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Banned in France for five years, The Battle Of Algiers is the best pro-terrorism film ever made (yep, even better than V For Vendetta). Led by Ennio Morricone’s thrilling score, who wouldn’t root for those poor, but heroic Algerians in their struggle against the creepy militant imperialistic French? Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to get all those pretentious cafes out of the Casbah. Told about ten years after the actual war, director Gillo Pontecorvo has crafted the definition of a "docu-drama," so well done it’s often mistaken for an actual documentary. Shot in grainy black & white in the actual locations of the real life events, Pontecorvo notes in the opening titles that not one foot of newsreel footage was used.

The Battle Of Algiers was released in the United States as the war in Vietnam was making many Americans sympathetic to the victims of colonialists. The film had a massive impact and scored awards all over the world. It would win the prestigious Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and strangely, for technical reasons, it would be nominated in 1967 for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and two years later it would get nominated for Best Director and for Best Screenplay (I’m not sure if any other film has received three Oscar nominations in two different years, two years apart).

When choosing where to start in a director's filmography, I've always enjoyed picking at random. Recommendations tend to be fairly overwhelming and a total buzz kill. The themes of Fassbinder's films were always intriguing to me, and since I enjoy seeing filmmakers break down and interpret romantic relationships, I started with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The film surpassed my expectations in terms of human dynamics by exposing a character's relationship to the women in her life in such a constricting setting, from her lover down to her servant.

Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is as far removed from an overnight success as a person could get. As a fashion designer in Germany, she had to go through the process of constant rejection and a humiliating divorce before being taken seriously in her field. These experiences have turned her into a cynic in matters of work and love. Her daughter is away at boarding school and she lives alone with her servant/secretary/assistant, Marlene (Irm Hermann). Marlene's role as a servant in her home goes far beyond the orthodox. In a sense, she's a broken extension of Petra, living vicariously through her disgrace and vanity. You get the feeling that she once aspired to be a self-sustaining fashion designer, but found herself tailoring not only Petra's designs, but her mess of an existence.

ONCE UPON A VERY STRANGE TIME… Dark, damp, and dreary, tucked away in a twisted dream somewhere between Oliver Twist and The Brothers Grimm is The City Of Lost Children. A ginger-headed sideshow strong man of Russian origin named "One" (Ron Perlman) has had a very bad day indeed. His sideshow barker has been knifed during their last chain busting performance and later that evening his adopted little brother, Denree, is abducted by a band of Jean-Paul Gaultier clad "Cyclopes" and taken away to an oil rig-looking platform of a mad scientist’s lair! Not only is the scientist mad, but he’s quite frail and cranky and even named Krank (Daniel Emilfork).

NOTE: Krank is something akin to Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but with a shaved head.

“The Clown is a mirror in which men see a grotesque, crooked, goofy image of themselves. It's the shadow within us. It will always be there.” — Federico Fellini The Clowns is Fellini's way of breathing life back into the circus. At once whimsical and sad, the lifestyle and acts of it are thought to be near extinction. Surely in America, France, and Italy, the lifestyle of a carny and the pleasures of the circus have dwindled. Fellini revisits a boyhood experience of seeing the circus come to town and being one of the few who were disturbed by the clowns featured there. He compared them to real people in his village: bums, alcholoics, and perverts who dress in rags and had terrible grins on their faces. Their dopey and mischievous demeanor reminded him, as a child, of the worst mankind had to offer. But as an adult, the director was given the chance to direct a film for television. The idea to do something for television intrigued him because he knew nothing about it and it posed a challenge. He gathered a team and explored France and Italy, filming a movie that is as much of a document about the art of the circus as it is a semi-autobiographical divergence into a world breached within almost all of his feature films.

Pulled by what the director deems to be a purely “subjective” and “emotion” attachment to filmmaking, The Clowns is considerably different than his other films, yet plays with the same familiar themes. Presenting the circus as a unique experience full of characters that mirror and mask the tragic and comical aspects of life, the movie is a great feat based on the thoroughness of this exploration alone. However, the movie goes deeper into the depressing and realistic side of traveling acts, as was done in one of my favorite of his films, La Strada. It also exposed the mystery behind every detail of circus acts, down to the development of costumes. My favorite among these is the story behind the White Clowns, known to most from their appearances in pantomimes and more regal circuses. Their embellished and extravagant costumes, supposedly designed by either the clowns' wives or fashion designers, brings a sort of avant-garde runway appeal to their beauty.

I've never read the novel "The Conformist" by Alberto Moravia, but I can bet that Bernardo Bertolucci's film Il Conformista is a faithful adaptation of the story. The film explores a truly profound relationship between the individual and societal ideals, dealing with Fascist Italy in both an intellectual and artistic sense.

I'd have to say, the best way to watch this film is with your own company or maybe another if you are ready to embark on a heavy, heavy journey. The film is a mind trip - allowing the viewer to question the individual's values, society, civil responsibility, and dependence.Yet it doesn't stop itself there - the photography by Vittorio Storaro is breathtaking and true to its story. The style is so noteworthy that the film is praised in Visions of Light, a documentary honoring cinematographers as artists, and for good reason. Each moment is dedicated to the sorrow of an Italian under governmental pressures.The rich colors, camera angles, and camera movement accentuate Italian expressionism in every sense.

