10. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Few movies have completely redesigned and disassembled the elements of cinema, but Alain Resnais’s eerie, daunting puzzle film, directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is one of them. The essential aspects of cinema, such as editing, topography, story, character, and perspective, are all thrown off balance as we witness three characters, among them Delphine Seyrig, come and go in a grand rural estate. Even though its mannered abstruseness seems less believable today, Resnais’s vision is nonetheless bold.
9. Forbidden Games (1952)
Adapted from François Boyer’s novel, René Clément’s somber, brilliant wartime drama stars Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujouly, two of the most endearing and unaffected child performers in film history (Poujouly will eventually be seen as the thief-turned-killer in Lift to the Scaffold). The movie centers on an abandoned girl who is adopted by a farming family and becomes friends with their eleven-year-old boy. Together, the kids start a macabre game that starts with her puppy’s funeral and grows gloomily to include a full pet cemetery.
8. Vagabond (1985)
Women have won three of the last four Golden Lions, but before to that, Venice (which still has a better record than Cannes) had not given any recognition to female filmmakers. A study of a scornful, mysterious vagabond, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, that is intercut with testimony from people who knew her and serve to intriguingly muddle the overall picture, won Agnès Varda the top prize in 1985 for her most starkly uncompromising film.
7. Red Desert (1964)
When it comes to Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic poem about industrialization and alienation in the Po Valley, there are two things that everyone recalls. First, the iconic monologue “My hair hurts” by the troubled Monica Vitti, who portrays a lady adrift in a dirty atmosphere. Second, the great visual lengths the director went to for his first color film: he painted the trees, shrubs, and grass after nature failed him.
6. A City of Sadness (1989)
This richly detailed humanist epic was a breakthrough work for Hou Hsiao-hsien, dubbed “the world’s greatest active narrative film-maker” by US critic J Hoberman, in an output that scarcely lacks masterpieces. The film examines complex events through the lens of one family, with Tony Leung playing the clan’s youngest son, a deaf-mute photographer, and taking place between 1945, when Japan surrendered in the Second World War, and 1947, when the brutal White Terror campaign began (following the 1947 massacre of over 18,000 Taiwanese people by Chinese troops).
5. The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Gillo Pontecorvo’s scathing documentary, which praised and memorialized the FLN’s (Front de Libération Nationale) 1954 uprising against French colonial control in Algeria, was briefly banned in France and blocked in the UK and the US. It mixed the explosive devices of a ticking-bomb thriller with real and fictional characters, as well as verité techniques (the reviewer Peter Matthews calls the handheld camera “excitedly clawing at the action”). The process of making political films was never the same.
4. Belle de Jour (1967)
After casting Catherine Deneuve as Séverine, who stumbles into sex labor in this twisted version of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel, Luis Buñuel told her, “Don’t do anything.” “And most importantly, don’t act.” She doesn’t, either—this is somnambulant acting that is captivating. Keep an eye out for the differences between Séverine’s sensual dreams and reality. Jean-Claude Carrière, co-writer of Buñuel, said, “Her daydreams are real.” “A woman we spoke to dreamed of each one. However, the character’s marriage to her spouse is phony. This movie is really peculiar. I’m not kidding.
3. Rashomon (1950)
Several versions (including one in which the deceased man speaks through a medium) give differing accounts of what transpired after a lady is raped in a woodland by a bandit and her husband is seen to have been murdered. Akira Kurosawa’s contemplation on the essence of truth, which also took home the Oscar for best foreign language film, is as complex as the forest backdrop that cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa so powerfully captures, and as powerful as regular partner Toshiro Mifune, who plays the robber.
2. Ivan’s Childhood (1962)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s heartbreaking debut, which shared the Golden Lion that year with the fraternal drama Family Diary, defeated Kubrick’s Lolita to win first prize. Tarkovsky’s film, which he made “to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director,” is based on the book Ivan by Vladimir Bogomolov and follows an orphaned Russian youngster who has been brutalized by conflict. Ivor Montagu stated in 1973, “With one blow, it annuls a whole cinematheque of the war films of all lands.”
1. Ordet (1955)
The beautiful and somber version of Kaj Munk’s play by Carl Theodor Dreyer was filmed in the town where Munk was a parish priest until the Nazis killed him in 1944. The action is confined to a farmhouse on Jutland, where the cramped environment demands a certain staginess that is ultimately overruled by the cinematography. We meet the multigenerational household as the camera roams the interiors (there are very few exterior views and just three closeups). The family consists of an elderly man, his sons, one of whom thinks he is the reincarnation of Christ, and two grandchildren. His pregnant daughter-in-law is also there; her passing paves the way for a miracle that raises the movie to a supernatural plane.
