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After the international firestorm of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci went on to create one of the grandest and most legendary epics in modern cinema, 1900 (Novecento). A stunning five-hour saga following the intertwined fates of two childhood friends born on the same day in 1900 at opposite ends of the social scale through five decades of class struggle. Described by Pauline Kael as making most other films “look like something ..
The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present - for the first time on DVD in the UK - Claude Lanzmann's four films that he made as follow-ups to his landmark Shoah, each of which explore in further depth specific aspects and events of the Nazis' externimation progamme. A Visitor from the Living (1997) is based on an interview conducted by Lanzmann with Maurice Rossel during the filming of Shoah. A member of the Berlin delegate for th..
A stunning romantic drama from writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa), A Letter to Three Wives explores the domestic travails of three couples and the woman that brings them to the brink of crisis. The letter of the title is written with a poisonous pen: the three women (portrayed by Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, and Ann Sothern) receive a note stating that one of their husbands has run off with a wom..
Ranked as one of the finest British films of all time, director Fred Zinnemann's (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Day of the Jackal) A Man for All Seasons was lavished with awards and critical praise upon release for its opulent mise en scene and the incredible performances from its cast. Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), England's Roman Catholic Chancellor, is forced into a difficult position when corrupt King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw,..
Elaine May writes, directs and stars in this romantic comedy alongside Walter Matthau. Having spent his entire inheritance, wealthy playboy Henry Graham (Matthau) is desperately searching for a new way to make more money. With no apparent skills to fend for himself, Henry vows to marry a wealthy woman so she can support him and makes a bet with his Uncle Harry (James Coco) that he can do so within six weeks. But if he fails to do so Hen..
Taiwanese martial arts feature. The film follows the painter Ku (Shih Jun) as he tries to protect a female fugitive, Yang (Hsu Feng), from being captured by an evil eunuch. After the eunuch arrives with an army of East Chamber guards, the artist and the warrior fortify Ku's mother's supposedly haunted mansion and set ghostly traps in preparation for the soldiers' arrival. Will the pair survive the inevitable battles?..
Director Elia Kazan's first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn shows that the filmmaker's great empathy for his characters was already quite evident at this early juncture, and this endures as one of the most moving Hollywood dramas of the 1940s. Based on Betty Smith's novel – a bestseller in the U.S. but also one of the most popular books among American soldiers overseas in WWII – Kazan's debut is a sensitive, masterful adaptation. Set am..
The debut feature of Italian filmmaker-novelist-poet-provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or: The 120 Days of Sodom; The Gospel According to Matthew; The Decameron), Accattone rocked the cinema world with its depictions, at once raw and elegant, of the underside of Roman street life – and, in the process, seemed to announce a new direction for Italian films: a neo-neorealism.On the mean streets of Rome, Accattone’s eponymous pimp (pla..
Since re-emerging in the 2000s, Billy Wilder's superb Ace in the Hole, so ahead of its time in the 1950s with its acidic and unflinching examination of journalistic ethics and human morality, has taken its place alongside Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment as among the director's greatest works. In one of the most powerhouse performances in American screen-acting, the great Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, a newspap..
An exceptional patriotic war movie that follows the story of prince Alaxander Nevsky from the apparent position of humble fisherman to a war hero leading his country in a successful campaign against invaders from Germany. It is 1242 and the story begins with Russia constantly being invaded by Mongol raiders, in their endless pursuit of land and treasure, when news comes of an impending attack by Teutonic knights. Some of the Russian hie..
A fifteen year old Fiona Fullerton heads up an all star British cast in this double Bafta award winning musical comedy - widely regarded as the most lavish and most faithful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic fantasy novel. Alice is listening to a story told by Lewis Carroll when a white rabbit runs by Alice follows the rabbit down a hole and then falls deep into the centre of the earth, where she lands, on a bed of leaves in an endl..
A dark psychosexual drama from first-time directors Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Allure stars Evan Rachel Wood (Westworld) as a troubled woman who becomes entangled in an intense relationship with a young girl. Plagued by the abuse of her past and the turmoil of failed intimate encounters, Laura (Evan Rachel Wood) struggles to find a sense of normalcy. Her beacon of hope comes in sixteen year-old Eva (Julia Sarah Stone), a talented piani..
