Film Archive｜Classic Cinema Daily

Classic Cinema Daily每天一部电影，重新认识电影史。

FILM ARCHIVE

Film Archive

All 74 films, 1910s to 2020s.

74 films

011929Man with a Movie Camera持摄影机的人Dziga Vertov · Soviet Union · Documentary / Experimental film / City symphonyNo actors, no script, no intertitles. A cameraman carries his machine through Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa from dawn to dusk — and the film folds its own shooting and editing into the finished work.

022023Anatomy of a Fall坠落的审判Justine Triet · France · Drama / Legal drama / MysteryA novelist stands trial for her husband's death, with only her partially blind eleven-year-old son as a witness — and a French courtroom turns every fracture of a marriage into evidence.

031959Come Back, Africa回来吧，非洲Lionel Rogosin · South Africa · Drama / DocumentaryIn apartheid South Africa, a Black farmer leaves his village for Johannesburg, only to find no place for him under the pass laws and the city's iron rules.

041975Manila in the Claws of Light马尼拉：在霓虹灯的魔爪下Lino Brocka · Philippines · DramaA young man leaves his fishing village for 1970s Manila to find the woman he loves, only to be swallowed by the city's neon and its brutal underbelly.

052010Nostalgia for the Light故乡之光Patricio Guzmán · Chile / France · DocumentaryIn Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers study light emitted billions of years ago while a group of women sift the sand for the bone fragments of relatives who disappeared under the military regime. Guzmán sets the cosmic past beside the national one and asks who is entitled to remember.

062010Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives能召回前世的布米叔叔Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Thailand · Drama / FantasyOn a farm in northeast Thailand, a dying man with failing kidneys sits down to dinner with the ghost of his dead wife and the son who vanished years ago. Apichatpong's Palme d'Or winner tells of past lives, memory and leave-taking across six reels of differing film stock.

071968Memories of Underdevelopment发育不良的记忆Tomás Gutiérrez Alea · Cuba · Drama1960s Havana, after the Cuban Revolution. The bourgeois intellectual Sergio stays when his wife and parents flee to Miami, yet grows estranged in a country redefining itself as 'underdeveloped'. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's fragmented, subjective camera records one man's slipping out of step with his time.

0820074 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days四月三周两天Cristian Mungiu · Romania · DramaIn 1987 Communist Romania, a student helps her pregnant roommate arrange an illegal abortion over a single night. Cristian Mungiu's real-time, unsentimental drama won the Palme d'Or and anchored the Romanian New Wave.

092002The Man Without a Past没有过去的男人Aki Kaurismäki · Finland · Comedy-drama / DramaA man arriving in Helsinki is beaten into amnesia and taken in by outcasts living in harbour containers. Without a past, he begins again in the cracks of society. Aki Kaurismäki's Grand Prix winner at Cannes.

101988The Vanishing消失George Sluizer · Netherlands, France · Psychological thriller / DramaOn a French holiday, Saskia vanishes from a rest stop. Her husband Rex spends three years chasing the truth, until the man who claims to know approaches him. A Dutch psychological-thriller classic.

111956A Man Escaped死囚越狱Robert Bresson · France · Drama / War / Prison filmLyon, 1943. A Resistance member is imprisoned by the occupying Germans and waits to be shot. He makes no speeches; he does one thing — converts a spoon, a few planks and an enormous amount of time into a route through the wall. Bresson films the escape as a rite of attention and discipline.

121956The Searchers搜索者John Ford · United States · Western / Adventure / DramaTexas, 1868, three years after the Civil War. Ethan Edwards comes back to his brother's ranch; a Comanche raid takes his family. With his part-Native nephew he spends five years crossing the wilderness for an abducted child — a search that gradually stops resembling a rescue.

131927Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans日出F. W. Murnau · United States · Romance / Drama / Silent filmA farmer is talked into drowning his wife by a woman visiting from the city. At daybreak he takes his wife into town instead, and across a tram, a barbershop, an amusement park and a church, sees her again. Murnau's moving camera and synchronised score turn murderous intent into the quietest wavering in cinema.

141993The Piano钢琴课Jane Campion · New Zealand / Australia / France · Drama / Romance / Historical drama1850s New Zealand. Ada, who has not spoken since childhood, arrives with her daughter and her piano to marry a settler she has never met. When her husband trades the instrument to a neighbour, a slow bargain over keys, lessons and the body begins. Campion's Palme d'Or winner turns silence into the loudest thing on screen.