Michael Haneke is one of the most innovative and exciting filmmakers currently working. His films can be extremely shocking and, at times, graphically violent. But unlike most thriller directors, Haneke chooses to downplay his violence. Haneke prefers a cold austerity to the melodramatic hysterics that characterize modern thrillers. His characters are cold and unfeeling, resulting in an atmosphere of psychological turmoil, emotional paralysis, and impending doom. His paradoxical approach to violence instills an unnerving tension within any well-balanced viewer, and this tension quickly turns into utter terror. Haneke thwarts his viewers of their moment of cathartic release:  that tantalizing moment in which viewer and filmmaker can share a moralizing sigh of relief and say, “Ah, wasn’t that horrible?” No one is bailed out of a Haneke film; instead, the viewer must deal with and eventually accept the bleak situation that confronts him.

Haneke’s unapologetic approach to cinema expects more from its audience than your normal pure entertainment thriller or horror film. When watching Haneke’s films, despite the discomfort we feel, we must never alienate ourselves from the violent acts depicted on screen (and in the specific case of Funny Games, we are even encouraged to play along). His films always provoke social thought and personal introspection. Ultimately, Haneke wants his viewers to ask more questions, and to view this tiny world and all its complexities with a more critical eye. Oh, and yes, they are quite riveting to watch as well…

The Mirror is absolutely the most poetic film I’ve seen. Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia’s famous director, sewed the film together like fragments, creating a loose, non-linear, autobiographical tale full of childhood memories. The film contains newsreel footage and poems by Tarkovsy’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky. It is a personal, unique film, now highly regarded as one of Tarkovsky’s best works and masterpieces. His work, often a struggle with the Soviet authorities, is well-realized and committed – he has only made seven feature films out of his 27 years as a filmmaker, and each one of them is finely crafted and boldly uncompromised. Here is one of my favorites.

The film begins with Alexei’s son Ignat. The film revolves around his thoughts and his world, and the narrator reads poems reminiscent of a man’s relationships with his mother, ex-wife, and son. The mother, Maria, is a proofreader in a printing press. She is first shown in the countryside during pre-World War II. The rural countryside is one of Tarkovsky’s landscapes – the homes and the land featured in the film are gorgeously drenched in nature, yet also contain an element of isolation. Tarkovsky’s use of nature refers to his childhood memory of war that caused many to evacuate Moscow to the countryside.

The Model Couple is not science-fiction, though it does induce the same paranoia and anxiety about the future that some of those films do. And while it is a story about people whose lives are on display for the world, it in no way resembles movies like The Truman Show.

The film exaggerates the borders where privacy and personal freedoms are obscured, if not removed, by a totalitarian government. Set in 1970s France, The Ministry of the Future, an organization claiming to try and make "a new city for a new man," is executing an outrageous experiment. They've chosen a seemingly “normal” Caucasian married couple to be the poster-children for their efforts. Claudine (Anémone) and Jean-Michel (André Dussollier) have been married for a couple of years. Claudine takes care of the home and Jean-Michel is the breadwinner. The two are thrilled to be chosen to represent all of France. They are brought to a compound where they will arrange a new life with the help of the Ministry, in a place dubbed "The Model Home."

Timecrimes is sort of like a darker version of that "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons where Homer's toaster becomes a time machine and he keeps screwing up the future by altering the past. It starts off with a similarly dimwitted protagonist and comic dialogue, anyway, but then unexpectedly evolves into an effectively puzzling thriller that, once you think you know where it's going, manages to twist its way into a place you never could have predicted, but which only makes sense. BloodyDisgusting.com calls it, "One of the best time travel movies of all time," and I'll agree in that it's one of the most uniquely satisfying and intelligent I've ever seen.

Héctor and Clara just moved into a new home privately located in a scenic forest in Spain, and Héctor begins noticing some bizarre signs no less than a few seconds into the film. The phone rings but no one appears to be on the other end. He calls the number back but only gets a voicemail asking for a security code. "How can anyone know this number?" he asks his wife. "We just moved in." Later, while lounging on the front lawn and taking in views of the forest with his binoculars, he sees a woman stripping off her clothes. Venturing into the woods for a closer look, Héctor is suddenly attacked by a scissor-wielding maniac covered in bloody bandages. He makes a run for it, eventually stumbling on a high-tech looking science lab. He finds a radio and calls for help, where a scientist named El Joven guides him to a safer part of the building. But what Héctor finds determines his fate in ways he, and I doubt any audience watching, could predict.

"Music is the goal, not the means."

Few films capture the simplicities of what is important in an artist's life. The title is taken from Schiller's "Ode to Joy," fitting for this story concerning two orchestral players. Stig is a dissatisfied musician, hating the idea of living in mediocrity, while Marta is a beautiful lady who basks in the simple joys of life. She steals Stig's hardened heart in spite of himself, and they eventually get married. He struggles with his ability to play as a violin soloist. His ambitions consume him to the point where he loses sight of his wife's patience and care. We've all seen this inner torment from the viewpoint of a husband/musician plenty of times – any biopic of an artist will tell that story. Yet what stands out about this film is Bergman's ability to portray the main character in all his flaws and weaknesses, and there's absolutely no glamour or flashiness attached. The result? Honest, rich sentiment.