Elio Petri's acclaimed Oscar-winning thriller. Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector investigating a heinous crime-which he committed himself. Both a penetrating character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian crackdowns by the Italian government in the late 1960s and early '70s, Petri's kinetic portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable...

The great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu is best known for the stately, meditative domestic dramas he made after World War II. But during his first decade at Shochiku studios, he dabbled in many genres--including the crime film, which resulted in this trio of magnificently shot and edited silents. Heavily influenced in narrative and visual style by the American movies that Ozu adored but already envincing the compassion and confident precision of...

Based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of 1958, in which a fifteen-year-old girl and her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.

Stellan Skarsgård plays an enigmatic Swedish detective with a checkered past who arrives in a small town in northern Norway to investigate the death of a teenage girl. As he digs deeper into the heinous killing, his own demons and the tyrannical midnight sun begin to take a toll.

"Russell Stevens, a police officer, goes undercover as 'John Hull,' the partner of a dangerously ambitious cocaine trafficker, in order to infiltrate and bring down a powerful Latin American drug ring operating in L.A. But the further Stevens descends into this ruthless world of money, violence, and power, the more disillusioned he becomes -- and the harder it is to make out the line between right and wrong, crime and justice. Steeped in shadowy,...

Taking place largely over the course of one tense night, Carol Reed's psychological noir, set in an unnamed Belfast, stars James Mason as Johnny McQueen, a revolutionary ex-con leading a robbery that goes horribly wrong. Injured and hunted by the police, he seeks refuge throughout the city, while the woman he loves (Kathleen Ryan) searches for him among the shadows.

Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously evil as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? When slick salesman Walter Neff walks into the swank home of dissatisfied housewife Phyllis Dietrichson, he intends to sell her insurance, but he winds up becoming entangled with her in a far more sinister way. It is one of the most wickedly perverse stories ever told...

"The all-American obsession with celebrity turns monstrous in this deliciously subversive (and disturbingly prescient) satire of our television-mediated, true-crime-obsessed age. In a career breakthrough, Nicole Kidman delivers a diabolical deconstruction of the girl next door as a local TV weather reporter whose perfectly perky facade belies a murderous heart, as her ruthless pursuit of fame ensnares three disaffected teens in a sordid, tabloid-ready...

Two-bit hustler Harry Fabian aches for a life of ease and plenty. Trailed by an inglorious history of go-nowhere schemes, he stumbles upon a chance of a lifetime in the form of legendary wrestler Gregorius the Great. But there is no easy money in this underworld of shifting alliances, bottomless graft, and pummeled flesh, and soon Fabian learns the horrible price of his ambition.

"A ripped-from-the-headlines social-problem picture about inmates' rights that was inspired by a recent spate of uprisings in American prisons ... shot on location at Folsom State Prison, with real inmates and guards as extras"--Container.