Amelie Poulain lives and works in Montmartre, but doesn’t connect very deeply with other people. It’s delightful, and it remains one of the two or three best introductions to foreign films for the subtitle-phobic. But it’s a gateway drug to world cinema, and if you like it, move on to the harder stuff.
A straight-laced professor gets angry at his students for lusting after a sexy showgirl, but he feels a bit differently once he actually sees said showgirl. Unfortunately, her seeming reciprocation of his affections may only be an act. Early example of Marlene Dietrich’s innate magnetism.
Jean Cocteau’s fantastic version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth has a post-war French poet following his wife into the underworld–but is he really more interested in the femme fatale incarnation of Death?
Lola has twenty minutes to save her boyfriend in this fast-paced, multi-tiered feast of postmodernism, which plays with the concepts of time, responsibility, reality, and worlds of possibility, all to a techno-frenetic backdrop.
Luis Bunuel offers a scathing surrealist attack on the bourgeoisie in this film depicting a dinner party that won’t end, because all the guests simply lack the will to leave.
