During its release, this was the most popular film of all time in its native Italy. A typical Roberto Benigni comedy of mistaken identity, this 1991 work stars the actor-director in two roles, one a tough mafioso named Toothpick and the other a meek bus driver who is the gangster's look-alike. When the bad guy's girlfriend comes on to the clueless innocent-and she brings him along to her Sicilian villa-the slapstick madness rolls into high gear. Benigni really is a very funny and often remarkable clown, and he employs his usual physical gags in great and gratifying abundance. His script's inspiration reaches several peak moments when the mysteries between light and dark doppelgangers are suggested. One could reasonably call this sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde tale the closest Benigni has yet come to making his version of Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor. -Tom Keogh.

Marco Ferreri's greatest international success, "La Grande Bouffe" scandalized audiences when it was released in 1973. Audiences were shocked by its tale of four world-weary middle-aged men (superbly portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret) who decide to gorge themselves to death in one final orgiastic weekend full of gourmet food, call girls and a hefty, lusty schoolteacher. This blackly humorous parable of modern society's collapse won the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Award. The New York Times called it "vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale. a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie. " Nearly 30 years later, it continues to challenge audiences' sensibilities and test the limits of shockability.

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.

Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. -Bret Fetzer.

With his aptly titled Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard embraced the widescreen splendor of Hollywood while thumbing his nose at Hollywood itself. A rebel with a cause, Godard pursues an iconoclast's agenda, using the Franscope format (expertly controlled by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) to undermine the grandeur of widescreen melodramas. The story ostensibly concerns an innovative production of Homer's Odyssey and the struggle of a respected screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) to please a pugnacious producer (Jack Palance), a veteran director (Fritz Lang, essentially playing himself), and a petulant wife (Brigitte Bardot) who's grown tired of their turbulent relationship. It's all pretense, however, for Godard's mischievous (and yes, contemptuous) deconstruction of commercial Hollywood filmmaking, potently infused with film-buff in-jokes, astute observations about love, stardom, and artistry, and enough glossy style to suggest that Godard had mastered the craft he so willfully rejects. Contempt is one of his most accessibly fascinating films. -Jeff Shannon.

Candy, based on the naughty, notorious erotic satire by Terry Southern, whose wicked pen contributed to Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider (among other '60s classics), and adapted for the screen by the sly Buck Henry (The Graduate and Catch 22), is a bizarre second-hand reconfiguration of Candide for the permissive '60s. Swedish teen beauty queen Ewa Aulin is Candy, all breathy, wide-eyed innocence as a curvy blond kewpie doll-think Lolita, Barbarella, and Baby Spice all rolled into one-whose naiveté lands her in the sack with one dirty old man after another on a sexual odyssey. Guest cads include Ringo Starr as an embarrassingly unconvincing Mexican gardener; James Coburn preening as a surgeon who puts the "theater" into his operating theater; Walter Matthau as a snarling, insane general; and French crooner Charles Aznavour as a humpbacked spider man. Richard Burton stands out as a soused, sex-mad poet with an ever-present wind machine dramatically blowing his hair, and Marlon Brando's phony guru with a seductive line of mystic patter is downright hysterical. Despite luscious cinematography by longtime Fellini collaborator Guiseppe Rotunno and gorgeous opening and closing sequences of space flight by Douglas Trumbull, this clumsy misfire has all the cutting satire of a Monkees episode and only half the style. Director Christian Marquand lets the film ramble interminably while his cast mercilessly mugs their way through ill-conceived roles (except Aulin, who remains a passive, almost alien presence in the center of the chaos). The result is a sloppy all-star sex farce with blunt, misdirected attempts at social topicality buried in teasing peekaboo pinup photography and sexual romps, pleasing enough eye candy but hardly the erotic, satirical, transgressive portrait the picture promises. -Sean Axmaker.

The Oscar®-nominated film Tristana continues a devastating critique of social convention by director Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire). Beautifully photographed in Toledo, Spain, the story is splendidly acted by Catherine Deneuve (The Last Metro, Belle de Jour) and Fernando Rey (The French Connection), in perhaps their finest roles. Rey is Don Lope, a liberated but hypocritical aristocrat who seduces his beautiful young ward, Tristana (Deneuve). Given the opportunity, she flees with her lover (Franco Nero, Camelot), but illness forces her to return and, later, marry Don Lope. The result is a tense union in which Tristana slowly gains the upper hand.

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.

Bye Bye Monkey has been called one of Italian director Marco Ferreri's most powerful and haunting works. Variety describes it as "a sort of fable on man's transient state today, which [Ferreri] intimates has about destroyed all the old standards, leaving little to replace them. [a] sometimes jolting, entertaining and disturbing look at a fringe side of mankind. " In this richly symbolic work, Gerard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni star as two foreign eccentrics whose discovery of an abandoned baby chimpanzee causes them to question their own lives. Winner of the 1978 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize of the Jury.

This 1972 film by Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, Swept Away) is a wild farce of the Sicilian milieu. Mimi (who is a man) is forced to leave his hometown when he can no longer get work as a result of voting against the local strong arms in a "secret" ballot. In the big city he finds work, but also finds that life there is very much as corrupt as it was at home. He falls in love and has a child by his lover, and when forced to take a job in his hometown again, he must hide his lover and their son from his wife. When he is too tired to please his wife in bed after making love all day to his lover, she becomes pregnant by another man, setting off a chain of events that ultimately lead to a public revenge scene that possibly has no rival. What's even more amazing is that the film manages to portray a complex protagonist in a searing comedy. A must-see, especially if you'd like a lighter view of the same world portrayed in The Godfather. -James McGrath.