Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a ...

Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
Starring: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Yves Afonso, Yves Beneyton
Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard

The Russian answer to 2001, and very nearly as memorable a movie. The legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made this extremely deliberate science-fiction epic, an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem. The story follows a cosmonaut (Donatas Banionis) on an eerie trip to a planet where haunting memories can take physical form. Its bare outline makes it sound like a routine ...

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko
Directed By: Andrei Tarkovsky

Manufacturer: First Run Features
Starring: Essy Persson, Preben Mahrt, Jørgen Reenberg, Tove Maës, Erik Hell
Directed By: Mac Ahlberg

Manufacturer: Water Bearer Films
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Andréa Ferréol
Directed By: Marco Ferreri

One of the greatest directors of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt) continues to influence the bold styles of directors such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Comparable to Blade Runner in its futuristic vision, Godard's Alphaville is an exciting blend of crime thriller and sci-fi drama. Eddie Constantine, known through French films as ...

Manufacturer: Homevision
Starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Valérie Boisgel, Jean-Louis Comolli
Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard

"Child and expertise for rent," reads the banner flying from the wooden cart of rogue samurai Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama). With his infant son and a baby carriage stocked with a veritable arsenal in tow, Ogami rents his services for 500 pieces of gold while awaiting his revenge on the corrupt clan that murdered his wife. Director Kenji Misumi draws his distinctive graphic style from the ...

Manufacturer: Animeigo
Starring: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Fumio Watanabe, Tomoko Mayama, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, Tomoo Uchida
Directed By: Kenji Misumi

Shinya Tsukamoto draws on the marriage of flesh and technology that inspires so much of David Cronenberg's work and then twists it into a manga-influenced cyberpunk vision. A man (Tomoroh Taguchi) awakens from a nightmare in which his body is helplessly fusing with the metal objects around him, only to find it happening to him in real life... or is it? Haunted by memories of a hit and run (eerily ...

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Kei Fujiwara, Renji Ishibashi, Nobu Kanaoka, Naomasa Musaka, Tomorowo Taguchi

When oppressed peasants unleash a metal-eating demon in hopes of fending off an invading army, their would-be savior becomes a nightmarish monster! Soon the entire countryside is laid to waste as the towering behemoth does what giant monsters always do when visiting South Korea. Sweeping epic vistas and spectacular special effects produced by members of the "Godzilla" team highlight this ...

Manufacturer: Adv Films
Starring: Chang Son Hui, Ham Gi Sop, Jong-uk Ri, Gwon Ri, Gyong-ae Yu
Directed By: Chong Gon Jo, Sang-ok Shin

This fourth entry in the Gamera series found the titanic turtle paralleling the cuddly direction of his competitor Godzilla. When two young, star-gazing children investigate a spaceship that has practically landed in their backyard, they are whisked away to Terra, our undiscovered tenth planet whose two "groovy spacegirls" are all that remain of a once-superior alien civilization. But the ...

Manufacturer: Neptune Media
Starring: Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama, Christopher Murphy, Yuko Hamada, Eiji Funakoshi
Directed By: Noriaki Yuasa

This Belgian satire (in French with English subtitles) is dark, dark, dark--but also right on the money in its sly sendup of the media's fascination with violence and its complicity therein. This mock documentary has a trio of filmmakers shooting a cinéma vérité feature about a garrulous serial killer who lets the film crew follow him around as he selects victims and then dispatches them. But ...

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Rémy Belvaux, Jean-Marc Chenut, Olivier Cotica, Rachel Deman, Jenny Drye
Directed By: Rémy Belvaux, Benoît Poelvoorde