Aloys Adorn is a middle-aged private detective who lives and works with his father. He experiences life from a safe distance, through a video camera he keeps recording 24 hours a day, and the massive collection of surveillance tapes he organises and obsessively watches at home. But when his father dies, Aloys is left on his own and his sheltered existence begins to fall apart. After a night of heavy drinking, Aloys wakes up on a public ..
One of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era, Joe May's Asphalt is a love story set in the traffic-strewn Berlin of the late 1920s. Starring the delectable Betty Amann in her most famous leading role, Asphalt is a luxuriously produced Ufa classic of Weimar cinema. A well-dressed lady thief (Betty Amann) steals a precious stone from a jewellery shop. She tries to seduce the policeman (Gustav Frohlich) who arrests he..
Planned by the Soviet Central Committee to coincide with the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the unsuccessful 1905 Russian Revolution, this film was developed by the 27 year-old Sergei Eisenstein from less than one page of script from a planned eight-part epic that was intended to chronicle a large number of revolutionary actions. Starting with the Potemkin's crew's refusal to eat maggot-infested meat, the mutiny develops and t..
The music of Benny Goodman comes to life in this wonderful musical biography of the famed King of Swing. Featuring all the outstanding songs and instrumentals made famous by the immortal clarinetist, the story follows the innovative musician from his childhood in Chicago to his historic concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Steve Allen (Casino, The Player), Oscar winning actress Donna Reed (It's a Wonderful Life, From Here to Eternity, Dall..
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Often acknowledged as one of the best prison films ever made, Birdman of Alcatraz was director John Frankenheimer’s first huge success and received rave reviews for its performances, cinematography (by the great Burnett Guffey; From Here to Eternity, Bonnie and Clyde) and Frankenheimer’s directing. Burt Lancaster stars as the notorious prisoner, Robert Stroud, sentenced to a life of solitary confinement for murdering a prison guard. Whe..
Urban action and fatal attraction give rise to a groove from beyond the grave in this funkadelic, fangadelic Soul Cinema sensation! The eternally cool William Marshall puts a fresh spin on the age-old legend of the vampire, condemned to wander the earth with an insatiable lust for blood. In 1780, African Prince Mamuwalde (Marshall) pays a visit to Count Dracula in Transylvania, seeking his support in ending the slave trade. Instead, the..
One of the early films by Method Actor's director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront), Boomerang! also marked one of the early American Hollywood entries into the Cannes Film Festival in 1947. Kazan's impactful noir drama stars a cast of stalwarts of the '40s and '50s hard-boiled streak and his own oeuvre, including Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, Arthur Kennedy, and Karl Malden. When the murder of a priest r..
This wondrous true adventure from the best-selling novel about a woman who raised a lioness and eventually set her free is beautifully photographed on the vast, golden savannas of Africa. Born Free is a story of courage and love, nature and human nature, and a relationship unlike any other ever filmed. When game warden George Adamson (Bill Travers) is forced to kill a menacing lion and lioness, he and his wife Joy (Virginia McKenna) ado..
An action-packed mystery western based on the best-selling novel by Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare), Breakheart Pass throws open the throttle for runaway excitement! At the height of the frontier era, a locomotive races through the Rocky Mountains on a classified mission to a remote Army post. But one by one, the passengers are being murdered. Their only hope is John Deakin (Charles Bronson,..
In this classic TV sitcom, Gordon Brittas (Chris Barrie) is the manager of Whitbury New Town Leisure Centre. He means well, wants to do well and desperately wants to be a good manager. Unfortunately his best talent is to continually create recipes for total disaster. Deep down Brittas cares for his staff, but all he ever seems to do is to make their lives more difficult. Trying to rise above this, and to keep the Centre running smoothly..
Capturing Keaton's first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle through to starring in, headlining, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin's old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton's sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome 'Stone Face' persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts e..
Buster Keaton' (1895-1966) is oneof the greatestartists in cinema history. After a very early star in vaudeville with his parents (as The Human Mop), Keaton as old as the cinema when he began his career in film at the age of twenty-one with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Burlesque yet sensitive, Keaton inspired European surrealists and created the funniest and most astonishing character of the silent era. His short films were whirlwinds of pr..
