THE RAVEN is a classic of its kind for all the right reasons. First and foremost there's the inspired teaming of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, the screen's then-current titans of terror. Price and Lorre had appeared successfully a year earlier in Corman's TALES OF TERROR, while Price and Karloff hadn't worked together in a feature since Universal's TOWER OF LONDON in 1939, THE RAVEN would mark the first teaming of all three of these screen villains. Sensing a Laurel and Hardy-style camaraderie between Price and Lorre, writer Richard Matheson concocted a medieval horror satire complete with wizards, sorcery and gleeful black comedy.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic, restored in 2006 and now available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to "become an honest soul" amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a once famous artist - still of great renown, but he has been unable to paint anything of significance for a number of years. A young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) and his girlfriend Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) visit the artist at his country mansion in the South of France and a certain tension develops between Frenhofer and Marianne. Frenhofer believes that she could help him complete his great unfinished masterpiece – La Belle Noiseuse. The idea causes inevitable tensions and friction between Frenhofer and his wife Liz (Jane Birkin) and between Marianne and Nicolas. Each have to ask how far they will go to allow the creation of a work of art. Will they go as far as allowing The Beautiful Troublemaker to destroy their own lives and ambitions?

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

The second collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman (after STROMBOLI), EUROPA 51 is a provocative, haunting, and compassionate examination of the isolating and often misunderstood path of personal redemption and spiritual service in contemporary society. Composed of alternating sequences of daytime and nighttime episodes (that would be similarly used by Federico Fellini in his subsequent film, LA DOLCE VITA), the film presents a recurring visual dichotomy that illustrates the polarizing division between wealth and poverty, spirituality and materialism, vanity and humility, selfishness and benevolence.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

After making such American noir classics as The Naked City and Brute Force, blacklisted director Jules Dassin went to Paris and embarked on his masterpiece: a twisting, turning tale of four ex-cons who hatch one last glorious heist in the City of Lights. At once naturalistic and expressionistic, this melange of suspense, brutality, and dark humor was an international hit and earned Dassin the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series THE UNTOUCHABLES. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts the course of Montès’s scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she has ended up performing. Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

Thirty years before they hit the big screen via Brian DePalma's brilliant movie adaptation, Eliot Ness's legendary exploits came to life in the classic 1950s and '60s television series The Untouchables. Created by veteran crime-drama producer Quinn Martin, the series followed Ness (Robert Stack) and his team of crack crime fighters–including agents Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), and William Youngellow (Abel Fernandez)–as they took on the Mafia underworld of gangsters Al Capone (Neville Brand) and Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) in Prohibition-era Chicago. Smart and iconic, the series distinguished itself with superb voiceover narration from broadcaster Walter Winchell and a gritty style that nonetheless eschewed graphic depictions of gore and violence.

Secluded castles, musty hallways, tree branches that reach like hands, mist-shrouded forests, stranded travelers, duplicitous lovers who conspire to murder, secret passageways that descend to deteriorating crypts–this is the stuff of Italian gothic horror, one of the most exciting and atmospheric sub-genres of film, and Mario Bava was one of its greatest practitioners.