The inspiration for Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Rene Clair's comic masterpiece was a landmark in the early days of sound production. In A Nous La Liberte Claire employs plenty of clever dialog tricks, comic sound effects, and songs to tell this satirical story of two friends who go from down and out prisoners to wealthy businessmen. When Louis successfully escapes from prison he winds up making a fortune in the phonograph business. Later his friend Emil is released and finds himself employed in Louis' factory. The amazing Bauhaus sets from legendary art director Lazare Meerson add to the satire by paralleling the design of the prison with that of the factory and assembly lines.

One of the most ferociously iconoclastic and experimental films of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais's 1961 feature, winner of the grand prize at that year's Venice Film Festival, is based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. At its center is what seems to be a simple but unanswerable puzzle: Did its protagonist (Giorgio Albertazzi) have an affair the year before with a woman (Delphine Seyrig) he just met (or possibly re-met) at his hotel? The inquiry becomes an unsettling experiment in flattening the dimensions of past, present, and future so that any difference between them becomes meaningless, while Resnais's coldly formal but oddly dreamlike geometric compositions make space itself seem a function of subjective memory. Add to that Resnais's trademark tracking shots-long, smooth, a visual correlative of a wordless feeling-and this is a film that truly gets under the skin in almost inexplicable ways. One of the most influential works of its time. -Tom Keogh.

It's long been one of the revered classics of international cinema, but there is no fine layer of dust over La Grande Illusion. Jean Renoir's film is just as vibrant, exciting, and wise as it has ever been. The story is set during World War I, mostly in a couple of German POW camps, where two very different French prisoners plot to escape: the working-class officer Maréchal (Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy) and the upper-class de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay). The suspenseful backbone of the story is formed by these escape attempts, but Renoir is primarily concerned with the way people treat each other, and especially with how class and nationality inform human relations. Most compelling of all the film's characters is the aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, unforgettably incarnated by stiff-backed Erich von Stroheim; although he runs a prison camp, von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with de Boieldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility. There is nothing dewy or naive about Renoir's vision (and two years after the release of this antiwar film, Europe was plunged into another world war), yet Grand Illusion is one of those movies that makes you feel good about such long-outmoded ideas as sacrifice and brotherhood. After it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared the film "Cinematographic Enemy Number One. " There can be no higher praise. -Robert Horton.

The silent epic and international cinema legend Abel Gance is most celebrated for his sweeping and pioneering biography masterpiece "Napoleon. " But this touching and tortured document of the legendary Beethoven's creative genius deserves equal tribute and attention. Like "Napoleon," "Beethoven" is Gance's portrait of a great mind, a giant of history, here crafted as a romantic vision of the artist. The film chronicles the years of Beethoven's greatest successes and his struggles against overwhelming adversity-poverty, the onset of deafness and his unrequited passion for his "Immortal Beloved. " Writer/director Gance conducts a symphony of images set to an expressionistic score, depicting not only the events but the spirit of the composer's life. If one were to gather the hundreds of books written about Ludwig van Beethoven, sift through each with a fine-tooth comb, and extract every simple mistake, wild speculation, and outright falsehood, the result would still be nowhere near as fabulous and artificial as this 1936 biopic, which rewrites the composer's life story into a throbbingly melodramatic tale of genius ignored and love unrequited. Director Abel Gance, best known for his expansive silent classic Napoleon, wasn't interested in the truth of Beethoven's life, but instead the romantic ideal of a great man tormented by history; Gance's Beethoven is merely a variation of the filmmaker's beloved Bonaparte, triumphant yet scorned by his inferiors in the artistic realm rather than the political. (Needless to say, among the film's many omissions is Beethoven's bitter rededication of the "Eroica" Symphony. ) Beginning where every portrait of Beethoven the man must, with the identification of the Immortal Beloved, the film nominates (wrongly) Giulietta Gallenberg, née Guicciardi, reconstructing their brief passion as a lifelong obsession. During each of Beethoven's struggles-with love, poverty, deafness-thunder cracks against the sky and the opening notes of the Fifth burst onto the soundtrack to punctuate the action. [+]

Little known stateside but long esteemed in Europe, The Crime of Monsieur Lange is simply one of the very greatest films directed by Jean Renoir (it was made a few years before Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game). René Lefèvre (Le Million) takes the title role of a nebbish who clerks for a penny-press publisher by day, and by night writes feverish potboilers about a Western hero named "Arizona Jim. " Lange's encyclopedically venal boss (Jules Berry) discovers his secret and immediately starts exploiting it, as he exploits everybody and everything within range. Life sublimely imitates pulp fiction and vice versa in the brilliant screenplay by Jacques Prévert (who would later write Children of Paradise). The movie blends sociopolitical protest, tender satire, and astonishing poetry without breaking a sweat, and its climax-an amazing synthesis of theme, dramatic emotion, and inspired camerawork-is one of the transcendent moments in screen history. -Richard T. Jameson.

High-Definition transfer, with new electronic subtitles. A pre-cursor to Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows and a major influence on the French New Wave. From one of the most intriguing personas in film history. Much more than simply a classic of world cinema, Zero de Conduite's blend of pure joy and anarchist satire will burn itself into your memory forever. Set in a boarding school outside Paris, four young boys secretly plot to subvert the grotesque and oppressive administration led by an overly dignified midget in full formal wear, and a headmaster and dormitory monitor appropriately named Fishface and the Creep. Such an anarchistic vision so upset French authorities that the film was banned for over ten years, and only reappeared after Jean Vigo's untimely death at the age of 29. This tender and ferocious elegy to youthfulness has been previously available in unwatchable bootleg versions. We are proud to be offering this masterpiece in a new transfer, which illuminates the wonderful absurdities of Vigo's world. It's hard to believe that this fantastical tale of a schoolboy rebellion was banned in its native France for 12 years following its initial 1933 release (for supposed anti-French sentiment). Perhaps the French authorities were remembering director Jean Vigo's father, a famous French anarchist who died in prison, or just concerned that Vigo was revealing too much of his own unhappy youth spent in boarding schools. [+]

Often considered the real beginning of the French New Wave movement, this 1958 film, the first feature by Claude Chabrol, is also-strangely-underrated on its own terms. The story of a theology student (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial home town for convalescence and reunites with his unhappy childhood friend (Gerard Blain), the film introduces many of Chabrol's pet themes and interests, particularly the Hitchcockian relationship between two characters who transfer or implicitly share a private experience or fate. Chabrol's consideration of that idea would naturally deepen and become more complex over the years (brilliantly in 1969's La Femme Infidele and Le Boucher), but at this career flashpoint it is a little overstated and obvious in religious allusions. Still, Le Beau Serge is an engrossing film with no shortage of dramatic momentum. The final act, driven by the main character's efforts at self-sacrifice, is as affecting as ever. -Tom Keogh.