One of Ingmar Bergman's best comedies, A Lesson in Love belongs to that trio of films (Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night) Time called a "lewdly hilarious trilogy. " This witty look at marriage and adultery re-unites Gunnar Bjorns.

In this 1960 Satyajit Ray film, Kalikinkar Roy (Chhabi Biswas, who also appeared in Jalsaghar) has a revelation that his daughter-in-law, Doyamoyee (Sharmila Tagore), is the incarnation of the goddess Kali. When his son Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee, The World of Apu) returns from university in Calcutta, he is appalled to find that his wife has been made a virtual prisoner of his father's obsession. Doyamoyee is decorated as a living goddess and forced to sit all day in the temple where people come to offer her prayers. When an impoverished man brings his only son to this reluctant goddess and he is cured, everyone believes that she has performed a miracle. Then her beloved nephew Khoka gets sick. Will another miracle happen? Or is simply believing not enough? Dark and brooding, this is another powerful human portrait by the Svengali of Bengali filmmaking. Ray exposes the underbelly of twisted human desire and the overwhelming compulsion to rob others of the right to control their own destiny. Based on the story Devi by Prabhart Kumar Mukherjee, the film is 93 minutes long and is shot in black and white. The music is by Ali Akbar Khan. -Luanne Brown.

Granada Television's powerful adaptation of John Galsworthy's novels about the sprawling, fractious and aristocratic Forsyte family moves into the 1920s with Series Two, based on the author's To Let. The drama shifts to a new generation shouldering the burdensome legacies of an aging Soames (Damian Lewis) and his failed marriage to free-spirited Irene (Gina McKee). The lovely Fleur (Emma Griffiths Malin), Soames's daughter by second wife Annette (Beatriz Batarda), and strapping Jon (Lee Williams), son of Irene and Soames's bohemian cousin, Jolyon (Rupert Graves), develop a romance much to the dismay of their feuding parents. But the long reach of the elder Forsytes' sins-and the tenderness with which they seek redemption through their children-ultimately undercuts the young lovers' happiness. Meanwhile, sundry characters move in and out of the Forsytes' orbit, including a French businessman (Michael Maloney) stirring more troubles for Soames and an art dealer (Oliver Milburn) with designs on Fleur. As with Series One, all this will feel familiar to anyone who has seen the 26-part, 1967 version of The Forsyte Saga (the program that arguably created public television as we know it). Yet this updated effort renews and redefines the Forsytes' overlapping tragedies, with a more interior feel and a first-rate contemporary cast. As with its legendary predecessor, this Forsyte Saga depends heavily on the seemingly soulless Soames's slow evolution to humanity; Damian Lewis carries the load brilliantly. -Tom Keogh.

David Lean's finest films, from Great Expectations (1946) to Lawrence of Arabia (1962), are resolutely sober, which is more than can be said of Henry Horatio Hobson in his wonderfully comic encounter with the moon in Hobson's Choice (1954). Lean's only other comedy was Blithe Spirit (1945), but here he approaches matters of the heart with a surprising lightness of touch and wins a marvelous performance from Charles Laughton-himself soon to make his one and only film as a director, Night of the Hunter (1955). The setting is late-19th-century Salford, England (the black-and-white location filming is exceptional), and widower Henry Hobson forbids his three daughters to marry to avoid paying their dowries. Romance will not be thwarted by economics, and much humorous conflict ensues, interspersed with some serious and even disturbing moments. Brenda De Banzie is splendidly spirited as the eldest daughter, Maggie, while her fiancé is played by the ever excellent John Mills, who would later win an Oscar® for his part in Lean's much more serious love story, Ryan's Daughter (1970). -Gary S. Dalkin David Lean backs up vicious wit with tender romance in this thrilling adaptation of Harold Brighouse's play. As Henry Hobson, a tyrannical bootshop owner, Charles Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Ruggles of Red Gap) is a comical drunk of Falstaffian proportions. When Hobson forbids his daughters to marry (their unpaid labor supports his pub visits!), his eldest daughter defiantly sets her cap for Willie, the shop's best bootmaker. Brenda de Banzie (The Man Who Knew Too Much), as the eldest daughter, hounds the flabbergasted Willie into marriage, resulting in a thriving new shop of their own. [+]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid tribute to his mentor, Douglas Sirk, with this loose adaptation of All That Heaven Allows, the classic American soaper of a widow falling for younger man to the disapproval of family and friends. Fassbinder combines the Sirk melodrama with the story told in his own The American Soldier. An aging, lonely charwoman (sweet old Brigitte Mira) befriends a Moroccan guest worker (El Hedi ben Salem) at least 20 years her junior. Finding comfort and happiness in one another's company, they suddenly marry. Her kids are aghast, his friends appalled, and the neighborhood turns its back, so the two pull together for support. Their relationship ironically begins to unravel when the pressure of community prejudice eases and they must confront the gulf between them. Combining melodrama with social commentary, Fassbinder offers a sharp, incisive portrait of prejudice in modern Germany grounded in contemporary social conditions. Mira delivers a tender, vulnerable performance and Fassbinder molds Salem's stiffness into a distinctive character trait of a man ill at ease in German society. It's an assured and beautiful film, full of gliding camerawork and evocative images, and invested with intimacy and gentleness. Even Fassbinder's characteristically grim conclusion defies tragedy for a glimmer of hope, a welcome and affecting rarity in his career. [+]