7.7
Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, JULES AND JIM charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession. The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring and willful Catherine, whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, JULES AND JIM was a worldwide smash in 1962 and remains every bit as audacious and entrancing today.
6.1
With this intimate supernatural drama, the celebrated French filmmaker Olivier Assayas conjures a melancholy ghost story set in the world of celebrity and haute couture. Starring Kristen Stewart, whose performance in Assayas’s CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA made her the first American actress to win a César Award, this evocative character study tells the story of a young fashion assistant and spiritual medium who is living in Paris and searching for signs of an afterlife following the sudden death of her twin brother. A stirring depiction of grief in the form of a psychological thriller, PERSONAL SHOPPER—which won Assayas the best director award at Cannes—is a chilling meditation on modern modes of communication and the way we mourn those we love.
7.7
A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson’s unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence.
7.6
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux's animated marvel FANTASTIC PLANET, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags' oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.
7.8
The first of the road films that would come to define the career of Wim Wenders, the magnificent ALICE IN THE CITIES is an emotionally generous and luminously shot odyssey. A German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) is driving across the United States to research an article; it’s a disappointing trip, in which he is unable to truly connect with what he sees. Things change, however, when he has no choice but to take a young girl named Alice (Yella Rottländer) with him on his return trip to Germany, after her mother (Lisa Kreuzer)—whom he has just met—leaves the child in his care. Though they initially find themselves at odds, the pair begin to form an unlikely friendship.
7.6
The chilly landscapes of Helsinki are warmed by the gentle humanism and wry humor of Aki Kaurismäki in the first installment of his FINLAND TRILOGY, a deadpan tale of everyday survival in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Misfortune begets misfortune when, in short order, Lauri (Kari Väänänen) loses his job as a tram driver and the restaurant where his wife, Ilona (Kati Outinen), works announces it is closing to make way for a chain. With few job prospects, the two find themselves facing a crisis that tests the strength of their bond.
7.6
Arriving in Helsinki, a nameless man is beaten within an inch of his life by thugs, miraculously recovering only to find that he has completely lost his memory. Back on the streets, he attempts to begin again from zero, befriending a moody dog and becoming besotted with a Salvation Army volunteer.
7.6
Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker. One of Agnès Varda’s most provocative films, LE BONHEUR (“Happiness”) examines, with a deceptively cheery palette and the spirited strains of Mozart, the ideas of fidelity and happiness in a modern, self-centered world.
7.4
On behalf of a multinational company, a production assistant drives around the Romanian city of Bucharest, interviewing various citizens who have been injured due to work accidents to cast one of them in a “safety at work” video.
7.5
Kaurismäki took his penchant for despairing character studies to unspeakably grim depths in the shockingly entertaining The Match Factory Girl. Kati Outinen is memorably impenetrable as Iris, whose grinding days as a cog in a factory wheel, and nights as a neglected daughter living with her parents, ultimately send her over the edge. Yet despite her transgressions, Kaurismäki makes Iris a compelling, even sympathetic figure. Bleak yet suffused with comic irony, The Match Factory Girl closes out the "Proletariat Trilogy" with a bang, and a whimper.
7.7
Robert Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with MOUCHETTE, one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film. Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. An essential work of French filmmaking, Bresson’s hugely empathetic drama elevates its trapped protagonist into one of the cinema’s great tragic figures.
7.5
Ninety minutes of deleted and alternate takes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, assembled by David Lynch to continue the story of the final week of Laura Palmer’s life.
7.4
Before he became a sensation with the twisty revenge story MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan fashioned this low-budget, 16 mm black-and-white neonoir with comparable precision and cunning. Providing irrefutable evidence of Nolan’s directorial bravura, FOLLOWING is the fragmented tale of an unemployed young writer who trails strangers through London, hoping that they will provide inspiration for his first novel. He gets more than he bargained for when one of his unwitting subjects leads him down a dark criminal path. With gritty aesthetics and a made-on-the-fly vibe (many shots were simply stolen on the streets, unbeknownst to passersby), FOLLOWING is a mind-bending psychological journey that shows the remarkable beginnings of one of today’s most acclaimed filmmakers.
