The moving Yossi & Jagger, at 65 minutes in length, has the focused impact and emotional clarity of a fine short story. A multiple award winner (among other prizes, Yossi & Jagger took a Best Actor honor for Ohad Knoller at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival), this unusual love tale, set on a snowy Israeli-Lebanese border facing possible Hezbollah incursions, has an unexpected sweetness and buoyancy. Knoller plays square-jawed, no-nonsense Yossi, company commander of an Israeli Defense Forces unit exhausted from sleepless nights anticipating an ambush. The handsome, fun-loving Jagger (Yehuda Levi), nicknamed for his rock-star appeal, is platoon leader and, unknown to all, Yossi's secret lover. The two arrange trysts by going off together on missions, and while Jagger begs Yossi to leave the army when the former's service is up, Yossi reminds him that real life is not a romantic movie. Meanwhile, the platoon's other characters and a trio of visitors-a colonel (Sharon Reginiano) and his two female soldier-companions (Hani Furstenberg, Aya Koren)-prove to be a lot of fun sorting out everything from menus to love lives before their next, possibly lethal mission. Director Eytan Fox's naturalistic touch, and ability to highlight the expansiveness of mature love even in the most tragic and ironic of circumstances, is something to marvel at. -Tom Keogh.

In his adaptation of the Tristan and Isolde legend, Jean Cocteau modernizes its eternal theme while making his mark as a master of poetic realism. The tragic story of a young man who falls hopelessly in love with his uncle's wife conjures both beauty and agony through intense dramatic performances, romantic Wagnerian music, and imaginative settings.

Director Schorr's triumphant first feature, a universal story of life under war's shadow, opened the 1987 Jerusalem Film Festival to unanimous acclaim. Set in 1970 during the War of Attrition at the Suez Canal, Late Summer Blues chronicles events in the lives of seven Israeli students during the summer following high-school graduation-a summer clouded by their impending induction into the army.

Perhaps Jean Delannoy's (The Eternal Return) best-loved film, La Symphonie Pastorale remains one of France's greatest contributions to cinema. This sensitive adaptation of Andre Gide's introspective novel is precisely constructed, brilliant.

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.

Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery, and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears, and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of grueling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, gray world of decay, but his icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the master of suspense. The film has been accused of being misanthropic by many critics, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle worthy of attention. -Sean Axmaker.