Laserdisc in Foreign DVDs & Videos

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In the midst of World War II, as the tide turns against the Axis, a German U-boat crew is sent out to patrol the Atlantic and fire at Allied ships bringing supplies to England. The submarine also carries a press correspondent, there to report from the front lines of nautical warfare. Meanwhile, the crew's captain (Jürgen Prochnow) is becoming disillusioned with the Nazi regime and with war in general. What starts out as a routine mission is soon livened up beyond the crew's expectations when their boat's surprise attack on a convoy is thwarted by a fast-moving destroyer. Battered by depth charges, the crew must pull together to survive the attacks of their unseen enemy. Widely considered to be director Wolfgang Petersen's best film and one of the finest German films ever made, DAS BOOT is stunningly realistic in its portrayal of the cramped conditions aboard a German submarine. Based on a novel by Lothar G. Buchheim, it is a striking example of an intelligent antiwar film clothed in the guise of a military thriller.

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This Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film was a big art house hit, spawning a whole international subgenre, "foodie" (films about the liberating effects of good food). It's adapted from a story by Isak Dinesen about two sisters in a 19th century Calvinist settlement in Denmark who, under their late father's rigorous spiritual dictates, pass up their chances for romance and worldly success. Years pass; they grow into charitable old spinsters and one day a French war refugee, Babette (Stéphane Audran), comes to work for them. Life goes quietly one for years until one day Babette decides to prepare a lavish gourmet dinner for the elders of the town, even though the thought of such decadence makes the sisters fear for their Christian souls. This all may sound rather dull to some viewers, but rest assured, no one who has seen this film has ever regretted it. Even with its measured pacing and austere emotional palette this remains a riveting experience from the first frame to the last. The acting is marvelously naturalistic, and the cinematography evokes the dark beauty of 19th century Scandinavian paintings, rendering the ancient, white-whiskered faces of the villagers, the windswept coastline, the wood-hewn interiors, and of course the incredible food, with a vital, deeply felt reverence that lingers in the mind long after the film is over.

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In his final collaboration with Akira Kurosawa, Toshirô Mifune portrays Dr. Kyojio "Red Beard" Niide, a gruff but caring head doctor at a 19th-century clinic for the poor. Sorely in need of competent assistance, Red Beard takes on a new intern, the ambitious Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama). However, Yasumoto isn't made aware of his appointment until after he's visited the facility and seen its grim conditions and impoverished patients. Initially, the brash young physician rebels against the wise elder and declines his duties, but gradually Yasumoto begins to respect Red Beard and his difficult yet essential work. As Yasumoto slowly acclimates to the clinic, the story also follows the lives (and deaths) of various patients. Truly the end of an era, RED BEARD marks the dissolution of the Kurosawa/Mifune partnership and also Kurosawa's last black-and-white production. Although surprisingly little has been written about the rift between Mifune and Kurosawa, it's likely that tensions were largely due to the film's grueling two-year shoot. Despite the drama behind the camera, RED BEARD remains one of Kurosawa's underrated classics. Although Mifune is best known for his earlier roles as an impetuous youth, here he gives a mature, though no less vital, performance, echoing the mentor character Takashi Shimura played in STRAY DOG, SEVEN SAMURAI, and other Kurosawa movies. (However, Mifune does get one action-packed, YOJIMBO-worthy fight scene.) In turn, Kayama admirably fills the role of the headstrong young intern. A sort of period-piece MASH or ER, RED BEARD is a moving drama that uses doctors and patients to address the timeless notion of trying to be a good person in an often cruel world.

