Inferno

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (Otto e Mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a director whose film—and life—is collapsing around him. An early working title for the film was La Bella Confusione (The Beautiful Confusion), and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act.

Hiroshi Inagaki's acclaimed Samurai Trilogy is based on the novel that has been called Japan's Gone with the Wind. This sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) plays out against the turmoil of a devastating civil war. The Trilogy (whose first part won an Academy Award®) follows Musashi's odyssey from unruly youth to enlightened warrior. In the third installment, Duel at Ganryu Island, Musashi reunites tragically with the women who love him, and battles for samurai supremacy in a climactic confrontation with his lifelong nemesis.

In the edge of perception, beyond the bounds of mortal existence, there is another world, a world of demons and other supernatural beings. Not all accept the prosperity of humankind, but from this world come protectors, known simply as Karas, raven-black shapeshifting warriors who follow ethereal spirits known as Yurine, and duel against those who would upset the balance of existence. However, one Karas, Hoshunin Eko, decided to turn on his brethren, and together with demon-machines known as the Mikura, has decided that no amount of human sacrifice would be enough to bring his own kind of order to his domain, which conveniently enough, lay in the dense heart of humanity known as Shinjuku. The old Karas is slain, and three years later, an enigmatic doctor named Otoha is chosen to topple Eko and restore what Shinjuku once was … but will even help from the most unlikely of sources be enough for him to accomplish his important mission?

"Gomorra" is a contemporary Neapolitan mob drama that exposes Italy's criminal underbelly by telling five stories of individuals who think they can make their own compact with Camorra, the area's Mafia.

Import/Export is a bizarre, horrifying, challenging work, often brilliant and spectacular, often troubling and indeed objectionable. It is an example of Seidl's characteristic form of grotesque realism - part Diane Arbus, part Samuel Beckett. His film addresses the human costs and human pain that globalization brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud or De Sade. There is a fierce, almost gleeful delight in contriving the most painful spectacle possible, and a laboratory coldness in the way Seidl and American cinematographer Ed Lachman film these grotesque figures in the unsettling white-walled spaces that Seidl finds everywhere, positioning them in symmetrical, rectilinear tableaux, coldly and unforgivingly lit.

Shocking, outrageous, and poetic, Jigoku (Hell, a.k.a. The Sinners of Hell) is the most innovative creation from Nobuo Nakagawa, the father of the Japanese horror film. After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by both his own guilt-ridden conscience and a mysterious, diabolical doppelgänger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell—literally. In the gloriously gory final third of the film, Nakagawa offers up his vision of the underworld in a tour de force of torture and degradation. A striking departure from traditional Japanese ghost stories, Jigoku, with its truly eye-popping (and -gouging) imagery, created aftershocks that are still reverberating in contemporary world horror cinema.

Major salvage companies like Smit and Titan can respond to a code red alert and get their teams to a stricken vessel anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours. In this episode, Smit scramble from Rotterdam to aid a listing British ferry, the Riverdance, which is in danger of polluting the resort of Blackpool. The same company also hot foots it to aid the Adriyatik, a virtual inferno, which could cause extensive environmental damage along the nearby heritage coast of Croatia

Apocalypse tells us about this huge conflict through the tragic destiny of those who went to war (soldiers) those who suffered from it (civilians), and those who ran it (political and military leaders). The "horrible yet familiar" war led to the deaths of 50 million men and women across the world - making for the first time as many civilian victims as there were military casualties.