Six vignettes follow the Allied invasion from July 1943 to winter 1944, from Sicily north to Venice. Communication is fragile. A woman leads an Allied patrol through a mine field, she dies protecting a G.I. but the Yanks think she killed him. A street urchin steals shoes from a G.I. who tracks him to a shanty town. A G.I. meets a woman the day Rome is liberated, in six months they meet again. A U.S. nurse braves the trip across the Arno into German...

Vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafš, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style.

A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, this late masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the...

Stromboli. After World War II, a Lithuanian refugee marries a simple Italian fisherman she meets in a prisoner of war camp and accompanies him back to his isolated village on an island off the coast of Sicily. Cut off from the world, she finds herself crumbling emotionally, but she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Europe '51. Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite racked by guilt over the shocking death of her young son....