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In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

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In the midst of World War II, as the tide turns against the Axis, a German U-boat crew is sent out to patrol the Atlantic and fire at Allied ships bringing supplies to England. The submarine also carries a press correspondent, there to report from the front lines of nautical warfare. Meanwhile, the crew's captain (Jürgen Prochnow) is becoming disillusioned with the Nazi regime and with war in general. What starts out as a routine mission is soon livened up beyond the crew's expectations when their boat's surprise attack on a convoy is thwarted by a fast-moving destroyer. Battered by depth charges, the crew must pull together to survive the attacks of their unseen enemy. Widely considered to be director Wolfgang Petersen's best film and one of the finest German films ever made, DAS BOOT is stunningly realistic in its portrayal of the cramped conditions aboard a German submarine. Based on a novel by Lothar G. Buchheim, it is a striking example of an intelligent antiwar film clothed in the guise of a military thriller.

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In SATYRICON, Italian New Wave director Federico Fellini depicts the hedonistic, amoral, pre-Christian world of ancient Rome. Using the unfinished classical writings of Petronius as his guide, Fellini invents a dreamlike culture full of strange, distant characters and odd, grotesque events. Though the film lacks a definitive plot or narrative structure, its constants are Gitone (Max Born) and Encolpius (Martin Potter), whose unsavory encounters with sex, the theater, and religion are the film's focal point. Presenting a loosely structured episodic tale of decadence and depravity in ancient Rome, SATYRICON follows the adventures of two students as they negotiate their way through a variety of mishaps, dangers, and sexual encounters. What results is a bizarre journey through ancient Rome. This story is a perfect example of Fellini's accomplished skill in bringing fantasy to the screen.

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A sensuous comic fable of a young Mexican woman's tortured life and her main influences--her domineering mother, her forbidden lover, and the overwhelmingly sensual power of food and cooking. Based on the novel by Laura Esquivel.

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In Eric Rohmer's CLAIRE'S KNEE, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a handsome diplomat on vacation in the scenic Alpine village of Talloires, is coaxed into doing a strange favor for his friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a novelist working on a new book. Echoing Vladimir Nabokov's novel LOLITA, in which the writer Humbert Humbert falls in love with a budding 13-year-old girl, CLAIRE'S KNEE makes Jerome the researcher for Aurora's novel about an older man who seduces a teenage girl. Jerome and Aurora create mischief together as two friends in their mid-30s who are reminded of their own sexual appetites by watching the teenage sisters Laura (Béatrice Romand) and Claire (Laurence De Monoghan) with their young boyfriends. However, when Aurora challenges Jerome to seduce Laura, he tries but fails. Instead, he develops an obsessive desire to fondle Claire's knee, a notion both ruthlessly perverse and stubbornly innocent. Rohmer's laid-back, pensive style takes in the mountainous lakeside scenery, putting the weight of the film on intimate one-on-one discussions between the characters. With artful camerawork that captures much of the movie from Jerome's motorboat, Rohmer creates one of the cornerstones of his Six Moral Tales series, a pretty film with a naughty undercurrent and a relaxed existential overtone.

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Set in 16th Century Japan, Akira Kurosawa's epic SEVEN SAMURAI follows the plight of a defenseless farming village that lives in constant fear of marauding bandits. The farmers know that when their crops are harvested, the thugs will attack, so four men go to town in hopes of employing samurai to fight for them. However, the poor villagers can merely offer payment in the form of shelter and a daily bowl of rice, and initially only Kambei (Takashi Shimura), a brave elder samurai, and his eager young apprentice, Katsushiro (Isao Kimura), take up their cause. Encountering various nomadic warriors on the streets, they slowly put together his team of swordsmen, recruiting Shichiroji (Daisuke Katô), Gorobei (Yoshio Inaba), Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki), and Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi). Finally, Kikuchiyo (Toshirô Mifune), a scruffy wanderer who has been trailing them, completes the small band of ronin. However, upon reaching the village, the samurai learn that the farmers fear them as much the enemy. Despite the tensions, Kambei and his men slowly train the peasants to defend their village. Eventually the warriors launch a preemptive strike against the bandits, and begin a series of intense conflicts that culminates in a rain-soaked final battle--without a doubt, one of the most stunning sequences in cinema history. Widely considered to be the greatest Japanese film ever made, Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI is also credited with pioneering the modern action movie. This notion is especially evident in thrilling scenes such as Kambei's rescue of a kidnapped child, Kyuzo's duel, and Kikuchiyo's intensive theft of an enemy gun. Although the film clocks in at more than three hours, the story remains consistently engaging and slowly heightens the tension while providing action, drama, comic relief, and character development. Gleefully running amuck, Mifune gives one of his most renowned performances, imbuing the often comical Kikuchiyo with a surprising streak of melancholy and introspection. However, it is Shimura that anchors the entire film as the thoughtful and courageous Kambei, who stoically takes on the leadership of an almost impossible task. A monumental achievement in filmmaking, Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI is cinematic perfection in nearly every aspect, giving the production its much-deserved status as one of the best films ever created.

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A lonely little village girl who sees Boris Karloff's "Frankenstein," becomes entranced by the monster. The girl's sister convinces her the monster is still alive and she treks off into the countryside to find him.

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UMBERTO D., from director Vittorio De Sica, is a simple, heartbreaking tale about the life of an elderly pensioner. Penniless and alone, with only the maid (Lina Genneri) from his rooming house and a devoted dog for companionship, the old man (Carlo Battisti) contemplates suicide. But then one day, a ray of hope pierces his bleak existence, and everything changes. This careful observation of one man's attempt to keep his dignity in the face of a hostile society is one of the pearls of Italian post-war cinema.

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Mira Nair's first feature was an acclaimed drama depicting the desperate lives of homeless children in one of India's poorest cities. Krishna is a 10-year-old country boy forced to live on his own in the streets of Bombay after his family tosses him out. While he hopes to earn 500 rupees for his mother and return home, the all-consuming job of staying alive quickly makes that dream an unreality. He develops the street-smarts needed to survive in the seedy world of prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, and other homeless children, but the harrowing experience takes an extremely heavy emotional toll on him. Although Krishna keeps trying to raise the money to return home, it is, in the end, a hopeless task.

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Luis Buñuel's second film is a surreal attack on bourgeios ideals that incited a riot when first released and still retains its power to shock. Buñuel began the film as a collaboration with Salvador Dali, but after a few days working together the two had a falling out and Buñuel made the film himself, incorporating many of Dali's ideas. Its narrative follows two nameless characters, a man and a woman, through a series of scenes connected by dreamlike logic as they try, unsuccessfully, to make love. One memorable sequence finds the couple writhing around on a cliff when a mob of socialites comes upon them and pries them apart. Frustrated, the man sees a yelping poodle and kicks it into the air. L'AGE D'OR is not only an attack on bourgeois life but also a doctrine that directs humanity to live as the surrealists believed they should: that is, by placing love before everything else in life, such as the church, status, and family. Funny, disturbing, and thoroughly bizarre, Buñuel's film is a purposefully blasphemous and corrosive work that attacks social institutions with such vigor and imagination that one cannot help but be entertained.

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Director François Truffaut's first feature film, THE 400 BLOWS, is a landmark in French cinema. Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a 13-year-old boy who can't seem to do anything right. His parents yell at him and then bribe him for his love and his promises to work harder in school. Meanwhile, his schoolteacher is out to get him and blames Antoine for everything--turning him into the class clown. As a result, Antoine runs away from school and his difficult family, living on the streets of Paris and committing petty crimes. While his life on the street is tough, it's much better than dealing with his preoccupied parents and his accusatory teacher. Nonetheless, things only go downhill for Antoine, descending to a simultaneously painful and beautiful conclusion. A truly impressive film, THE 400 BLOWS is raw, honest, and intensely emotional. Imbued with a strong and complex personality, Antoine maintains his poise and self-confidence, even as he endures abusive treatment from every adult he encounters. René Simonet (Patrick Auffray) is Antoine's one pal, and the unspoken dialogues between the boys, depicted by Truffaut through the boys' facial expressions and with masterful roving photography, allow the viewer to see through Antoine's eyes and understand his unflinching tenacity. Few films have captured the difficulties of childhood as well as this acclaimed French masterpiece. Essentially the start of the French New Wave movement, THE 400 BLOWS is also the beginning of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle, which follows Léaud as Antoine in five additional films over the course of 20 years.

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Basil, a young English writer of Greek ancestry, meets an older, free-spirited Greek peasant named Zorba (Anthony Quinn) on the island of Crete. While Zorba pursues a relationship with Madame Hortense, an aging French courtesan, the inhibited Basil summons up the courage to court a young widow. The young, unhappy Englishman finds himself learning valuable life lessons from Zorba, the earthy peasant who has a zeal for everything he does. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Quinn) and winner of three, including Best Supporting Actress (Lila Kedrova).

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In this silent, classic example of early German expressionism, this cinematic landmark relates the stylized tale of a Dr. Caligari, a fairground showman who hypnotizes an innocent villager--turning him into a sleepwalking "zombie"--and compels him to carry out fiendish murders. Inarguably a landmark in world cinema, Robert Weine's one-of-a-kind thriller features fantastical, heavily stylized sets, antirealist acting, and evocative subjective camerawork.

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Two women of differing backgrounds are looking for the missing men they love in the aftermath of World War I. Along the way they encounter two French officers, one detailed to identify the dead and the other assigned to choose a body to be honored as France's unknown soldier.

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In István Szabó's second feature film, the director focuses on a Hungarian boy, Tako (Dani Erdélyi), living in Budapest just after the end of World War II. His father (Miklós Gábor), a doctor and member of the partisan resistance to the Nazis, was killed just as the war ended, leaving the very impressionable boy with mixed-up memories and a curiosity about his father's life that turns into an unsettling hero worship. The story is told in a series of flashbacks--some of them factual, some inspired by the tall tales about his father that Tako tells his friends to impress them. Shot in black and white by Sándor Sára, who would do wonderful color work in Szabó's 25 FIREMAN'S STREET, the film's present-time action has a historical feel and, when combined with actual news footage in the flashbacks, forms a smooth transition between the different times. A third period is added when Tako, now played by András Bálint, reaches adulthood at the time of the Russian invasion in 1956. He becomes involved in the radical youth movement and feels he must emulate his father's bravery. When Tako meets Anni (Katalin Sólyom), a Jewish woman, the story of her parents death in Auschwitz causes him to re-examine his memories of his father. Szabó's episodic, well-staged and -acted film evocatively captures the feelings and attitudes of the first generation of Hungarians to grow up after the war.

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During the war between Carthage and Rome, a girl is separated from her parents. In her odyssey through the world of ancient Rome, she encounters an erupting volcano, the barbaric splendor of Carthage, human sacrifice and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Silent film with piano score.

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The final collaboration, following PANDORA'S BOX, between G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, the American silent film star whose look defined the Jazz Age, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is a similarly lurid tale of a young woman's life. Brooks stars as Thymiane, a young girl life whose life collapses when she is raped and made pregnant by her father's young assistant. After a reform school escape she ends up in a brothel, which, ironically, leads her to a salvation of sorts. Silent film with piano and jazz ensemble score.

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In perhaps his most intriguing and streamlined film, dedicated to the subject of criminal masterminds and their underground workings, Fritz Lang's SPIES follows the machinations of the wheelchair-bound master criminal, the great Haghi, as he dictates criminal orders from his headquarters deep in the belly of the city. When Haghi sends forth female agent Sonja to seduce and trick secret agent 236, Tremaine, the two unexpectedly fall in love. Haghi did not suspect that these rival agents would go astray, and he is enraged that they are endangering his plot to take over the world. Many of the standard conventions of spy thrillers find their genesis in SPIES, including femme fatales, the crippled arch criminal and a last minute countdown to destruction. As Haghi's minions square off against the police and the secret service, attempting to steal a secret treaty, Lang mixes a pulp detective sensibility with the visual tricks, painterly aesthetics and narrative ingenuity of German Expressionism, creating a visually stunning and fast paced portrait of a master criminal and the seedy underworld of Germany between the wars.