151938Bringing Up Baby育婴奇谭Howard Hawks · United States · Screwball comedy / Romantic comedyA paleontologist who has spent four years assembling a dinosaur skeleton loses control of his life three days before his wedding, thanks to a girl, a leopard and a bone buried by a dog. Howard Hawks's screwball template — a flop on release, now the benchmark for the form.

161944Double Indemnity双重赔偿Billy Wilder · United States · Film noir / Crime / ThrillerAn insurance salesman helps a woman engineer her husband's death so the policy pays double. Billy Wilder turns the crime film into an arithmetic problem in which every step is correct and the answer is still wrong.

172008Waltz with Bashir和巴什尔跳华尔兹Ari Folman · Israel / France / Germany · Animated documentary / War / AutobiographyAn Israeli director realises he remembers nothing of his own service in the 1982 Lebanon War. He goes from comrade to comrade collecting fragments that contradict each other, and draws them into an animated documentary. In competition at Cannes 2008; winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

181958Vertigo迷魂记Alfred Hitchcock · United States · Psychological thriller / Mystery / RomanceA San Francisco detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife, and follows her far enough to lose the line between the woman and the shadow she has become in his memory. Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller, ranked first in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll.

191926The General将军号Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman · United States · Silent comedy / Action / AdventureA railroad engineer is written off as a coward because he never enlisted. Then Union spies steal his locomotive, and his girl with it — and for seventy-nine minutes he chases a train alone.

2019638½八部半Federico Fellini · Italy / France · Avant-garde comedy-drama / Psychological dramaA famous director cannot decide what his next film is about, and everyone around him demands an answer. Fellini turned his own creative block into the film itself, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

211980Raging Bull愤怒的公牛Martin Scorsese · United States · Biographical / Sports dramaA middleweight champion brings the violence of the ring home with him: he suspects his wife, beats his brother, and ends up alone in a dressing room reciting another man's lines to a mirror. Scorsese's black-and-white study of self-destruction.

221966Blow-Up放大Michelangelo Antonioni · United Kingdom / Italy · Psychological mystery / DramaA celebrated London fashion photographer snaps a pair of lovers in a park, then enlarges the negatives until a body surfaces in the grain. Antonioni's first English-language film turns a murder into a parable about seeing.

231949Late Spring晚春Yasujirō Ozu · Japan · Drama / Family dramaThe film in which Ozu's style fully arrived. In a house in Kamakura a widowed professor and his twenty-seven-year-old daughter have lived for years; the relatives start pressing her to marry, and she keeps saying no. Not one argument in the whole film.

241935The 39 Steps三十九级台阶Alfred Hitchcock · United Kingdom · Spy thriller / Mystery / AdventureThe film that fixed Hitchcock's template of the innocent man on the run: one gunshot in a London music hall turns a visiting Canadian into a wanted murderer, and sends him fleeing to the Scottish Highlands with the woman who just handed him to the police.

251975Mirror镜子Andrei Tarkovsky · Soviet Union · Avant-garde / Drama / AutobiographicalTarkovsky's most private film: a dying poet remembers his mother, the war, a divorce and a childhood, with Soviet newsreels and his father's poems threaded through. Accused of elitism and barely released at home in 1975; now eighth in the Sight & Sound directors' poll.

261941Citizen Kane公民凯恩Orson Welles · United States · Drama / Mystery / BiographicalWelles's debut at twenty-five: a newspaper magnate dies with one word on his lips, and a reporter interviews everyone who knew him without ever solving it. It stood at number one in Sight & Sound for fifty years.

271925Battleship Potemkin战舰波将金号Sergei Eisenstein · Soviet Union · Historical drama / Silent film / EpicEisenstein's 1925 five-act reconstruction of a failed mutiny: sailors refuse a bowl of maggoty meat, and the Odessa Steps becomes the most quoted sequence in cinema. Voted the greatest film ever made at Brussels in 1958.

281939The Rules of the Game游戏规则Jean Renoir · France · Comedy / Drama / SatireRenoir's 1939 country-house weekend: a hunt, a masquerade, crossed lovers, and a death politely recorded as an accident. The only film to place in the Sight & Sound top ten in every poll from 1952 to 2012.

