Abel Gance's 1927 masterpiece is absolutely indispensable for silent-film buffs or anyone interested in classic world cinema. From the future emperor's first strategic victory, a schoolyard snowball fight, to the climactic invasion of Italy, Napoleon truly rules! This is no static, antiquated relic. Among Gance's innovations was to free the camera (for one battle scene, he had it mounted on horseback!). The film's justly celebrated climax features a triptych of synchronized images that anticipates by more than 30 years Cinerama and widescreen. But more than a triumph of filmmaking, Napoleon is a triumph of film restoration and was a boon to the vital cause of film preservation. Gance's movie was long thought lost. But historian Kevin Brownlow, with the cooperation of film archives from around the world, spent more than a decade painstakingly reassembling it. Francis Ford Coppola's name (not to mention a reported quarter of a million of his dollars) helped find Napoleon the audience this film so richly deserves. The rousing score was composed by Coppola's father, Carmine. Viva la Gance! -Donald Liebenson.

Carlos Saura's (Cria!, Carmen) first commercial success in Spain, Peppermint Frappe radiates the influence of Surrealist director Luis Buñuel. The eerie story of a bachelor obsessed with his friend's wife explores the fierce conflict between repressive religious upbringing and sexual desire. Julian, a respected doctor devoted to the Catholic Church, and Pablo, a free spirit caught up in the modern ways quickly engulfing traditional Spain, are distinct opposites. When Julian meets Pablo's bride Elena, he imagines that she is the mysterious woman he had seen beating a drum at a Holy Week ritual, then attempts to transform his nurse Ana into a second Elena. This mesmerizing mixture of reality, illusion, and memories stars Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez (The Garden of Delights) as Julian and Geraldine Chaplin (Cria!) as both the temptress Elena and the shy Ana.

One of the first, and most successful, French export comedies, Cousin Cousine garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Marie-Christine Barrault, an international audience for director Jean- Charles Tacchella, and a substantial, surprising haul at American box offices in late 1975 and early '76. Retrospectively, it's not difficult to understand why: Barrault and costar Victor Lanoux prove themselves to be adept, protean comic actors, and Tacchella's breezy pacing makes the witty, gag-laden script crackle with frenetic verve. Barrault and Lanoux play cousins (by marriage only; it isn't quite that French) drawn together when their respective partners are caught philandering. Their initial friendship quickly blossoms into something altogether more scandalous. The narrative, framed by weddings, funerals, and other family get-togethers, feels surprisingly modern in its choice of milieu; indeed, recent comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and My Best Friend's Wedding owe a substantial debt to the whimsical tone of Cousin Cousine. More Hollywood than Cannes, it's perhaps unsurprising that Tacchella's comedy was recently remade into Cousins (1989), an intermittently amusing Ted Danson vehicle with occasional resemblances to its vastly superior predecessor. -Miles Bethany.

The exquisite circularity of the roundelay has always been an attractive cinematic device, but never has it been used with more delicacy and canny insight than in La Ronde, Max Ophüls's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler play Reigen. The camera glides, swirls, and delicately dances around fleeting moments between lovers, from chance meetings and secret trysts, to the sincere but hopeless courtship by a besotted admirer, to the relaxed banter of cuckolding married couples. Ophüls's wry glimpses behind closed doors and pulled curtains are both cynical and sweet, generous of character but suspect of motive. As one scene ends, we waltz along as the characters change partners and dance again and again; we follow streetwalkers and soldiers, courtesans and counts, until we come full circle. Returning to the superb metaphor of the carousel, where dapper Anton Walbrook wanders about as host and commentator (a sort of literary ringmaster, like Peter Ustinov in Lola Montes), Ophüls plays at the game of love with a cocked grim and a sly jab, though he never belittles or judges. What could easily have descended into farce is lifted into loving satire by Ophüls's elegant touch and sparkling wit. A huge success in Europe, its continental attitude wasn't embraced by American audiences at the time. But it has come to be regarded one of Ophüls's finest and most beautifully visualized films. Everyone is somebody's fool, and isn't it wonderful? -Sean Axmaker Ophuls presents his amused view of the rituals of love and lovemaking in ten timeless sketches full of humor and tenderness. Set in half-lit, turn-of-the-century Viennese interiors, La Ronde is an elaborate satire on sexual behavior, a panoramic display of illicit love in old Vienna that comments on the futility of transitory relationships in which the deceivers are always deceived.

One of the most powerful and profound films about faith ever made, Carl Dreyer's Ordet (which translates to "The Word") turns a Romeo and Juliet story into a passionately spiritual drama of love and acceptance. Young lovers in a rural farming community are kept apart by the religious differences of their parents. But although the parents appear strict and ascetic, Dreyer gives them tender moments of unspoken love and a quiet dignity, revealing them as thinking, feeling people with deep beliefs who need a crisis to make them face their conflicts. They find unexpected guidance from Johannes, a mad young man who believes he is Christ, preaching love and forgiveness in a sad, hoarse voice as he wanders the fields and pads around his sparsely furnished home. "They believe in the miracles I wrought 2,000 years ago," he cries, "but they have no faith in me now. "Dreyer strips his austere vision to essentials: simple dialogue, a quietly gliding camera, and lovely but unadorned images. Windswept fields of grain and stark homes lit by cold light suggest a chilly existence, but Dreyer reveals a rich, if restrained, emotional world that explodes in feeling at the film's climax. It's a moment of utter cinematic simplicity that resonates with pure love and joy and faith. -Sean Axmaker As one of Carl Dreyer's most celebrated forays into the sound film, Ordet deals directly with the spiritual theme first put forth in The Passion of Joan of Arc: personalized faith versus organized religion. Whereas Borgen the farmer believe.

