Released in 1953, Summer with Monika, an early Ingmar Bergman-directed melodrama, did much to establish the reputation of Swedish cinema, and perhaps Swedish women in general, as leading the vanguard in sexual liberation. The film attracted the wrath of the censors and one scene of lovemaking had to be cut. While subsequent generations will look at the film and wonder whatever the fuss was about, it retains a vivid and frolicsome sensuality, before submitting to the inevitable, Bergmanesque bleakness. The film tells the story of a young couple, Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (18-year-old Harriet Andersson, with whom Bergman would fall in love) stuck in lousy jobs in Stockholm. Harry is beset by parental responsibility-his mother died young and his father is ill-while Monika is fed up with her drunken, violent father. They escape in a motorboat and to spend a blissful summer on an island in the archipelago. Once Monika gets pregnant and they're forced to steal food, however, the idyll concludes and they return to Stockholm, where the relationship disintegrates. You realise that Monika, from a large and fractious family, yearns for escapism, while Harry, who has never known true family life, longs for domestic stability. It is he who is left holding the baby. But Bergman does not quite condemn Monika, giving her one of his best scenes: in a cafe, estranged from Harry, chatting up a stranger, she stares unwaveringly and directly to camera, as if defying us to judge her. [+]

This early Max Ophuls melodrama became his first big success. A young philandering army officer, trapped in a loveless affair with the wife of a strutting Baron, falls in love with a shy young seamstress but cannot escape the repercussions of his past. As the giddy lovers frolic through an idyllic romance (a lovely sleigh ride through the snow-covered forest becomes a swooning expression of their emotional innocence), the suspicious Baron demands honour be served. Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler (whose Reigen Ophuls was later adapted for La Ronde), Liebelei contrasts obsession with appearances, and the social decorum of high society with the rash sincerity and energy of youth in a style that is more visual than verbal. The restless camera of his later work is only hinted at here, but the handsome photography and lush decor create a constrictive world where tradition rules. The opening opera house scene is especially striking, where character and class become defined simultaneously, and the haunting climax is so effective that Ophuls revived and refined it for The Earrings of Madame de. The 1932 production was subsequently suppressed by the Nazis for its jaundiced view of honour and Prussian authoritarianism, and they attempted to destroy all copies of the film. [+]

The second of an Ingmar Bergman trilogy, 1962's Winter Light is a deliberate repudiation of the "God is love" message of its predecessor Through a Glass Darkly. Gunnar Bjornstrand stars as Tomas, a pastor in a remote parish tending to a dwindling congregation, as tense and distracted as David-the novelist Bjornstrand plays in Through a Glass Darkly. He finds himself trying to counsel a local fisherman Jonas, who is plagued by a sense of impending atomic doom but realises that the religious platitudes he consoles him with-"put your faith in the Lord"-are mere drivel. He himself is wracked by religious doubts, unable to tolerate "God's silence" and unable to prevent the fisherman from committing suicide. He finds himself taking out his inner woe on his eczema-riddled mistress, played by an unflatteringly made up Ingrid Thulin. Described by Bergman's own wife as a "dreary masterpiece", the synopsis to Winter Light seems almost comically miserable, yet this passion play is gripping in its unsparing bleakness, bathed in the stark illumination implied by the title, ironically akin to the light of a religious epiphany. Released at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, its preoccupations and all-pervasive anxieties are especially apt. On the DVD: Bergman's own notes reveal that Winter Lightis among his own favourites and he explains the evolution of the film's ideas at some length. Critic Philip Strick's background notes reveal that Gunnar Bjornstrand was exhausted and ill for much of the making of the film, which doubtless enhanced his anguished performance here. -David Stubbs.

This semi-comic 1961 film by legendary director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Ran) was inspired by the American Western genre. Kurosawa mainstay Toshirô Mifune (Seven Samurai) is cast as a drifting samurai for hire who plays both ends against the middle with two warring factions, surviving on his wits and his ability to outrun his own bad luck. Eventually the samurai seeks to eliminate both sides for his own gain and to define his own sense of honour. Yojimbo is striking for its unorthodox treatment of violence and morality, reserving judgment on the actions of its main character and instead presenting an entertaining tale with humour and much visual excitement. One of the inspirations for the "spaghetti westerns" of director Sergio Leone and later surfacing as a remake as Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis, this film offers insight into a director who influenced American films even as he was influenced by them. -Robert Lane, Amazon. com.

