Experience Mario Bava's horror classic "Black Sabbath" (original Italian title: "Three Faces of Fear")-as it's never been seen in America before! A beautiful woman is terrorized by calls from an ex-lover who has escaped prison for the pleasure of killing her. A family becomes a feeding ground when their father returns home wounded after ridding the countryside of a hideous vampire. A nurse is haunted by reproaches from the Beyond after stealing a ring from the finger of a dead medium! Join Boris Karloff as he hosts (and stars in) this trilogy of terror tales-presented in its original aspect ratio and in Italian with English subtitles, with every shock intact! When American audiences first saw Mario Bava's 1963 horror trilogy, it wasn't the same film he had made in Italy. Finding it too terrifying for kids (imagine that!), AIP pictures trimmed it of violence and intensity, rescored it, and renamed it in order to cash in on the success of Black Sunday. New tongue-in-cheek introductions with costar Boris Karloff were added, the segments were rearranged, and one segment was completely rewritten in the dubbing. It was a good film even in its butchered form, but the original Italian version is excellent. [+]

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.

In this classic documentary, one of the world's finest directors captures the colorful pageantry and emotional intensity of the 1964 Olympics. Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad is both a celebration of Japan's postwar recovery and an artistic statement about athletic competition. To produce this epic work, Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) brings together an impressive team, including his wife and collaborator Natto Wada, renowned cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon), and 164 ubiquitous cameramen. Using his talents as a novelist, Ichikawa searches out the human side of the Olympics in such dramatic moments as Vera Caslavska's virtual sweep of the gymnastics medals and Billy Mills' astonishing, come-from-behind victory in the 10,000-meter race. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo were a milestone as much for the intense athletic competition as the joyous commemoration of Japan's recovery following its defeat in World War II. Director Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) created an epic film of the event, a documentary that covered the entire athletic competition while also capturing the surrounding atmosphere. Early in the film is a stunning aerial shot of Hiroshima, which first shows the devastated area, where destruction from the atom bomb has been preserved, before focusing on a beautiful park where an Olympic ceremony was being held. The scenes of athletic competition, some of which were shot by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon), work beautifully on two levels. The camera frames the extreme effort expended by such athletes as the great American runner Bob Hayes, and thus the film functions as a credible sports documentary, yet the camera also goes in for close-ups, lingering on the athlete's muscled forms to provide images that would look perfectly at home on the wall of a photography gallery. The narration in Japanese is accompanied with English subtitles, and this edition retains the widescreen look of the original theatrical release (in a letterboxed format) as well as the complete 170-minute running time. [+]

Shot in black and white, this 1965 Japanese monster movie was the Daiei company's answer to Toho's famous Godzilla series. A skirmish between U. S. and unknown "enemy" planes results in an atomic explosion over the Arctic which unthaws and unleashes the giant flying turtle Gamera, who eventually settles into Japan to wreak havoc while seeking out hydro-electric sustenance. However, this fire-eating (and breathing) behemoth displays a compassionate streak when he saves the life of a young boy who nearly falls to his death from a toppled lighthouse. Panicky scientists and military officials vainly try to find ways to destroy Gamera while the boy seeks to bond with his misunderstood reptilian hero. Like many of its celluloid Japanese monster brethren, Giant Monster Gamera has not aged all that well, but the well-staged and photographed assault on Tokyo makes for festive mayhem. Overall the film is good entertainment for young kids as well as the inner children of the adults who grew up on these monster mashes. -Bryan Reesman.

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.

The gendarme Ludovic Cruchot is an ambitious man. So, when he is transferred to the laid-back post of Saint-Tropez, he sees an ideal opportunity to advance his career. Everything goes as planned until his daughter has a little too much fun on the beach.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse rolls over you and wraps you in its stylish embrace. The plot, such as it is, follows Vittoria (luscious Monica Vitti, The Red Desert) as her engagement falls apart and she slowly falls into a giddy but anxious affair with Piero (Alain Delon, Le Samourai, Purple Noon), a trader in Rome's stock exchange. Like Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Antonioni examines the nuances of human relationships-but where Bergman is dense and dialogue-driven, Antonioni is spare and visual (there's maybe a page of dialogue in the first fifteen minutes of L'Eclisse). Every frame is like an exquisite black and white photograph, yet there's nothing static about this movie. It's fluid, sleek, and graceful, achieving its own kind of visual music. L'Eclisse contrasts opposing elements: Light and shadow, noise and silence, laughter and death, love and money, desire and dissatisfaction. Critics often describe the movie as a portrait of modern alienation, but they focus too much on Vittoria herself; while she finds her own life wanting, all around her Antonioni's camera captures a much larger world, full of as much vitality as despair, as much hope as loss. This is a movie essential to anyone's understanding of what movies can be. -Bret Fetzer.