Michael Haneke's film of Franz Kafka's The Castle pairs one of the most influential voices in 20th century literature with one of the most visionary filmmakers of the new millennium. Originally broadcast on Austrian television in 1997, Kino offers The Castle on US DVD for the first time. A film as complex, vivid, and "intriguing" (New York Times) as Orson Welles' The Trial, The Castle is both an ingenious, perversely faithful interpretation of the master of alienation's novel, and a worthy companion to The Piano Teacher, Caché and other films from the darkest leading light of contemporary cinema.

Ozu’s hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent I Was Born, But . . . , Good Morning (Ohayô) is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set. Shot from the perspective of the petulant brothers, Good Morning is an enchantingly satirical portrait of family life that gives rise to gags about romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan.

Shot on location with a cast of nonprofessional actors, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece follows Umberto D., an elderly pensioner, as he struggles to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic boom. Alone except for his dog, Flike, Umberto strives to maintain his dignity while trying to survive in a city where traditional human kindness seems to have lost out to the forces of modernization. Umberto’s simple quest to fulfill the most fundamental human needs—food, shelter, companionship—is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever filmed and an essential classic of world cinema.

Acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (A TASTE OF CHERRY, THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES) pays homage to Yasujiro Ozu, the brilliant Japanese filmmaker whose spare but evocative style has been a major influence on Kiarostami's work. Canny and sublime, the 74-minute film is comprised of five long, apparently single takes of a beach on the Caspian Sea, all focusing on the ocean, comprised of virtually no camera movement and enveloped in rapturous natural sound.

Denys Arcand's award-winning, hilarious and satirical comedy features many of the same cast and characters as his acclaimed new film 'The Barbarian Invasions'. Made 17 years earlier, THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE is a witty and provocative look at the battle of the sexes. Four men gather at a country retreat to prepare a gourmet supper, while in the city their female companions are working out at a health club.

Panahi's gripping and controversial film is further confirmation that Iranian cinema is now among the most original, vital and exciting in the world.

THE PIANO TEACHER is a powerful and controversial new drama from the award winning filmmaker Michael Haneke.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke, one of modern cinema's most distinctive and ambitious directors, CODE UNKNOWN is a complex film of powerful emotional force and a fascinating study of the subtle connections and barriers between people, social class, race, and the difficulty of communicating in the modern world.

Michael Haneke’s brilliant follow up to his critically acclaimed 'The Piano Teacher', which won the Grand Prix, Best Actress and Best Actor awards at Cannes in 2001, was presented at this year’s Cannes Festival, where it screened out of competition (Patrice Chéreau, the president of this year’s jury, stars in the film which made TIME OF THE WOLF ineligible for any award). Taking its title from Codex Regius, an ancient Germanic poem which describes the time before the ‘Ragnarok’ the end of the world, TIME OF THE WOLF is a dark and brutally compelling apocalyptic drama. Reuniting Haneke with Isabelle Huppert, his award-winning star from 'The Piano Teacher', TIME OF THE WOLF brings together an impressive ensemble cast, including the French speaking talents of Patrice Chéreau, Béatrice Dalle, Olivier Gourmet and Serge Riaboukine.

A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, director Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of man. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson’s unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this seemingly simple story becomes a moving parable of purity and transcendence.

Mike Leigh’s brilliant and controversial Naked stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter on the lam in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharpe, Leigh’s panorama of England’s crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

The poignant, deadpan films of Aki Kaurismäki are pitched somewhere in the wintry nether lands between comedy and tragedy. And rarely in his body of work has the line separating those genres seemed thinner than in what is often identified as his “Proletariat Trilogy,” Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, and The Match Factory Girl. In these three films, something like social-realist farces, Kaurismäki surveys the working-class outcasts of his native Finland with detached yet disarming amusement. Featuring commanding, off-key visual compositions and delightfully dour performances, the films in this triptych exemplify the talents of a unique and highly influential film artist.