Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski combines drama, documentary, and personal essay in this 1981 feature, a masterpiece made entirely on its own terms.
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The artist group Black Audio Film Collective created this experimental work in 1986, responding to the race riots that had recently erupted across England.
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A darling of the Third Reich, German director Veit Harlan became infamous for the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jew Suss (1940), which was seen by some 20 million Germans and another 20 million people across Europe.
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In the northern French port city of the title, an elderly shoe shiner calls on his circle of working-poor friends to help him protect a young African refugee from getting deported.
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Shortly before he was driven into exile by the Hollywood blacklist, the talented and neglected John Berry made this 1951 film, the last of John Garfield, who died of a heart attack at 39 (many believe in part because of pressures related to his own blacklisting).
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This fascinating British documentary by Gary Hustwit uses the 50th anniversary of the Swiss typeface Helvetica to consider a half century of graphic design, exploring the tension between the orderly postwar modernists and the individualists who came after them.
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Documentary makers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea reconstruct one of the great unrealized projects of the French cinema: Henri-Georges Clouzot's visually ambitious psychodrama L'Enfer, which collapsed in mid-production after the director suffered a heart attack on location in July 1964.
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I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain's novel The King's Ransom as Akira Kurosawa's best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors.
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Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby stereo.
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In films like The Pornographer (2001) and On War (2008), French writer-director Bertrand Bonello tells odd, deliberately impenetrable stories that evoke such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nikolai Gogol.
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In Laurent Cantet's 1999 French feature, written with Gilles Marchand, a student at a Paris business school returns home to Normandy to intern at the factory where his father has worked for 30 years.
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Israeli actor Mark Ivanir (Schindler's List) breaks out in his first leading role, playing a workaholic businessman from Jerusalem whose years on the road have estranged him from his wife and child.
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