Found footage horror directed by Brian Allan Stewart and Nick McAnulty. Jennifer (Jennifer Fraser) and Farhang (Farhang Ghajar) acquire a new camera with the intention of documenting their activities. These activities grow ever more sinister however as the couple prepare to kill someone in their basement and capture footage of the deed, purely for the visceral thrill. Farhang begins to have serious reservations about their plan but Jenn..
After the visual fireworks of Sunrise and the now-lost splendour of 4 Devils, F.W. Murnau turned his attention to this vivid, painterly study of an impulsive and fragile marriage among the wheatfields of Minnesota. During a brief stay in Chicago, innocent farmer’s son Lem falls for and weds Kate, a hard-bitten but lonely waitress. Upon bringing her home at the start of harvest time, the honeymoon soon turns into a claustrophobic struggl..
Jackie Chan stars as the girl-chasing private detective Ryo Saeba in this hilarious live-action adaptation of the popular Japanese manga series, City Hunter, presented from a stunning new 2K restoration! Hired to track down Shizuko Imamura, the runaway daughter of a publishing tycoon, Ryo initially turns the job down… until he sees a picture of the missing woman! Ryo eventually finds her aboard a luxury cruise ship, but much to the anno..
Director Ron Howard followed up the huge success of Splash with this light-hearted science-fiction tale about a group of elderly friends who find their youth returning after encountering a benevolent Alien species living next door to their retirement home. Bucking the trend of extravagant special effects targeted at a teenage audience, Cocoon with its senior cast and more personal focus was a huge success, picking up two Academy Awards ..
Three guys in their twenties love wine and women but they are still virgins.Under the guise of a wine tour they embark on a journey to Spain hoping to have their first sexual experience. Jozef is blind, Philip is paralysed from the neck down and Lars is in a wheelchair with a brain tumour, but they're not going to let anything stand in their way.... Based on the real life experiences of Asta Philpot, Come As You Are (Hasta la Vista) is ..
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is one of the wonderful highlights of an under-appreciated chapter of director Robert Altman's career. Between the box office disappointment of Popeye (1980) and the explosive comeback of The Player (1992), Altman returned to lower-budgeted, independent filmmaking, often boldly experimenting with how theatre work could be inventively adapted for cinema and television. This period of..
Perhaps the most compelling picture ever made about the shattering aftermath of the Vietnam War. Coming Home earned eight Academy Award nominations and won three for Best Actress (Jane Fonda), Actor (Jon Voight), and Original Screenplay. Coming Home is an uncompromising, extraordinarily moving film directed by the great Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude). When Marine Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) leaves for Vietnam, his wife Sally (Fonda) vol..
From the early stages of his career across five decades to his final film, Fritz Lang built a trilogy of paranoiac thrillers focused on an entity who began as a criminal mastermind, and progressed into something more amorphous: fear itself, embodied only by a name Dr. Mabuse. For the first time on home video, all three of Fritz Lang's Mabuse films have been collected for one package, in their complete and restored forms. 1: Dr. Mabuse, ..
Eleven years after The Leopard, the revered Italian maestro Luchino Visconti reteamed with the iconic Burt Lancaster on the lavish Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno). A retired American professor (Lancaster) lives a solitary and luxurious life in a house in Rome. His world takes an unexpected turn when he is forced to rent part of his house to a countess and her companions: a lover, a daughter and the daughter's boyfr..
One of the most lavish and successful Hollywood musicals of the 1940s, Charles Vidor’s Cover Girl is a breath-taking spectacle that established its stars Rita Hayworth (Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai) and Gene Kelly (Singin’ in the Rain), as the two most popular actors of their time. Nightclub dancer Rusty (Hayworth) has a happy life performing at her boyfriend Danny’s (Kelly) club in Brooklyn, but her whole world changes once she wins a..
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa first came to prominence in the West with his J-Horror masterpieces Cure and Pulse [Kairo]. Now he makes a triumphant return to the horror genre with Creepy, a macabre and deeply unsettling thriller that has sent shivers down the spines of audiences worldwide. Based on a novel by Yutaka Maekawa, Creepy follows ex-police detective and criminal psychologist Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, Dolls), who moves to a qu..
