For starters, they breathed life into Italian feminine archetypes made familiar by postwar neo-realist cinema, and did it with real affection and brio.

It was a historic moment in postwar Italian cinema, but Mr. Sordi didn't notice.

Karmakar also contributed to Fruits of Confidence, a project produced and directed by Alexander Kluge, a highly influential figure in postwar German cinema.

Hamer's career "now looks like the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", according to film critic David Thomson.

The Taviani brothers' 16 feature films - all to be screened at the museum - represent one of the most diverse and consistently stimulating bodies of work in postwar cinema.

Jiri Weiss, a central figure of Czechoslovakia's postwar cinema, died on April 9 in Santa Monica, Calif.

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in a work on American film noir, wrote that "the prison assault remains one of the most brutal sequences in postwar American cinema."

Burstall was a key figure in Australian postwar cinema and was instrumental in rebuilding the Australian film industry at a time when it had been effectively dead for years.

To watch "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia," Martin Scorsese's monumental introduction to postwar Italian cinema, is to be indelibly reminded of how much movies can matter.

Catherine Deneuve, playing a French actress who takes up the cause of Marie's repatriation, is the living incarnation of everything noble and beautiful in postwar French cinema.