Juxtaposing images of pristine, romantic innocence with ones of mute, meaningless violence, Godard's Masculin-Féminin first lulls with a hypnotic, disjointed story line and then stuns with scenes of tremendous depth and meaning. This outrageous film follows the somewhat ineffectual courtship of Madeline, an aspiring pop singer, by Paul, an erstwhile journalist and interviewer but mostly groundless searcher. As in most Godard films, plot mechanics are secondary to elements such as dialogue (generally marvellous, but sometimes a bit too pointed), lighting (bizarre and over-saturated, but nevertheless than fascinating), shot framing (extraordinarily thoughtful), and performance. Godard allows his camera to linger on single faces, without cutting, for what seems by modern standards to be extremely long segments-perhaps even excruciatingly long-but the remarkably subtle cast members never disappoint, particularly the fantastically adept and frequently hilarious lead actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya. The filmmaker has little to add to our collective understanding of the relationship between masculin et féminin writ large; in fact, most of the female characters are uncomfortably stereotypical, framed as either wilfully oblivious to the world or subtly (or overtly) deadly. But as an examination of a young generation faced with the prospect of war in Vietnam and the vagaries of French socialism, Masculin-Féminin proves remorselessly and chillingly trenchant. A towering influence, it would seem, on Whit Stillman's similarly themed Barcelona-but while Stillman lacks the conviction to follow his instincts to their logical, violent conclusions, Godard faces his uncompromising story with elegance and courage. -Miles Bethany, Amazon. com.

Sergei Eisenstein's debut film is more than a landmark of Soviet cinema; it's easily one of the most thrilling and inventive films to emerge from the silent era of Russian film making. Eisenstein was a theatre director and stage designer with some very specific ideas about the cinema, and he put them into practice telling the story of a worker's strike in pre-Revolution Russia, portraying the struggle not of leader against leader, but of the proletariat against the factory owners, enlivened by a conspiratorial subplot involving a quartet of insidious spies sent to infiltrate the ranks of the workers. The subject matter is at times didactic and the acting often hammy and overwrought, but the technique is vibrant and the images striking. Eisenstein's compositions reflect the graphic boldness of contemporary poster art, mixing poetic realism with grotesque expressionism in a gripping style, and his famous montage editing style (to be perfected in his next film, Battleship Potemkin) is raw, experimental and energetic. Eisenstein's later films are more consistent and elegant, but none of them have the sheer cinematic invention and energy of this first film. The new score, composed and performed by the idiosyncratic Alloy Orchestra, combines a mix of martial and mood music on synthesiser with the driving percussion of drums, wood blocks, bells and wrecking yard of clanging metal objects-a dynamic soundtrack to one of the most auspicious directoral debuts ever. -Sean Axmaker.

Perhaps the most accessible of Robert Bresson's films, this story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the mercy of the world around her is like a melodrama stripped of flourish. Mouchette is an angry adolescent in the French provinces, the daughter of a drunken bootlegger and a dying, bedridden mother, a pariah in school and a figure of village gossip. She rebels in typically adolescent ways, lobbing mud at teasing classmates and defying wagging tongues with a wilful stare, but her deep pain and loneliness pour from her hollow, sad eyes. There's no sentimentality in Bresson's portrait of village life but for a few brief moments the film explodes with energy and emotion. Mouchette rides the bumper cars at a local fair, flirting with a young boy in loving bumps and deliberate rams, and her dour expression flowers in a smile as the fairground speakers blare a rock & roll tune. until her father's heavy hand slaps her back to reality. It's a moment unlike any other in a Bresson film, a joyous reprieve from the monotony of her life, but if the rest of her existence is glum and hopeless, the film is unexpectedly beautiful. The style is often fragmented-the film opens on a stunning play of hands, feet and spying eyes as poacher and police both wait for their prey-but the beauty of the forests and meadows creates an idyllic naturalism that leavens Bresson's harsh portrait of the human condition. [+]

