Peter Cowie

"Akira Kurosawa is arguably the greatest of all Japanese film directors and is respected around the world as one of the masters of the art form. In celebration of the centennial of his birth, this volume pays tribute to Kurosawa's visual style - with more than two hundred images, many never before published. Kurosawa put together scenes with a painterly effect, and all of the most memorable shots are here. He was famous for a meticulous attention...

A Greek pacifist leader is murdered at a rally. Despite the official police report of accidental death, a journalist's persistent questioning leads to a full-scale investigation, revealing corruption in high places.

"[A] chronicle [of] the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne and Johan through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partners. Shot in intense, intimate close-ups by master cinematographer Sven Mykvist and featuring flawless performances, Ingmar Bergman's emotional X-ray reveals the intense joys and pains of complex relationship. The set includes both the three-hour U.S. theatrical cut and Bergman's original five-hour, six-part...

An opera by Mozart, in which a handsome young man is enlisted to rescue the Queen of Night's daughter from an evil sorcerer.

Filmed over several weeks, "Bergman Island" is an impressively intimate look at the waning hours of one of cinema's true legends. Granted unprecedented access to the man himself, Marie Nyreröd captures stories from Bergman that cover his entire life to that point. Bergman is remarkably candid, whether he's discussing his abusive father or his last directorial effort, Saraband. Even those not particularly interested in Bergman's cinema will find something...

[A] monumental mid-nineteenth century epic that charts, over the course of two films, a poor Swedish farming family's voyage to America and their efforts to put down roots in this beautiful but forbidding new world. Karl Oskar and Kristina [are] a couple who meet with one physical and emotional trial after another on their arduous journey.

This mesmerizing debut by the great Swedish director Jan Troell (The Emigrants, The New Land) is an epic bildungsroman and a multilayered representation of early twentieth-century Sweden. Based on a series of semi-autobiographical novels by Nobel Prize winner Eyvind Johnson, Here Is Your Life follows a working-class boy's development, from naive teenager to intellectually curious young adult, from logger to movie projectionist to politically engaged...

Marie is an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student. Her memories of the rocky shores of Stockholm's outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works.