Breathless

This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and - according to the credits - the end of cinema itself.

Sotiris is a police interrogator in Athens. He has an obsession: he needs to be fair. He judges the suspects after his personal moral and against the law. With the intention to save another innocent soul, he accidentally kills a man. Dora is the only witness to the crime. She is a poor cleaning woman who leads a breathless life. The struggle to survive has made her unfair. The righteous Sotiris and the unrighteous Dora like each other. But love, honesty and justice aren’t easy to combine.

A successful and popular nightclub owner who believes financial independence is the path to equality and success, must act as a go-between for militant-minded brother and the white gang syndicate his brother has attacked and robbed. Their involvements lead to a breathless race course chase, the destruction of a dopepusher and a violent waterfront climax.

Francois Villon, in his lifetime the most renowned poet in France, is also a prankster, an occasional criminal, and an ardent patriot.

Corporate executive Grace Nichols (Megan Hughes) was all business until she was turned on to Brian Lerner (Doug Jeffery), the hottest personal trainer and biggest womanizer in town. Her resolve to avoid relationships that might distract her corporate climb was put to bed the minute he lured her between the sheets. But she never knew the price she'd have to pay before it was too late. Smooth Operator is an erotic adventure into intense passion and fantasy that will leave you breathless with desire and beggin for more.

Part three of a trilogy. After the Japanese defeat to the Russians in the last episode, Kaji, the Japanese soldier and humanist protagonist, leads the last remaining men through Manchuria . Intent on returning to his dear wife and his old life, Kaji faces great odds in a variety of different harrowing circumstances as he and his fellow men sneak behind enemy lines. Ultimately, he finds himself in the exact opposite position he held in the first episode: then a labor manager, Kaji is now a prisoner of war, forced to work for the Russians, whom do not seem to hold to the Communist ideals in which Kaji himself had put his faith.

From Jean-Luc Godard, possibly the most influential European film director of all time comes IN PRAISE OF LOVE, a mesmerizing and lyrical meditation on love, and the role history and memory play in shaping human consciousness, past and present. Structured in two parts, the film opens in Paris, where the young artist Edgar is developing a project on the four stages of a love affair- meeting, sexual passion, separation. and rediscovery. During the casting process, Edgar discovers a beautiful young woman who he is convinced he has met before. In the second part, set two years earlier, Edgar interviews an elderly couple- former Resistance fighters during the war- only to find that their memories are being bought up for a Steven Spielberg blockbuster. Linking the two parts is Edgar's relationship with the enigmatic woman he met and re-encounters. IN PRAISE OF LOVE is a combative but tender work that stubbornly asserts the importance of love, art and memory. A film of great intellectual freedom, elusive meanings and overwhelming visual beauty, Godard has never seemed more young, fresh and original.

Over the course of his varied career, Koreyoshi Kurahara made meticulous noirs, jazzy juvenile-delinquency pictures, and even nature films. His free-form approach to moviemaking was perfectly suited to the radical spirit of the 1960s, when he was one of the biggest hit makers working at the razzle-dazzle, youth-oriented Nikkatsu studios. The five films collected here hail from that era of the Japanese New Wave, and encompass breathless teen escapades, cruel crime stories, a Yukio Mishima adaptation, and even a Hollywood-inspired romantic comedy.

Les films de Jean Rouch, archives uniques sur l’Afrique, petits bijoux pour les cinéphiles, sont aussi des contes qui mettent en scène des histoires toutes simples - la chasse, le voyage, l’amour et la mort, l’apprentissage et l’amitié - à la portée universelle. Certains films relèvent de la tradition anthropologique pure, d’autres de la fiction humoristique. Des thématiques (« Ciné-Transe », « Ciné-Conte », « Ciné-Plaisir » et « Ciné-Rencontre ») permettent de mieux appréhender la diversité, le foisonnement de l’œuvre Rouchienne. Des « viatiques », ou courtes introductions, dits par Bernard Surugue, replacent succinctement chaque film dans son histoire.

This lush, Technicolor tragic romance from Luchino Visconti stars Alida Valli as a nineteenth-century Italian countess who, during the Austrian occupation of her country, puts her marriage and political principles on the line by engaging in a torrid affair with a dashing Austrian lieutenant, played by Farley Granger. Gilded with ornate costumes and sets and a rich classical soundtrack, and featuring fearless performances, this operatic melodrama is an extraordinary evocation of reckless emotions and deranged lust, from one of the cinema’s great sensualists.