Product Description
Includes ten films:
Army of Shadows
Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, and Paul Meurisse go underground to fight the German occupation in Jean-Pierre Melville's World War II French Resistance masterpiece. Army of Shadows was not released in the United States until 2006,
when it became the most acclaimed film of the year.
Au hasard Balthazar
A little donkey is suckled by its mother, then baptized Balthazar. It moves from
owner to owner, some kind, some cruel, some drunkenly careless. In a body of work known for its purity and transcendence, Au hasard Balthazar is perhaps the most wrenching of Robert Bresson s visions, voted ninth in the Village Voice s poll of the greatest films of the twentieth century.
Band of Outsiders
Young layabouts Franz and Arthur meet the ravishing Odile (Anna Karina), with whom they plan to steal a stash of cash hidden in her aunt s mansion. In the hands of Jean-Luc Godard, a crime caper becomes pure pulp poetry. Pauline Kael called this French New Wave classic a reverie of a gangster movie . . . perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film.
Billy Liar
John Schlesinger's adaptation of the smash-hit West End play stars Tom
Courtenay as a feckless aspiring comedy writer whose dream life helps him momentarily escape from an endlessly nagging family and a dead-end job. Also starring Julie Christie in her enchanting film debut, the honestly hilarious Billy Liar
is one of the finest films of the British New Wave. The New York Times called it one of the great movies of the 1960s. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
A group of stylish, elegant friends portrayed by Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, and Jean-Pierre Cassel find their dinner plans constantly going awry: whether
they've got the wrong day or the cops are intruding while performing a sting operation, they re never able to sit down to eat their meals. Luis Buñuel's surreal and cutting masterwork of social satire won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.
Mafioso
Alberto Sordi (The White Sheik, I vitelloni) is a Fiat factory foreman in Northern Italy who returns to his hometown in Sicily with his wife and children, only to find himself unwittingly
tapped as a hit man by the local don. Alberto Lattuada s Mafioso is one of the darkest, most authentic and funniest movies about the mob, a blueprint for The Godfather in
sardonic, compressed, anecdotal form, wrote the Village Voice's J. Hoberman.
Murderous Maids
More than seventy years on, the case of the Papin sisters, the servants who murdered and mutilated their mistress and her daughter in pre-World War II Le Mans, remains an enigma. Jean-Pierre Denis film is the definitive screen version of the story: at once
a stunning dramatization of the events leading up to the tragedy and a compelling interrogation of the class issues that are believed to have contributed to the incident.
Rififi
Four ex-cons plot to crack a Parisian jewelry store's safe it's one last job, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans. Blacklisted, Bronx-raised Hollywood exile Jules
Dassin, then living in France, turned a Spillane-esque potboiler by Auguste le Breton into an existential heist film that earned him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and set the standard for screen robberies for decades to come.
The Third Man
In rubble-strewn postwar Vienna, Joseph Cotten's pulp western writer Holly Martins arrives to meet up with his old friend Harry Lime, only to find that he's dead or is he? Winner of the Academy Award for best cinematography, Carol Reed's The Third Man is a triumph of atmosphere.
Touchez pas au grisbi
Jean Gabin is aging gangster Max le Menteur, whose plans to retire following a huge heist are foiled whenhis partner Riton tells Jeanne Moreau's two-timing
femme fatale about the cash.
Review
Over the past ten years Rialto Pictures has enriched American film culture by both reviving a significant number of classic films not seen in theaters since their original runs and premiering extraordinary films never before distributed in America. --Museum of Modern Art, New York
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