentatious wife and fascist brother-in-law. He takes the job of "Aryan comptroller" in a button shop owned by an aging Jewess, Rosalie (Ida Kaminska) who barely seems aware that there is a war unraveling the solidarity of the small town. Tono works as Rosalie's assistant and they develop a touching and sometimes funny friendship. When the deportations to the concentration camps take place, Rosalie is somehow overlooked. Against the warnings of his wife, Tono protects Rosalie from the next roundup, but not without tragic consequences.

Like Jiri Menzel's CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS and Milos Forman's LOVES OF A BLONDE, Kadar's film emerged from a movement of unconventional artistic filmmaking called the Czech New Wave (1963-1968). THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET was the first Czechoslovakian film to win the Best Foreign Film Academy Award has become one of the most acclaimed and cherished films of the 1960s. Kadar mixes documentary and fiction techniques to create a subtle style that is tragically realistic yet softly dreamlike. The capricious Kaminska was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award and Króner gives an impassioned performance that is unforgettable.

Throne of Blood
Akira Kurosawa's take on Macbeth brings the story to 16th-century Japan. Legendary actor Toshiro Mifune plays Washizu, a samurai destined to betray his friend and master in exchange for nobility.

The Tin Drum
Novelist Günter Grass assisted in this brilliant film adaptation of his groundbreaking novel, which depicts the significant events in German history since the turn of the century as seen through the eyes of a bizarre child. In this allegorical film, a three-year-old boy observes the hypocrisy of the adult world and decides to remain a child forever by not growing any taller. His primary efforts to communicate consist of glass-shattering screams and banging on his tin drum. But as this unusual lad matures, and the events leading up to the onslaught of Nazism come to a head, he proves to have a keener perception of life than those around him. Volker Schlondorff's powerful drama deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tokyo Story
Yasujiro Ozu's most widely distributed and best-known film presents the story of an elderly couple in post World War II Japan who come to Tokyo to visit their various children and realize that the family has essentially fallen apart. The couple is received coldly by their two modernized children and only their widowed daughter-in-law seems glad to see them. The children shuttle their aging parents off to a health spa in an attempt to get them out of the way. They learn later that the mother has fallen ill upon her return and arrive too late to say their good-byes.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a young woman (Catherine Deneuve) falls for a mechanic, and soon they're expecting a child together. But when he is called off to war, she marries a wealthy man to provide security for her child.

The Vanishing
A young woman on vacation with her boyfriend disappears from a rest stop. After three years of searching, he finally discovers what happened to her.

War and Peace
Director Sergei Bondarchuk's lengthy — that 434-minute running time is no misprint — adaptation of the epic Tolstoy novel is seen by many critics as the most faithful big-screen rendering of the story, and it received the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1969. At the time, the Italian-Soviet project was among the most pricey films ever, with a budget that soared toward $100 million. Bondarchuk served double duty, not only directing but starring as Pierre Bezukhov, the central character.

White
Part two in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLORS astounding trilogy, WHITE represents Equality (of Liberty and Fraternity) in the French flag and the French national motto. Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a sweet but awkward Polish hairdresser, has just lost everything in a bitter divorce settlement--his cold-hearted French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), having taken their home, credit cards, and business. The poor Karol finds himself stranded in Paris, speaking very little French; once he returns to his native Poland, his luck changes for the better. He manages to make a small fortune and a name for himself. Although he's moved up in the world, he still thinks about his former life with Dominique, and it is his memories, good and bad, that lead him to stage his disappearance, and which initiate an unusual chain of events. WHITE is a more lighthearted and leisurely affair than BLUE or RED, adding a well-rounded dimension to the trilogy. Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiwicz's script thrusts the characters into odd predicaments, and then ingeniously backs off to tell the tale of Karol's revenge, succeeding in laying enough emotional groundwork to justify Dominique's sincere change of heart.

Wild Strawberries
WILD STRAWBERRIES is among Ingmar Bergman's most rich and contemplative films, a lyrical reflection on guilt and disappointment in the form of a spiritual journey. The movie stars Victor Sjöström as Professor Isak Borg, an elderly academic who takes a trip by car from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary university degree, accompanied by his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin). Along the way, they meet various passengers who seem to be weighed down by unresolved ethical dilemmas. Meanwhile, Borg's own existential crisis is triggered by dreams and memories in which he is confronted with past disappointments, missed opportunities, and troubled personal relationships with those close to him--his son (Gunnar Björnstrand), his mother (Naima Wifstrand), and his late wife (Gertrud Fridh). The film features stunning imagery, most notably in the flashback, dream, and nightmare sequences, as well as an outstanding final film performance by Sjöström (who is also a famed Swedish director of the silent era).

This film was released soon after THE SEVENTH SEAL, which had earned Bergman accolades from film critics and moviegoers the world over. Though similarly challenging and philosophically complex, WILD STRAWBERRIES is often considered the more accessible of the two movies because of its ultimate warmth and affirmation of life.

Wings of Desire
After walking through Berlin, an angel (Bruno Ganz) contemplates giving up his celestial life to become a human.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a farce about Pepe, an actress who is jilted by her lover, a fellow actor. When she responds with obsessiveness and despair, it wreaks havoc with everyone around her, especially her best friend Candela.