This second feature by the Japanese cinema-insurgent Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) galvanised its home-turf with its topsy-turvy directorial dexterity and stinging constigation of an indolent, self-indulgent youth culture reposing on the eve of the turbulent 1960s. When high-schooler Makoto is saved from the advances of a lecherous middle-aged man by uni student Kiyoshi, the pair embark on a fi..
Released to critical acclaim in both the East and the West, Cure was a breakthrough film for director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a nerve shredding thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in a bleak and decaying Tokyo. A series of murders have been committed by ordinary people who claim to have had no control over their horrifying actions. Following the only link - a mysterious stranger who had brief contact with each perpetrator and their vi..
One of world cinema's most dynamic and highly regarded auteurs, Hou Hsiao-hsien has influenced entire generations of filmmakers and was once dubbed "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema". The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present three films from early in his career, Cute Girl, The Green, Green Grass of Home and The Boys from Fengkuei, all making their worldwide debut on Blu-ray and presented from stunn..
One of the most iconic masterpieces in cinema history, Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.) shook filmgoers worldwide and changed the direction of the art form. Now presented in a definitive restoration, the film’s chilling, radically expressionist vision is set to grip viewers again. At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari presents the somnambulist Cesare, who can purport..
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With the etching onto glass of a single word - "Mabuse" - Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang’s electrifying Das Testament Des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) is the astonishing second instalment in the German master’s legendary Dr. Mabuse series, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema ever before - or since. It’s been eleven years since the downfall o..
Taiwanese auteur House Hsiao-hsien followed up his highly acclaimed coming-of-age trilogy of films with Daughter of the Nile [Ni luo he nu er], a rich and poignant drama about a young woman struggling to support her family amidst the violent and neon-soaked milieu of 1980's Tapei. Lin [Lin Yang] works as a waitress in a fried chicken restaurant, attends night school and pines after her brother's friend, local gigolo Ah-sang (Fan Yang). ..
Revered by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, the great director Andre de Toth made some of the most gripping and unusual American films of the 1950s, and Day of the Outlaw stands as one of his finest. Robert Ryan plays the ruthless cattleman Blaise Starrett who rides into the small, snowbound town of Bitters to settle a feud with homesteader Hal Crane (Alan Marshal) over access to land, with one eye on rekindling a pas..
After the relatively commercial Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Luis Bunuel returned to the surrealist and political style of his earlier works with Death in the Garden [La mort en ce jardin] the middle film in what has been described as his "revolutionary triptych", a trilogy of films that "study in the morality and tactics of armed revolution against a right-wing dictatorship". Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a ba..
Paul Wegener's landmark gothic horror film was first released in 1914, before being substantially reworked for a reissue six years later. The Golem, a clay hulk brought to life by a magic scroll implanted in his chest, saves the Jews from Rudolf II in 16th Century Prague. Reverting to his inanimate form, the golem is given the gift of life once more by a Rabbi's assistant who wants him to kidnap the beautiful Miriam...
Before directing numerous genre defining masterpieces such as Metropolis, M, and Spione, Fritz Lang was already defying cinematic conventions with Der mude Tod (literally, The Weary Death). A young woman (Lil Dagover) confronts the personification of Death (Bernhard Goetzke), in an effort to save the life of her fiance (Walter Janssen). Death weaves three romantic tragedies and offers to unite the girl with her lover, if she can prevent..
Fritz Lang returned to Germany on the eve of the 1960s to direct this enchanted penultimate work, a redraft of the diptych form pioneered in such silent Lang classics as Die Spinnen; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.; and Die Nibelungen. Although no encapsulating title was lent at the time of release to what is, effectively, a single 3-hour-plus film split in two, the work that has come to be referred to in modern times as "the Indian epic" prov..
A masterwork of the German silent cinema whose reputation has only increased over time, Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks, mere months after their first collaboration in the n..
