Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1940 • United States
Starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall

In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock made his official transition from the British film industry to Hollywood. And it was quite a year: his first two American movies, REBECCA and FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, w...

Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1945 • Italy
Starring Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero

This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films t...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1946 • Japan

In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, the only female protagonist in Kurosawa's body of work and one of his strongest heroes. Transforming hersel...

Directed by Alain Resnais • 1955 • France

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in NIGHT AND FOG (NUIT ET BROUILLARD), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing...

Directed by Andrzej Wajda • 1957 • Poland
Starring Teresa Izewska, Tadeusz Janczar, Wienczyslaw Glinski

“Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives,” announces a narrator, foretelling the tragedy that unfolds as a war-ravaged company of Home Army resistance fighters tries to...

Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov • 1957 • Soviet Union
Starring Tatiana Samoilova, Alexei Batalov, Vasily Merkuryev

This landmark film by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov was heralded as a revelation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the international cinema community alike. It tells the story of ...

Directed by Kon Ichikawa • 1959 • Japan
Starring Eiji Funakoshi, Osamu Takizawa, Mickey Curtis

An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II, Kon Ichikawa’s FIRES ON THE PLAIN is a compelling descent into psychological and physical oblivion. ...

Directed by Bernhard Wicki • 1959 • West Germany
Starring Karl Michael Balzer, Folker Bohnet, Michael Hinz

Bernhard Wicki’s astonishing THE BRIDGE was the first major antiwar film to come out of Germany after World War II, as well as the nation’s first postwar film to be widely shown internation...

Directed by Stuart Cooper • 1975 • United Kingdom
Starring Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball

Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage with a fictional narrative, this immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings to life a...