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The murder of a young girl strikes a chord of fear in a neighborhood, with the local voyeur, Monsieur Hire, pegged as the prime suspect. His solitary ways and peculiar behaviors elicit the suspicion of the local residents, but the lovely woman across the way--upon whom Hire spies--may have a different answer to the mystery. A taut and intricate character-based suspenser.

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After her 17 year-old son disappears, a resourceful and charming woman named Christine enlists the aid of two of her former lovers by convincing each of them that they are the young man's father. It isn't long before both men, François Pignon and Jean Lucas, are bumbling their way around France, looking for their long lost son. Soon, the two happen to meet by chance, explain to each other that they're looking for their lost son, and decide to team up, forming one of the oddest and most inept partnerships France has ever seen.

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Set in central Russia during the Civil War of 1918, this film from Hungarian auteur Miklos Jancso witnesses the brutality and senselessness of war as the Red and the White armies battle in the hills along the Volga. Told from the vantage point of Hungarian troops fighting for the Red Army, Jancso's Cinemascope frame captures the horror these soldiers endure fighting for the Bolsheviks, and the surreality, chaos, seemingly arbitrary nature of war.

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This musical about backstage goings-on centers on a laundress who goes on for the star on opening night and saves the show. Clearly a star vehicle for Josephine Baker, her rendition of "Haiti" is unforgettable.

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Three young women move to Moscow from the country in search of love and a better life. One finds a proper, but dull husband. The other lands a famous hockey player, but ends up disappointed in him. The third becomes pregnant by a television cameraman who promptly leaves her upon hearing the news. Twenty years later the women are still living in Moscow, having learned how to cope with the reality of their respective situations. Winner of the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

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In one of the first films made in Israel to present an Arab perspective, Michel Khleifi's WEDDING IN GALILEE provides a complex portrait of Palestinian society and commentary on life under military occupation. When a Palestinian village elder requests permission to hold a traditional wedding for his son, the military commander in charge of the occupying force requires that the Israeli military governor and his staff be guests of honor at the ceremony. The ensuing preparations detail traditional Palestinian life and customs, including a moving sequence in which attendants prepare the bride for the ceremony. Despite the impending celebration, tensions bubble under the surface, and Khleifi deftly examines the conflict and its impact on individual lives.

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Set in Sweden, Andrei Tarkovsky's last film follows the travails of wealthy patriarch Alexander (Erland Josephson), a former actor and critic who lives in a remote home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. One year on his birthday, a sudden television announcement interrupts the celebration with news of a nuclear holocaust. His family and guests suffer through violent fits of hysteria and emotional turmoil in the ensuing days, but the previously troubled Alexander finds a clearness of mind when he makes a pact with God--offering himself as a sacrifice in order to redeem the fallen earth for his cherished son. Supremely poetic, THE SACRIFICE is filled with achingly beautiful images, expertly shot by Ingmar Bergman's trusted cinematographer Sven Nykvist. As Alexander goes from self-contented ease to crippling animal fear and existential anguish and finally to spiritual abandon, the troubled journey is illustrated with a haunting succession of images, tableaus, objects, dreams, and gestures--all sewn together in a seamlessly elliptical vision. As in all of Tarkovsky's haunting and mystical films, the characters are forced to come to terms with their own physical and spiritual existence, with redemption coming through faith--in this case, Alexander's faith in his love for his young son.

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During the postwar upheaval in a war-torn German town, a tragic love affair develops between an American sergeant and a Polish woman who has lost her husband in the war.

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A French author goes to North Africa to write a novel, but becomes distracted - then entranced - by a native girl whom he transforms into a "princess." Filmed in Tunisia. Based on a story by then-husband of Josephine Baker, Pepito Abatino.