Perhaps the most stately of Fritz Lang's two-part epics, the five-hour Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungen) is a courageous and hallucinatory work, a film in which every single shot might alone endure as an exemplar of visual art. Its extraordinary set-pieces, archetypal themes, and unrestrained ambition have proved an inspiration for nearly every fantasy cycle that has emerged on-screen since - from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings. In Pa..
Perhaps the most stately of Fritz Lang's two-part epics, the five-hour Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungen) is a courageous and hallucinatory work, a film in which every single shot might alone endure as an exemplar of visual art. Its extraordinary set-pieces, archetypal themes, and unrestrained ambition have proved an inspiration for nearly every fantasy cycle that has emerged on-screen since - from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings. In Pa..
In the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs. A journey through the Donbass unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and drama are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country or one political system. It is about a world, lost in post-truth and..
Double Indemnity is the dazzling, quintessential film noir whose enormous popular success and seven Oscar nominations catapulted Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment) into the very top tier of Hollywood's writer-directors. Adapted from a novella by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye), Double Indemnity remains the hardest-bo..
One of the legendary epics of the silent cinema - and the first part of a trilogy that Fritz Lang developed up to the very end of his career - Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) is a masterpiece of conspiracy that, even as it precedes the mind-blowing Spione from the close of Lang's silent cycle, constructs its own dark labyrinth from the base materials of human fear and paranoia. Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Dr. Mabuse, the..
A quintessential entryway into the highly stylized, tightly choreographed wuxia genre of martial arts cinema, Dragon Inn was a global breakthrough for the form's greatest practitioner, King Hu. Its influence remains incalculable, from its annihilation of traditional expectations of what kind of role an actress should inhabit (also chipped away at by Hu's previous masterpiece Come Drink with Me), to the formation of many of the genre's a..
Hong Kong action pioneer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and martial arts superstar Jackie Chan burst onto the scene in 1978 with a one-two punch of kung fu masterpieces, and it was the second of these, Drunken Master, with its Keatonesque slapstick and flawlessly choreographed fight scenes that would make the biggest impact. Jackie Chan plays Wong Fei-hung (a legendary Chinese folk hero who has also been port..
One of the most influential and revered figures in all of cinema, Friedrich Wilheim Murnau came to prominence in the first half of the 1920s with a diverse string of productions ranging from buoyant satire to swirling psychological drama. Five key works are presented here: Schlob Vogelod, Phantom, Die Finanzen des Grobherzogs (The Grand Duke's Finances), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) and Tartuffe. In the sinister mystery Schlob Vogel..
Described by Ingmar Bergman as "a work of genius", Peter Watkins' multi-faceted masterwork is more than just a biopic of the iconic Norwegian Expressionist painter; it is one of the best films ever made about the artistic process. Focusing initially on Munch's formative years in late 19th century Kristiania (now Oslo), Watkins uses his trademark verite style to create a vivid picture of the emotional, political, and social upheavals tha..
From director Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, The Never Ending Story) comes a tale of two enemies thrown together in a hostile world where to survive they must become allies. A soldier from Earth crash-lands on an alien world. Eventually he encounters another survivor, but from the enemy species he was fighting; they band together to survive on this hostile world. In the end the human finds himself caring for his enemy in a completely unexpect..
From director Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, The Never Ending Story) comes a tale of two enemies thrown together in a hostile world where to survive they must become allies. A soldier from Earth crash-lands on an alien world. Eventually he encounters another survivor, but from the enemy species he was fighting; they band together to survive on this hostile world. In the end the human finds himself caring for his enemy in a completely unexpect..
One of the most revered figures in modern cinema; Nicolas Roeg's Eureka was barely released at the time of its making and overlooked by critics. Now, three decades later, it returns to reclaim a place among both the front ranks of Roeg's work and as one of the most extraordinary studio films of the 1980s. Twenty years after uncovering an unimaginable bounty of gold in the Klondike, prospector Jack McCann, now settled in the Caribbean, f..
Murnau's last German film features astonishing photography, magnificent art direction, and special effects which retain the power to amaze. Freed from the constraints of psychological narrative, Murnau's mastery of cinematic technique places Faust, eine deutsche Volkssage (Faust: A German Folktale) at the pinnacle of the silent era, its barrage of visceral and apocryphal imagery contrasting with the simplicity and directness of its spir..