291994Before the Rain暴雨将至Milcho Manchevski · North Macedonia · War / DramaThe first film made in North Macedonia after independence. A triptych — an Orthodox monastery, a London restaurant, a photographer returning home — whose three parts loop back into one circle. Golden Lion, Venice 1994.

302012Amour爱Michael Haneke · France / Austria / Germany · Drama / RomanceParis. Two retired music teachers in their eighties. A stroke at the breakfast table — and then, over 127 minutes inside one apartment, the final shape of a life together. Palme d'Or 2012, Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards.

311988Cinema Paradiso天堂电影院Giuseppe Tornatore · Italy / France · Coming-of-age / Comedy-drama / DramaIn the Sicilian town of Giancaldo, eight-year-old Totò falls for the only cinema in town and for its projectionist, Alfredo. Thirty years later, now a director in Rome, he returns home for the old man's funeral. Scored by Ennio Morricone; Cannes Grand Prix and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

322015Son of Saul索尔之子László Nemes · Hungary · Historical drama / Drama / Holocaust filmOctober 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner in the Sonderkommando, moves bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria. Among the dead he sees a boy still breathing — and then decides to give him a proper Jewish burial. A 40mm lens stays at his back; 107 minutes, 85 shots.

331993The Scent of Green Papaya青木瓜之味Tran Anh Hung · France / Vietnam · DramaSaigon, 1951: ten-year-old Mùi is sent to work as a servant for a family quietly sliding from wealth into poverty. Ten years later, no longer affordable, she moves to a household whose master is a pianist — and is seen for the first time. Shot entirely on a soundstage in France; Caméra d'Or at Cannes 1993 and an Academy Award nomination.

341975Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles让娜·迪尔曼Chantal Akerman · Belgium / France · Drama / ExperimentalIn a Brussels apartment, a widow cuts her days into exact intervals: peeling potatoes, polishing shoes, shopping, receiving a man each afternoon, hiding the money in a soup tureen. Over three days, a few overcooked potatoes begin to loosen the whole order. 201 minutes, fixed camera, real time — first in Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll.

352010Incendies焦土之城Denis Villeneuve · Canada / France · Mystery / Drama / WarNawal dies in Canada, and her will refuses her a gravestone or a funeral unless her twins find the father they believed long dead and a brother they never knew existed. Two letters carry the pair back to the Levant and into a civil war. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play; nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

361969The Night of Counting the Years木乃伊之夜Shadi Abdel Salam · Egypt · Historical drama / Drama / NeorealismUpper Egypt, 1881. After their father's funeral, two brothers discover what has kept their clan alive for generations: selling off the royal mummies buried in the mountain above them. Shadi Abdel Salam — an architect by training who directed only one feature — shot it in Classical Arabic and near-static compositions, turning it into a parable about who owns the past.

371995Underground地下Emir Kusturica · Yugoslavia / Bulgaria / Czech Republic / France / Germany / Hungary · Black comedy / Absurdist / Epic / WarBelgrade, 1941: a man hides his best friend's family in a cellar and tells them the war is not over. For the next twenty years he grows rich on that lie while the people below keep manufacturing weapons for a revolution that ended long ago. Kusturica turns half a century of Yugoslav history into a brass-band carnival, with a zoo and a chimpanzee. Palme d'Or, Cannes.

381988Landscape in the Mist雾中风景Theo Angelopoulos · Greece / France / Italy · Road movie / Coming-of-age / Tragedy / DramaTwo children are told their father lives in Germany, so they board a night train and cross the whole of Greece to find him. Angelopoulos turns a search for a father into an allegory of twentieth-century Greece in slow long takes: fog, rain, snow, and a broken-fingered marble hand lifted out of the sea by helicopter. Silver Lion at Venice; the European Film Award for Best Film.

391966The Battle of Algiers阿尔及尔之战Gillo Pontecorvo · Italy / Algeria · War / Historical drama / DocudramaIn Algiers between 1954 and 1957, the National Liberation Front and French paratroopers escalate their violence street by street. Pontecorvo uses newsreel-style black-and-white photography and non-professional actors to turn a colonial war into an archive with no narrator. Golden Lion, Venice 1966.