La Belle et La Bete is one of the all-time great movie fantasies, and one of the most gorgeous pictures ever made. It was the first feature film by French director Jean Cocteau, a writer, poet and painter with ties to the surrealists. (In fact, his first film, The Blood of a Poet, was delayed after the scandal caused by L'Age D'Or, made by his fellow surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. ) The haunting, surreal visuals (candelabra made of human hands, for example) and a sensitive performance by Jean Marais as the Beast imbue the film with an indelible, mythical power. -Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

A bizarre and austere thriller with more than a touch of Samuel Beckett, Woman of the Dunes can be read as an oblique allegory of human existence. An entomologist, Niki, on an expedition to a desert region, gets cut off from his party and spends the night with a young tribal widow who lives at the bottom of a huge sand-pit. The next morning, he finds he's trapped in the pit, unable to escape. The rest of the tribe, it seems, has decided he's the woman's ideal mate. She's very attractive, but Niki's a city boy through and through, can't speak her language, and the main activity on offer (besides sex) is dredging up the drifting sand that constantly threatens to engulf the pit. Observing Niki's struggle to escape with the same detachment that the entomologist bestowed on his insects, Teshigahara treats his subject with quiet, ironic humour. But behind the story (from a novel by the great Japanese writer Kobo Abe) there's an implied philosophical theme about acceptance and harmony. And in its close, vivid attention to the textures of sand and flesh, the photography is deeply sensuous. -Philip Kemp.

French film-maker Claude Lelouch continues to take critical heat for this 1966 international hit, which has been labelled "schmaltzy" and dismissed as overly stylised for its simple story line. While it certainly can't be mistaken for a masterpiece of the French New Wave (Lelouch was left in the dust that year by such wonders as Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminin), A Man and a Woman has a jumpy impressionism that engages a viewer precisely because it cuts against conventional expectations of romance. Starring Anouk Aimée as a widowed "script girl" (working in film production) and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a racer who lost his wife to suicide, the film is really an objective sampling-almost a study-of moments between the time the two characters meet and the point at which they begin to read each other intuitively. Generous flashbacks fill in details on the pair's woeful, recent histories, while endless documentary-like glimpses of Aimée's and Trintignant's characters at work in their highly charged professions become a visual engine for the days passing between measured developments in love. Lelouch is more drily humane than lush in his approach, though the film strains once in a while for a forced naturalism that can actually be more narcissistic than the most obvious romantic contrivance. Still, A Man and a Woman-in the best sense-is also a movie in love with itself, with its own ability to evoke and conjure and construct dozens of different ways of tracking a relationship in progress. If Lelouch doesn't exactly push open the boundaries of cinema as several of his film-making peers did at the time, he certainly enjoys what he's doing. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Kenji Mizoguchi, greatest of Japanese directors, only made two films in colour, and this is the second of them. It's also the last of his many period dramas, a genre of which he was undisputed master. The story is set in the 12th century, at a crucial point in Japanese history: the moment when the samurais ceased to be mere hired fighters, despised by the courtly aristocrats, and took over as the dominant class in Japanese society-a status they would enjoy for the next 700 years. The politics of the film are complex-essentially it tells how one samurai clan, the Taira, broke the arrogant power of the Buddhist temples, with their armies of warrior monks, and began to undermine the supremacy of the Emperor. But it's not necessary to follow all the intricacies of the historical background to appreciate the dramatic sweep of clashing forces and the subtle psychological interplay of emotions as the young hero, Kiyomori, head of the Taira clan, finds his loyalties pulled this way and that, culminating in a crisis of identity as his parentage is called into question. Above all, Tales of the Taira Clan is supremely beautiful to look at, even by Mizoguchi's standards. The sumptuous sets and costumes, often shot at night or in deep-shaded half-light, take on a jewel-like sheen, and his sweeping, serene camera captures all the turbulence of a troubled era. -Philip Kemp.