In the tradition of such acclaimed cinéma direct works as Jean Eustache's Le Cochon (1970) and Frederick Wiseman's Meat (1976) comes Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 92-minute documentary Our Daily Bread – an ironic, detached cinematic glimpse of how the food we eat on a daily basis is picked, killed, mechanically processed, and packaged for human consumption. Geyrhalter resists having an overtly political or muckraking agenda; instead, his sequence of images acts as an extended visual meditation, a plunge into the poetic mundanity of everyday existence. By singling out processes that we would otherwise take for granted or overlook, Geyrhalter calls our attention to the more absurd and surreal aspects of the food chain – with the graceful and rhythmic, yet thoroughly strange and haunting, processes of automatization in the foreground.

The fifth of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," Claire's Knee is a deliciously Rohmeresque story of sexual obsession. French diplomat Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), on a resort vacation, meets Claire (Laurence De Monaghan), the teen-aged daughter of a friend. Though engaged to be married, Jerome falls hopelessly in love – not with Claire, but with Claire's knee. Realizing that to be revealed as a fetishist would be ruinous for him, Jerome does not act upon his obsession. Eventually he gets to fulfill his yearnings by placing his hand upon Claire's knee, a gesture which she assumes is out of sympathy for a personal crisis she is going through. Originally released as Le Genou de Claire, this film was the recipient of the Prix Louis Delluc and the Prix Melies.

In director Richard Lester's Cuba, Sean Connery plays British soldier-of-fortune Robert Dapes, sent to Havana during the last days of the Batista regime. He is supposed to train Batista's soldiers for their upcoming confrontations with Castro's followers. As Dapes becomes increasingly sympathetic towards the rebel cause, he takes a few precious moments to renew his romance with Alexandra Pulido (Brooke Adams), who is now married to Juan Pulido (Chris Sarandon). The basic thrust of the film is that unchecked capitalism is perfectly capable of collapsing under its own weight – and that lofty idealism can be easily forgotten once absolute power is within one's grasp.

Inspiral Carpets couldn't really sustain their vision over the course of an entire album, yet they made a number of infectious Madchester singles, which became fairly big hits in England. The Singles collects all of the group's U.K. hits, from the swirling, sunny "Joe" to "I Want You," a duet with the Fall's Mark E. Smith that had previously been unavailable on album. Over the course of 17 tracks, nearly every one of the band's great moments ("This Is How It Feels," "Dragging Me Down," "She Comes in the Fall," "Saturn 5," "Uniform") is featured, making Singles a definitive overview of the laid-back baggy band's career.

Master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with Marcello Mastroianni as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director who, overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken, plunges 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."

Nostalghia is Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's enigmatic work about a writer (Oleg Yankovsky) who, trapped by his fame and an unhappy marriage, seeks out his cultural past in Italy. Here he meets Erland Josephson, a local pariah who declares that the world is coming to an end. The writer finds this prophecy curiously more alluring than the possibility of a dead-end future. Nostalghia won the Grand Prix de Creation and the International Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Set on the streets of New York's Little Italy, this dramatic series of character studies chronicles the lives and relationships between a disparate pair of Italian American cousins ( Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts). Both of them want to leave the poverty of ghetto life, but each takes a dramatically different route when one of them joins the mob and the other accidentally impregnates his girlfriend (Daryl Hannah). When the young gangster gets into deep trouble, the other must reevaluate his goals and his true feelings about his family.

John Boorman directed this gloriously savage interpretation of Arthurian legend loosely based on Thomas Malory's novel Le Morte d'Arthur. By turns gleaming and filthy, tender and bloody, the film is a visually stunning epic which is never less than compelling. Nigel Terry is perfectly cast as Arthur, whose unwavering trust and faith are shown to be both quietly heroic and achingly naïve. Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart also appear in this dense, passionate, and stirring triumph featuring a marvelous Trevor Jones score. The gruesome effects by Peter Hutchinson and Alan Whibley, however, and sights such as a knight having sex in full body armor make this a fairy tale strictly for adults.

The second of John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy," this film stars John Wayne as Cavalry Captain Nathan Brittles. In his last days before his compulsory retirement, Brittles must face the possibility of a full-scale attack from the Arapahos, fomented by the recent defeat of General Custer and by double-dealing Indian agents.

Woody Allen's tenth film as writer/director, Stardust Memories opens with a scene reminiscent of the opening of 8 1/2 and continues to use that film for inspiration. Sandy Bates (Allen) sits in a train at a train station, the car filled with very unhappy looking people. In a train on another set of tracks, Bates sees a wonderful party going on. A beautiful woman blows him a kiss as the happy train pulls out of the station. Bates is a famous film director who has been invited to attend a festival of his work being held at the Stardust hotel. He attends the event, but is ceaselessly harassed by fans who accost him and repel him in equal measure. While consistently hearing the complaints from fans, critics, and even space aliens that his earlier comedies are superior to his dramatic work, Bates juggles a trio of women in his private life. His encounters during the course of the retrospective force Bates to take a long look at himself.

After winning a cult following for several offbeat and darkly witty gore films, New Zealand director Peter Jackson abruptly shifted gears with this stylish, compelling, and ultimately disturbing tale of two teenage girls who construct an elaborate fantasy world named Borovnia and slowly drift away from reality, fueling an ultimately fatal obsession. The girls' parents decide that perhaps they're spending too much time together, and try to bring them back into the real world, but this only leads to a desperate and violent bid for freedom. Remarkably enough, Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story; in real life, Juliet grew up to become mystery novelist Anne Perry.

Nostalghia is Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's enigmatic work about a writer (Oleg Yankovsky) who, trapped by his fame and an unhappy marriage, seeks out his cultural past in Italy. Here he meets Erland Josephson, a local pariah who declares that the world is coming to an end. The writer finds this prophecy curiously more alluring than the possibility of a dead-end future. Nostalghia won the Grand Prix de Creation and the International Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Carlos Saura wrote and directed this powerful psychological drama in which family crises which reflect the embattled soul of a nation are seen through the eyes of an unusually perceptive child. Ana (Ana Torrent) is an eight-year-old girl growing up in a troubled household – her father Anselmo is a general in the Spanish military during the waning days of Franco's repressive regime, and her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) is dead, Ana having witnessed her agonizing final moments. Anna, her older sister Irene and younger sister Juana are looked after by their emotionally chilly Aunt Paulina, while housekeeper Rosa (Florinda Chico) provides what little warmth there is to be found in the household. While Ana's mother is gone, the girl frequently sees and hears her mother's spirit, and is convinced Anselmo's emotional neglect and infidelity is responsible for her death, leading the youngster to take her own form of revenge against her father.

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback.

Vivre sa vie presents 12 episodes in the life of a young woman who turns to prostitution to pay her rent. Each episode features a theatrical scene preceded by a title that lists the characters in the episode, its location, and a brief summary of the action. As he would throughout his career, director Jean-Luc Godard uses prostitution as a metaphor for both economic life in general and the position of the filmmaker under capitalism. The improvised acting and fragmented story give the viewer the impression of watching a documentary about a woman's life that is also a series of essays about aesthetics and economics. In addition, the film's camera style presents a catalogue of alternatives to conventional shooting strategies.