401949The Third Man第三人Carol Reed · United Kingdom · Film noir / Mystery / ThrillerPost-war Vienna is carved into four occupied sectors. A broke pulp novelist arrives to take a job from an old friend and arrives in time only for the funeral. Carol Reed and Graham Greene turn a city cut into quarters into the summit of film noir: tilted frames, a chase through the sewers, a single zither. Top prize at Cannes; the Academy Award for black-and-white cinematography.

412001La Ciénaga沼泽Lucrecia Martel · Argentina, Spain, France · DramaThe rainy season is just beginning in north-western Argentina: two middle-class families crowd into a decaying estate and a few murky pools, waiting for rain, waiting for children, waiting as nothing happens. Lucrecia Martel's feature debut, premiered in competition at Berlin and later taken into the Criterion Collection — a film in which almost nothing happens and everything is dangerous.

421950Los Olvidados被遗忘的人们Luis Buñuel · Mexico · Crime / DramaIn a Mexico City slum, two street boys are pushed by fate toward the same street. Buñuel presses a surrealist's eye into the rawest street reality and films the people a city refuses to look at; Best Director at Cannes 1951, later inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

431966Daisies雏菊Věra Chytilová · Czechoslovakia · Experimental / Comedy / DramaTwo young women, both named Marie, decide the world is spoiled and that they will be spoiled too. A Czech New Wave classic that treats jump cuts, collage and coloured filters as weapons — banned the moment it was finished in 1966.

441931MM 就是凶手Fritz Lang · Germany · Thriller / Crime / DramaA German city hunts a child murderer, the police and the underworld each casting their own net. Fritz Lang's first sound film rewrote the grammar of film sound with a single whistle heard off-screen.

451959The 400 Blows四百击François Truffaut · France · Coming-of-age / Drama / French New WaveA Paris boy, punished for a lie, escapes a reform school and runs toward the sea. The film that opened the French New Wave: Truffaut's feature debut, semi-autobiographical, and Cannes Best Director in 1959.

461950Rashomon罗生门Akira Kurosawa · Japan · Jidaigeki / Psychological thriller / MysteryA samurai is found dead in a bamboo grove, and a bandit, a wife, the dead man's spirit and a woodcutter each tell the story differently. The Golden Lion winner at Venice in 1951, and the first of Kurosawa and Mifune's sixteen films together.

471982Yol道路Yılmaz Güney & Şerif Gören · Turkey / Switzerland / France · Ensemble drama / Road movie / Social realismAfter Turkey's 1980 military coup, five prisoners are granted a week's home leave. The screenplay was written from inside prison by Yılmaz Güney, who never reached the set. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1982 — and was banned in Turkey until 1999.

481916Intolerance党同伐异D. W. Griffith · United States · Epic / Silent film / Anthology film / Historical dramaD. W. Griffith intercuts four stories separated by 2,500 years — the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and a modern American labour strike — to argue that intolerance never goes out of date. The costliest gamble of the silent era, and the first true epic of film editing.

491975Picnic at Hanging Rock悬崖上的野餐Peter Weir · Australia · Mystery / DramaValentine's Day, 1900, Victoria, Australia. A girls' school picnic at Hanging Rock ends with three students and a teacher walking into the rock and never coming back. Peter Weir turned an unsolved disappearance into the most celebrated film in Australian cinema.

501991A Brighter Summer Day牯岭街少年杀人事件Edward Yang · Taiwan, China · Drama / CrimeTaipei, 1960. Hsiao Si'r, the son of a civil servant, grows up between night school, street gangs and his father's silences. In 237 minutes and over a hundred speaking parts, Edward Yang turns a real juvenile murder into the portrait of a whole generation.

511958Ashes and Diamonds灰烬与钻石Andrzej Wajda · Poland · Drama / War / Thriller8 May 1945, the day the war in Europe ended. A former Home Army soldier is ordered to assassinate a local Communist Party secretary — and falls in love in a hotel ballroom in a small Polish town. The final film of Wajda's war trilogy, and the crowning achievement of the Polish Film School.

522012The Act of Killing杀戮演绎Joshua Oppenheimer · Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, United Kingdom · Documentary / HistoryAfter the 1965 anti-communist purge in Indonesia the killers were never tried — they took power instead. Four decades on, the director asked them to restage their killings in the style of their favourite film genres. They agreed enthusiastically, and directed and starred in it themselves.

