In Burma during the closing days of WWII, a Japanese soldier separated from his unit disguises himself as a Buddhist monk to escape imprisonment as a POW.
Ito
Maki
Takagi
Hashimoto
Okada
Enigmatic gangster Silien may or may not be responsible for informing on Faugel, who was just released from prison and is already involved in what should be a simple heist. By the end of this brutal, twisting, and multilayered policier, who will be left to trust?
40-year-old Elling, sensitive, would-be poet, is sent to live in a state institution when his mother, who has sheltered him his entire life, dies. There he meets Kjell Bjarne, a gentle giant and female-obsessed virgin, also in his 40s.
Seasons of the year are used to frame human life, from birth to death.
When a brothel closes because of new laws, four of the prostitutes decide to go into business running a restaurant. They discover they cannot escape their past.
An all-knowing interlocutor guides us through a series of affairs in Vienna, 1900. A soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening. Later he has an affair with a young lady, who becomes a maid and does similarly with the young man of the house. The young man seduces a married woman. On and on, spinning on the gay carousel of life.
A woman and her daughter are each forced to contend with an increasing pressure to marry, particularly from three men who knew her late husband.
In 1918, Elizabeth MacDonald learns that her husband, John Andrew, has been killed in the war. Elizabeth bears John's son and eventually marries her kindly boss. Unknown to her, John has survived but is horribly disfigured and remains in Europe. Years later, on the eve of World War II, Elizabeth refuses to agree to her son's request to enlist and is stunned when an eerily familiar stranger named Kessler arrives from abroad and becomes involved.
A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring.
Captain Foster plans on raiding German-occupied Tobruk with hand- picked commandos, but a mixup leaves him with a medical unit led by a Quaker conscientious objector.
A band of Mexicans find their U. S. land claims denied and all the records destroyed in a courthouse fire. Their leader, Louis Chama, encourages them to use force to regain their land. A wealthy landowner wanting the same decides to hire a gang of killers with Joe Kidd to track Chama.
It is 1943, and the German army—ravaged and demoralised—is hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of the madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich is still vastly superior to the Russian army. However, within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors.
In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.
A boy experiences first love, friendships and injustices growing up in 1960s Taiwan.
Wealthy rancher Bick Benedict and dirt-poor cowboy Jett Rink both woo Leslie Lynnton, a beautiful young woman from Maryland who is new to Texas. She marries Benedict, but she is shocked by the racial bigotry of the White Texans against the local people of Mexican descent. Rink discovers oil on a small plot of land, and while he uses his vast, new wealth to buy all the land surrounding the Benedict ranch, the Benedict's disagreement over prejudice fuels conflict that runs across generations.
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
Documentary filmmaker Genya Tachibana has tracked down the legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who mysteriously vanished at the height of her career. When he presents her with a key she had lost and thought was gone forever, the filmmaker could not have imagined that it would not only unlock the long-held secrets of Chiyoko’s life... but also his own.
Johnny and his young nephew forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they embark on a cross-country trip to see life away from Los Angeles.
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.
Blind traveler Zatoichi is a master swordsman and a masseur with a fondness for gambling on dice games. When he arrives in a village torn apart by warring gangs, he sets out to protect the townspeople.
Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the two ace fighter pilots become entangled in a love triangle with beautiful Naval nurse Evelyn Johnson. But the rivalry between the friends-turned-foes is immediately put on hold when they find themselves at the center of Japan's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Kentaro is an unsocial 35-year-old who lives with his parents and has never dated a woman. When Kentaro’s parents set up an arranged marriage interview with a girl named Nahoko and her parents, he falls in love for the first time in his life. However, the pair soon run into unexpected obstacles. Nahoko is vision impaired and can’t seem to break free of her doting parents. Meanwhile, Kentaro has no idea how to deal with the surge of new emotions he’s feeling.
In the early years of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a British-trained lawyer, forsakes all worldly possessions to take up the cause of Indian independence. Faced with armed resistance from the British government, Gandhi adopts a policy of 'passive resistance', endeavouring to win freedom for his people without resorting to bloodshed.
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
In 1947, four German judges who served on the bench during the Nazi regime face a military tribunal to answer charges of crimes against humanity. Chief Justice Haywood hears evidence and testimony not only from lead defendant Ernst Janning and his defense attorney Hans Rolfe, but also from the widow of a Nazi general, an idealistic U.S. Army captain and reluctant witness Irene Wallner.
A member of an elite paramilitary counter-terrorism unit becomes traumatized after witnessing the suicide bombing of a young girl and is forced to undergo retraining. However, unbeknownst to him, he becomes a key player in a dispute between rival police divisions, as he finds himself increasingly involved with the sister of the girl he saw die.
The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.
A Russian and a German sniper play a game of cat-and-mouse during the Battle of Stalingrad in WWII.
As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fourth trapped behind enemy lines. Ranger captain John Miller and seven men are tasked with penetrating German-held territory and bringing the boy home.
Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.
In a moment captured in time, die-hard Italian fascists conduct reprisal executions of civilians in Lombardy during World War II.
After World War II, Antonia and her daughter, Danielle, go back to their Dutch hometown, where Antonia's late mother has bestowed a small farm upon her. There, Antonia settles down and joins a tightly-knit but unusual community. Those around her include quirky friend Crooked Finger, would-be suitor Bas and, eventually for Antonia, a granddaughter and great-granddaughter who help create a strong family of empowered women.