Bertolucci and Storaro's fascist Italy in tilted frames and autumn light.
Truffaut's own childhood as Antoine Doinel, ending with the freeze frame on the beach.
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch defending a Black man in Depression-era Alabama.
A bailiff in 1920s Rotterdam sets out to break the illegitimate son he refuses to acknowledge.
George Bailey sees the world without him and Bedford Falls at Christmas became a ritual.
A potter leaves his family for a ghost in war-torn Japan; Mizoguchi at his most beautiful.
A Bosnian and a Serb trapped in a trench with a third man lying on a mine.
A farmer plans to drown his wife and falls back in love with her in the city; Murnau in Hollywood.
An elderly Parisian couple, a stroke, and a husband who keeps his promise.
Renoir's French officers in a German prison camp in 1916, where class matters more than nation.
A married woman and a doctor meet in a railway tea room; the most restrained love story ever filmed.
Rossellini shot on the streets months after the Germans left; neorealism begins here.
A mother loses her son and goes to Barcelona to find his father; Almodovar's women.
A womanising Prague cellist is stuck with a five-year-old Russian boy in 1989.
Dreyer's trial in close-up, with a performance from Renee Falconetti that has never been matched.
Jewish prisoners forced to forge pounds and dollars for the Reich in Sachsenhausen.
Ozu's widowed father persuading his daughter to marry, told in tatami-level stillness.
A Sonderkommando prisoner at Auschwitz tries to bury one boy; shot in shallow focus over his shoulder.
A dying Montreal professor is gathered up by his son, his friends and his ex-lovers.
A Stasi officer listens to a playwright's flat and slowly changes sides.
A German-Jewish family flees to a Kenyan farm in 1938 and the daughter grows up African.
Javier Bardem as the quadriplegic who fought for thirty years for the right to die.
A Rio mother holds her family together after the dictatorship takes her husband in 1971.
A ballerina torn between art and love, with a 17-minute ballet in Technicolor.
The Odessa Steps sequence, the pram, and the montage theory every editor still learns.
A cellist takes a job preparing the dead for burial in rural Japan.
A Danish doctor commutes between a refugee camp and a schoolyard where his son is bullied.
Capra's idealist senator filibusters for 23 hours against a corrupt machine.
A father and son search Rome for a stolen bicycle he needs to keep his job.
A dead screenwriter narrates from a pool; Gloria Swanson is ready for her close-up.
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