531973The Spirit of the Beehive蜂巢幽灵Víctor Erice · Spain · Drama / Fantasy / Coming-of-ageIn 1940, with the Spanish Civil War just over, a mobile cinema brings the 1931 Frankenstein to an isolated village on the Castilian plateau. Six-year-old Ana comes to believe the monster really lives nearby and sets out to find him. Víctor Erice's feature debut: honey-coloured light, hexagonal windows, and a mystery that is never explained.

541928The Passion of Joan of Arc圣女贞德蒙难记Carl Theodor Dreyer · France · Historical / Drama / Silent filmIn 1431 a young peasant girl is tried for heresy by an ecclesiastical court in Rouen. Dreyer condensed the real trial transcripts into a single day and shot almost all of it in close-up — the most famous face in cinema, and a torture that never touches the body.

551979Alien异形Ridley Scott · United Kingdom / United States · Science Fiction / Horror / ThrillerThe commercial tug Nostromo is woken mid-route by a signal from an unnamed source. Seven crew members set down on a planetoid, find a crashed alien ship — and carry something back aboard that should have stayed where it was. Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction horror film, whose script said only that the crew was unisex, ended up rewriting the next forty years of the screen.

561948Spring in a Small Town小城之春Fei Mu · China · Drama / RomanceIn a half-ruined family compound in a small Jiangnan town just after the war with Japan, five people live out one spring. Zhou Yuwen's marriage to her ailing husband Dai Liyan has gone silent — until his old friend Zhang Zhichen, who was Yuwen's lover before the war, arrives from Shanghai. Fei Mu's 1948 black-and-white masterpiece: five people, one crumbling courtyard, and a love that never crosses the line.

571968Once Upon a Time in the West西部往事Sergio Leone · Italy / United States · Western / Epic / DramaThe railroad is pushing west, and a widow who has just stepped off the train inherits a patch of desert — the place where the station and the water will be. Four men are pulled onto the same line: a stranger with a harmonica, an outlaw wanted for something he did not do, a dying railroad man, and a killer with a gentle smile. Leone takes nearly three hours to bury the entire Western tradition.

581952Singin' in the Rain雨中曲Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen · United States · Musical / Comedy / RomanceHollywood, 1927. Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont are the studio's most bankable screen couple — on screen. Then sound arrives, and Lina's voice cannot survive it, so Kathy, out of the chorus, is pushed behind the curtain to speak for her. A musical comedy about how the movies learned to talk.

591966Black Girl黑女孩Ousmane Sembène · Senegal / France · Drama / Social realismA young woman from outside Dakar, Diouana, is taken on as a maid by a French couple. She thinks it is the start of a new life; in France she is shut inside an apartment, addressed only as "the maid", and even her letters home are written for her by her employers. Sixty-five minutes, in black and white — the first feature film by a director from sub-Saharan Africa.

602001Spirited Away千与千寻Hayao Miyazaki · Japan · Animation / Fantasy / Coming-of-ageTen-year-old Chihiro is moving house when her family wanders into an abandoned theme park. Her parents eat food that is not theirs and turn into pigs, and she is left to work in a bathhouse that serves the gods. Yubaba takes her name and leaves her only one character of it — "Sen". She has to work to survive, and she has to remember who she is to get them all back.

612002City of God上帝之城Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund · Brazil · Crime / Drama / EpicOn the western edge of Rio de Janeiro, a relocation housing estate called Cidade de Deus grows over twenty years into a city ruled by armed teenagers. One boy who wants to be a photographer survives — because he learned to watch it all from behind a viewfinder.

621936Modern Times摩登时代Charlie Chaplin · United States · Comedy / Social satire / DramaAmerica, deep in the Depression. A factory worker is pushed to a breakdown by the assembly line, and afterwards meets a young woman who survives by stealing bananas on the waterfront. It is Chaplin's last film as the Tramp — and the first in which the character speaks, in a language nobody understands.

631985Come and See自己去看Elem Klimov · Soviet Union · War / Drama / HistoricalBelarus, 1943. A boy named Flyora digs a rifle out of the earth and wants to join the partisans. He has not fired a shot before he is swept into the German reprisals: villages emptied, villagers herded into a barn and burned alive. Elem Klimov used live ammunition, Steadicam and a face the war remakes in front of us to make the least forgiving war film ever shot.