7.6
The Philippines, 1972. Mysterious things are happening in a remote barrio. Wails are heard from the forest, cows are hacked to death, a man is found bleeding to death at the crossroad and houses are burned. Ferdinand E. Marcos announces Proclamation No. 1081 putting the entire country under Martial Law.
7.6
When her parents split and her father (Kiichi Nakai) moves out of their family home, Renko (Tomoko Tabata), a bright and energetic sixth-grade girl, is left alone with her mother, Nazuna (Junko Sakurada), in Kyoto. As Nazuna sets out new rules for their life together, Renko makes plans of her own, and sees to it that any changes happening in her family happen on her terms. Filled with indelible images, this beloved coming-of-age film from Shinji Somai is a poignant family drama that transcends the tropes of divorce stories to bring us an emotionally layered portrait of a complex teenage girl who encounters the unknown and refuses to succumb to it.
7.6
A roving film projector repairman (Rüdiger Vogler) saves the life of a depressed psychologist (Hanns Zischler) who has driven his Volkswagen into a river, and they end up on the road together, traveling from one rural German movie theater to another. Along the way, the two men, each running from his past, bond over their shared loneliness. KINGS OF THE ROAD, captured in gorgeous compositions by cinematographer Robby Müller and dedicated to Fritz Lang, is a love letter to the cinema, a moving and funny tale of male friendship, and a portrait of a country still haunted by war.
7.4
In Kaurismäki's drolly existential crime drama, a coal miner named Taisto (Turo Pajala) attempts to leave behind a provincial life of inertia and economic despair, only to get into ever deeper trouble. Yet a minor-key romance with a hilariously dispassionate meter maid (Susanna Haavisto) might provide a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Ariel, which boasts a terrific soundtrack of Finnish tango and Baltic pop music and lovely cinematography by Kaurismäki's longtime cameraman Timo Salmimen, put its director on the international map.
7.4
This short film is the first segment of five in the multinational feature Love at Twenty (1962), all five segments on the theme of first adult love. After indulging in much delinquency in his youth, seventeen-year-old Antoine Doinel, having been provided opportunity to get out of that delinquent life, is now an upstanding member of society working for Philips Records, which allows him to indulge in his love of music. At the Youth Concerts, he has noticed the same young woman at several performances. She is Colette and the two begin to date. Colette treats Antoine like a buddy, while Antoine has fallen in love with her. His pursuit of getting Colette to be his exclusive girlfriend is helped on the surface by the fact that Colette's parents like him and encourage their dating. He uses grand romantic gestures to try and prove his love. Will Colette ultimately fall for Antoine's romanticism?
7.4
Lonely garbageman Nikkander (Matti Pellonpää) finds himself directionless after losing his friend and co-worker to a sudden heart attack; unlikely redemption comes in the form of plain supermarket cashier Ilona (Kati Outinen, in her first of many performances for Kaurismäki), with whom he begins a tentative love affair. Boiling down what is essentially a romantic comedy to a series of spare and beautiful gestures, Kaurismäki conjures an unexpected delight that finds hope blossoming even amid gray surroundings.
7.5
A young boy takes interest in piano while his family begins to disintegrate around him after his father loses his job.
7.5
This deadpan tragicomedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris is among the most beguiling films by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Based on stories from Henri Murger’s influential mid-nineteenth-century book “Scènes de la vie de bohème” (the basis for the opera “La bohème”), the film features a marvelous trio of Kaurismäki regulars—André Wilms, Matti Pellonpää, and Karl Väänänen—as a writer, painter, and composer who scrape by together, sharing in life’s daily absurdities. Gorgeously shot in black and white, LA VIE DE BOHÈME is a vibrantly scrappy rendition of a beloved tale.