Diary of a Country Priest is the first masterpiece by the great Robert Bresson, a towering and slow-working figure in French cinema. Starkly adapted from a successful novel by Georges Bernanos, the film locks in to the mind of a sickly, ineffective young priest trapped in an unfriendly rural area. Bresson charts the priest's collapse with a series of brief scenes, a minimalist style that makes the slightest touch of a hand or far-off sound of a dog barking seem magnified in importance. (This is a movie that must be watched and listened to-it is not a casual experience. ) Bresson's luminous portrait of faith and worldly humiliations takes on the intensity of a saint's notebook. In the central role is Claude Laydu, one of Bresson's early experiments with non-actors; his sad, open face is often in close-up, lighting our way into a world of private salvation. -Robert Horton.

The fourth feature film written and directed by the Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami (Coin Locker Babies) revels in S&M episodes that seem to owe less to the Japanese tradition of the "pink film" than to such Euro art-bondage movies as Maitresse and A Woman in Flames. Visually, the sequences stop well short of hard core, and emotionally they are amorphous, too, even less unsettling than standard porno fare. What ultimately saps the movie's strength is its schematic approach to character. The loosely structured picture tags along after a timid young woman named Ai (Miho Nikaido), a recent college graduate who has found work in the big city as a hooker specializing in low-impact bondage. Ai seems less a character than a convenient object for Murakami's flip sense of high-tech alienation. (She claims to have learned only one thing in life: "That I have no talent of any kind. ") The nonstick surfaces of her daily life, like her personality, are almost completely without distinguishing features; the only gestures she makes toward taking control are some superstitious rituals prescribed by a sidewalk fortuneteller. Ai herself is such a hazy presence that nothing that happens to her stays with us. -David Chute.

Nagisa Oshima's sensational, 1976 film concerns a woman (Eiko Matsuda) whose obsessive sexual relationship with her husband (Tatsuya Fuji) crosses the line from passion into the territory of life and death. One of the most sexually explicit films ever to play in mainstream theaters (though it did run into legal trouble both in the U. S. and Japan), it has an air of palpable doom, suggesting that sex can be a doorway to suicide. Lest this sound like grunge-era noodling over dreams of self-destruction, be assured that the Kyoto-born Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) takes a somewhat formal, middle-aged perspective on the conjunction of various mysteries of existence. -Tom Keogh.

Hailed by critics as one of the greatest films ever made, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is an undisputed masterpiece of Japanese cinema, revealing greater depths of meaning and emotion with each successive viewing. Mizoguchi's exquisite "gender tragedy" is set during Japan's violent 16th-century civil wars, a historical context well-suited to the director's compassionate perspective on the plight of women and the foibles of men. The story focuses on two brothers, Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) and Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), whose dreams of glory (one as a wealthy potter, the other a would-be samurai) cause them to leave their wives for the promise of success in Kyoto. Both are led astray by their blind ambitions, and their wives suffer tragic fates in their absence, as Ugetsu evolves into a masterful mixture of brutal wartime realism and haunting ghost story. The way Mizoguchi weaves these elements so seamlessly together is what makes Ugetsu (masterfully derived from short stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant) so challenging and yet deeply rewarding as a timeless work of art. Featuring flawless performances by some of Japan's greatest actors (including Machiko Kyo, from Kurosawa's Rashomon), Ugetsu is essential viewing for any serious lover of film. -Jeff Shannon DVD features The Criterion Collection's high standards of scholarly excellence are on full display in the two-disc set of Ugetsu, packaged in an elegant slipcase reflecting the tonal beauty of the film itself, which has been fully restored with a high-definition digital transfer. The well-prepared commentary by critic/filmmaker Tony Rayns combines the astute observations of a serious cineaste (emphasizing a keen appreciation for Mizoguchi's long-take style, compositional meaning, and literary inspirations) with informative biographical and historical detail. In the 14-minute featurette "Two Worlds Intertwined," director Masahiro Shinoda discusses how Mizoguchi's career and films have had a lasting impact on himself and Japanese culture in general. Interviews with Tokuzo Tanaka (first assistant director on Ugetsu) and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa focus more specifically on anecdotal production history Mizoguchi's working methods, including the director's legendary perfectionism regarding painstaking details of props, costumes, and production design. [+]

This romantic, witty, and ultimately poignant glimpse at two strangers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who share thoughts, affections, and past experiences during one 14-hour tryst in Vienna somehow remains writer/director Richard Linklater's (Dazed and Confused, Slacker) most overlooked gem. Delpy, a stunning, low-key Parisian, meets the stammering American Hawke, as the two share a Eurorail seat-she's starting school in Paris, he's finishing a vacation. Their mutual attraction leads to an awkward meeting (beautifully played by each performer), and Hawke suggests that Delpy spend his remaining 14 hours in Vienna with him. Typically, this skeleton is as much plot as Linklater provides; as usual, he's more interested in concentrating his talents on observing the casual, playful conversations between his leads. His tight time frame allows the characters to say anything to one another, and topics ranging from politics to past romances to fears of the future flow with subtle finesse. The short time frame is also cruel, however, because beneath this love affair lies the painful reality that the two most likely will never see each other again and will be left only with memories-an idea Linklater drives home with an effective snapshot conclusion. Hardly the trite Gen-X bitch session that many '90s films using this approach become, the film feels more like a Bresson or Rohmer piece, containing sharp perceptions-and flawed humans rather than stereotypes. The protagonists' frank revelations and heated exchanges flow in a stream-of-consciousness style, and its no accident that Linklater set the film in Vienna, where Freud invented and practiced psychotherapy. -Dave McCoy.