641955Pather Panchali大地之歌Satyajit Ray · India · Drama / Coming-of-age / NeorealismA village called Nischindipur, in Bengal. Harihar writes letters and recites scripture for a little money and dreams of better. His wife Sarbajaya holds the household together one day at a time. Their daughter Durga steals fruit from a neighbour's garden in the monsoon. Their small son Apu sees a train for the first time. Shot on and off over nearly three years, Satyajit Ray's first film turns a family's ordinary days into cinema.

651990Close-Up特写Abbas Kiarostami · Iran · Docufiction / Drama / DocumentaryTehran, 1989. A broke film buff named Hossain Sabzian tells a woman on a bus that he is the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Two weeks later he is arrested for impersonation. Abbas Kiarostami obtained permission to film the trial, then had everyone involved — the family, the journalist, even the judge — replay themselves on camera. No narration. No category.

661927Metropolis大都会Fritz Lang · Germany · Science Fiction / Drama / German ExpressionismA city sliced in two: gardens and towers above, machines and workers below. When the ruler's son follows a woman named Maria down into the depths, his father still holds another card — an inventor who can build a human being. Out of plaster, mirrors and one robot, Fritz Lang wrote the first draft of a century of urban science fiction.

671960Breathless精疲力尽Jean-Luc Godard · France · Crime / DramaMarseille. A young man who models himself on American gangster pictures steals a car and, on the road to Paris, shoots a policeman. He is going to Paris for an American girl — a student and aspiring reporter deciding whether to stay. Shot handheld on real streets and cut with jump cuts, Godard's debut became the opening statement of the French New Wave.

682019Parasite寄生虫Bong Joon-ho · South Korea · Black comedy / Thriller / DramaSeoul. A family living in a semi-basement scrapes by folding pizza boxes. When the son talks his way into a tutoring job at a wealthy household, the whole family follows him in, one at a time. With staircases, smell and one night of rain, Bong Joon-ho turns class difference into something you can physically feel.

692000In the Mood for Love花样年华Wong Kar-wai · Hong Kong / France · Romance / DramaHong Kong, 1962. Two couples move into the same apartment building, and a man and a woman discover that their spouses are having an affair. They never cross the line, and what they leave behind stays in corridors, stairwells and rainy street corners. With cheongsams, a repeated theme and frames within frames, Wong Kar-wai turned almost nothing happening into one of the most moving love stories of the past quarter century.

7019682001: A Space Odyssey2001太空漫游Stanley Kubrick · United Kingdom / United States · Science Fiction / Adventure / EpicIn 1968 Kubrick compressed the whole span of human history — from a bone club to a star child — into a film with almost no dialogue. A black monolith on the Moon, a ship bound for Jupiter, and a computer that starts to lie: more than half a century on, it is still the line that divides science fiction.

711957The Seventh Seal第七封印Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · Drama / FantasyIn 1957 Bergman had a knight returning from the Crusades challenge Death to a game of chess on a beach. The film lives in the gaps of that game — plague, flagellants, a troupe of actors, a last supper. Its question is medieval and still open: if God stays silent, is faith still possible?

721948Bicycle Thieves偷自行车的人Vittorio De Sica · Italy · Drama / NeorealismRome, 1948. A long-unemployed man finally lands a job pasting posters — on condition that he owns a bicycle. His wife pawns the family's bed sheets to redeem his from the pawnshop; on his first day of work, it is stolen. Using non-professional actors and real streets, De Sica turned a small event into the most famous search in film history.

731954Seven Samurai七武士Akira Kurosawa · Japan · Jidaigeki / Action / Adventure / DramaIn 1954 Kurosawa took a premise as plain as a fable — seven masterless samurai hired by farmers to fight bandits — and made the longest and most expensive Japanese film to that date. What it actually invented was not fight choreography but a narrative grammar of recruitment, defence and last stand, borrowed ever since.

741972The Godfather教父Francis Ford Coppola · USA · Crime / DramaIn 1972 Coppola turned a bestselling mob novel into a family tragedy. Violence is never the spectacle here; it happens inside weddings, kitchens and churches — and the gangster film acquires, for the first time, the weight of classical tragedy.