Classics Featured Lists

When an heiress to a major hotel chain is abducted by sex traffickers, her assistant races to the rescue. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

 

A talented young boxer with Golden Gloves aspirations must turn over a new leaf following a stint in jail if he ever hopes to reach his true potential, and win the championship title. In a world where second chances are hard to come by, this struggling pugilist will have to wage the fight of a lifetime before he even sets foot into the ring. Danny Trejo, Steven Bauer, and Oscar Torre star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

For his feature-film debut, critic-turned-director François Truffaut drew inspiration from his own troubled childhood. The 400 Blows stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's preteen alter ego. Misunderstood at home by his parents and tormented in school by his insensitive teacher (Guy Decomble), Antoine frequently runs away from both places. The boy finally quits school after being accused of plagiarism by his teacher. He steals a typewriter from his father (Albert Remy) to finance his plans to leave home. The father angrily turns Antoine over to the police, who lock the boy up with hardened criminals. A psychiatrist at a delinquency center probes Antoine's unhappiness, which he reveals in a fragmented series of monologues. Originally intended as a 20-minute short, The 400 Blows was expanded into a feature when Truffaut decided to elaborate on his self-analysis. For the benefit of Truffaut's fellow film buffs, The 400 Blows is full of brief references to favorite directors, notably Truffaut's then-idol Jean Vigo. The film won the 1959 Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, even though Truffaut had been declared persona non grata the year before for his inflammatory comments about the festival's commercialism. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Fresh off of the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque." 8 1/2 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s, inspiring such later films as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and even Lucio Fulci's Italian splatter film Un Gatto nel Cervello (1990). ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

À Nous la Liberté is an early talkie from French filmmaker René Clair. Louis (Raymond Cordy) and Emile (Henri Marchand) are a pair of convicts whose lives take decidely different paths after prison. Emile works his way up the ladder of capitalism, becoming a phonograph factory boss, a job that finds him overseeing a bleak outfit of automatous drones. Louis, on the other hand, lives the life of a poverty-stricken vagabond. Despite their contrasting lots, the pair meet up again later in life. À Nous la Liberté is perhaps best remembered for being the main inspiration for Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic Modern Times. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi