Top 10 Best Last Films: World Cinema

Such is Quentin Tarantino's conviction that most directors end their careers with a 'lousy' film that, in order to avoid the fate of so many major film-makers, he is reportedly considering retirement after having racked up three Oscar nominations for his 10th feature, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019). We have already seen that several British and American directors have managed to avoid bowing out on a low note. But what about those from the rest of the world?

There are numerous reasons why directors stop making films. Some become too old or infirm to secure insurance for a shoot, while others can only attract projects that disinterest them. Dwindling box-office fortunes often make it hard for directors to find funding, while some become so frustrated at battling against industry bureaucracy that they decide to call time on their careers. Others become disenchanted and seek employment in other spheres.

A number of those who had thrived from having fixed contracts under the old studio system struggled to make the transition to independence during the New Hollywood era. In many cases, work dried up because the executives who took over the studios had no film background and knew nothing of a director's track record. A few reinvented themselves in theatre and television, but some lost touch with their audience as cultural shifts widened the age gap. And, of course, a number simply died.

Final films aren't always planned and most directors think they've got one last picture in them. Indeed, some spend years developing potential projects. As Billy Wilder, who lived 21 years after completing the frustratingly unavailable, Buddy Buddy (1981), famously fumed: 'I didn't suddenly get stupid.'

He was born in the Austro-Hungarian town of Sucha, which is now located in southern Poland. But Wilder spent his most productive years in Hollywood and we shall start this global odyssey by looking at those Mitteleuropeans who followed the old adage, 'Go West, young man!'

The Hollywood Émigrés

At a time when Hollywood was still renowned for its orange groves, Frenchwoman Alice Guy-Blaché was helping establish the American film industry with the Solax studios at Flushing and Fort Lee in New Jersey. Her remarkable achievement is celebrated in Pamela B. Green's Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), which includes clips of her final film, Tarnished Reputations (1920).

By 1920, cinema had found its spiritual home in Hollywood. As motion pictures were still silent, actors, directors and technicians from Europe had flocked to the film colony to make their fortunes. Among them were the Swedish duo of Mauritz Stiller, who had discovered the teenage Greta Garbo, and Victor Sjöström, who used the surname Seastrom so that audiences could pronounce it more easily. He remains best known as a director for The Phantom Carriage (1921), but he was also acclaimed for his acting in Ingmar Bergman's To Joy (1950) and Wild Strawberries (1957), which ended a 45-year career in cinema.

Stiller and Sjöström had arrived in California as respected directors. Vienna-born travelling salesman, Erich von Stroheim, fetched up there with a fake title and a sneering sense of superiority that led to him becoming known as 'The Man You Love to Hate' for the self-directed performances in such sophisticated social comedies as Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922). Such was Von Stroheim's conviction in his own genius that he produced a 10-hour adaptation of Frank Norris's McTeague, which was eventually reduced to 150 minutes by editors appointed by MGM. The current version of Greed (1924) runs to 140 minutes, but still conveys the ambition of Von Stroheim's vision.

His final feature, Hello, Sister! (1933), was a studio commission that has never been issued on disc in this country. At the time of its release, a growing number of Austrians, Germans and Hungarians had made their way to Los Angeles to escape the rise of fascism. However, this particular path had been well trodden during the 1920s, after the German Ufa studio had joined with Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in signing the Parufamet Agreement to share talent and markets.

Beating the rush, however, was Ernst Lubitsch, who had been invited to Hollywood in 1922 by Mary Pickford, who was the most famous actress in the world. It's clear to see what attracted 'America's Sweetheart' from the six films gathered in Eureka's exceptional Lubitsch in Berlin (2010) collection. Famed during the silent era for the refinement of the 'Lubitsch Touch', he took as readily to talkies, as Cinema Paradiso users can discover from Trouble in Paradise (1932), Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) and To Be or Not to Be (1942), which is the subject of one of our What to Watch Next articles.

Sadly, he failed to finish That Lady in Ermine (1948), which was completed by Otto Preminger (more of whom anon), another Austro-Hungarian, whose hometown is now in Ukraine. Regretably, this Betty Grable musical isn't currently on disc, but Lubitsch's entire oeuvre should be available, as few have understood the medium better in its 127-year history. He did have a rival for ingenuity in the early days of the talkies, however.

Born in Tiflis, the Russian outpost that is now the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, Rouben Mamoulian had no idea that Silk Stockings (1957) would be his farewell, as the stage and screen pioneer received several offers after starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a sublime musical remake of Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). Indeed, he started an adaptation of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (which he had premiered on Broadway in 1935) after Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and King Vidor had turned it down. But he disagreed with producer Sam Goldwyn at every turn and was replaced by Otto Preminger, who (as the producer) had earlier fired and replaced him on Laura in 1944.

So controversial was Preminger's interpretation of Porgy and Bess that prints have long been out of circulation. But, while he was furious at wasting eight months on the pre-production, Mamoulian kept pitching for work. In 1960, Twentieth Century-Fox placed him in charge of Cleopatra (1963) and he insisted on Elizabeth Taylor being cast over Dana Wynter as the Egyptian queen. He held the Pinewood-based production together while Taylor fought for her life after contracting meningitis. But Mamoulian's dissatisfaction with Nunnally Johnson's script prompted him to resign in November 1961 and the 10 minutes of footage he had filmed at a cost of $7 million was scrapped when Joseph L. Mankiewicz took over. Mamoulian never directed again.

Known previously as Mano Kaminer and Mihály Kertész, Budapester Michael Curtiz had worked across the continent before being hired by Warner Bros in 1926. He would become the studio's safest pair of hands, as he took on projects across the generic range. In 1961, he called time on a 49-year career that had seen him pair Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland in such classics as Captain Blood (1935), bring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman together in a gin joint in Casablanca (1942) and earn Joan Crawford her Oscar in Mildred Pierce (1945).

For all his achievements, however, Curtiz tends to be considered a journeyman because he rarely wrote his own material and followed studio templates rather than imposing his own visual style. Indeed, as the Hungarian had a complex relationship with the English language and could be temperamental on the set, he has been seen by some as a figure of fun. His films were never anything less than polished, however, and he moved smoothly from directing Bradford Dillman in Francis of Assisi to John Wayne and Tom Tryon in The Comancheros (both 1961), a Western that had originally been assigned to George Stevens, with Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston, as the attached stars. As Curtiz was occasionally absent to receive treatment for the cancer that would claim him in 1962, Wayne assumed the director's chair to keep the shoot going.

Compatriot Sándor Kellner also made films across Europe and similarly benefited from a name change. He would eventually base himself in Britain, but Alexander Korda was obsessed with breaking into Hollywood. Having guided Charles Laughton to an Oscar in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Korda devoted much of his time to producing for his London Films company. But he continued to call the shots from time to time, with his take on Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband being his final venture behind the camera, although he also helped Anthony Kimmins with a few uncredited scenes in Mine Own Executioner (both 1947).

A Few More Expats

In 1929, a short entitled People on Sunday was made in Berlin. It was a mini-City Symphony that used the content and juxtaposition of the images to comment on human nature and wider Weimar society. What was so remarkable about this wittily perceptive piece was that just about everyone involved in its making went on to become an accomplished director in Hollywood. Co-directors Edgar G. Ulmer (an Austro-Hungarian whose home city is now in the Czech Republic) and Dresden-born Robert Siodmak were respectively responsible for such noir classics as Detour (1945) and The Killers (1946), while co-scenarist Curt Siodmak became a stalwart of the Hollywood horror genre, thanks to gems like George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941).

Already famed for devising the process that allowed scenery painted on glass to be photographed with live action (take another look at Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1927), Breslau-born cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan went on to win the Academy Award for Robert Rossen's monochrome pool-hall drama, The Hustler (1961). Camera assistant Fred Zinnemann (another Austro-Hungarian whose birthplace is now in Poland) would rack up 10 Oscar nominations, winning Best Director for both From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man For All Seasons (1966).

Producer Seymour Nebenzal was actually born in New York, but followed father Heinrich Nebenzahl into the German film industry, where he was feted for pictures like G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918 (1930) and Fritz Lang's M (1931). And completing the august line-up was the aforementioned Billy Wilder, who contributed to the screenplay. He would also savour dual Best Director wins, for The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Apartment (1960), for which he also took home the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Yet, despite their many achievements, these four iconic directors-in-waiting - Ulmer (The Cavern, 1964), Siodmak (The Last Roman, 1969), Wilder (Buddy Buddyand Zinnemann (Five Days One Summer, 1982) - share the dubious distinction of not having their final feature available on disc in the UK.

Their fate is shared by fellow exiles William Dieterle (Quick, Let's Get Married, 1964), William Wyler (The Liberation of L.B. Jones, 1970), Anatole Litvak (The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun, 1970) and Otto Preminger The Human Factor (1979), who all had distinguished careers in Hollywood.

Dieterle was considered the 'king of the biopic' for the likes of The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. However, he also made such classics as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Portrait of Jennie (1948). Cinema Paradiso has produced an Instant Expert's Guide to William Wyler, so click on the link to learn about the man who made the 11-time Oscar winner, Ben-Hur (1959).

Hailing from Kyiv, Litvak was one of cinema's wanderers. Having trained in the Soviet Union, he worked in Germany, Britain and France before settling in Hollywood. In addition to assisting Sicilian-born Frank Capra with his epic wartime propaganda series, Why We Fight (1942-45), Litvak also directed Olivia De Havilland and Ingrid Bergman to Best Actress Oscars in The Snake Pit (1948) and Anastasia (1956).

Litvak was known as a disciplinarian on the set, but he was nowhere near as much of a martinet as Preminger, whose Austro-Hungarian hometown is also now in Ukraine. He had forged a reputation in Vienna's theatreland before being lured to Hollywood by 20th Century-Fox. Following such lauded noirs as Fallen Angel (1945), Preminger took on the Production Code in combative pictures like The Moon Is Blue (1953), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). He also played Nazis in war films like Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953) and even guested as Mr Freeze in Batman (1966-68), the role played by compatriot Arnold Schwarzenegger in Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin (1997).

After forming a dream team at Universal with producer Ross Hunter on Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Written on the Wind (1966), Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sirk in Hamburg) opted to leave Hollywood and return to his native Germany after finishing Imitation of Life (1959). Fannie Hurst's novel had previously been filmed in 1934 by John M. Stahl, with Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers as the widowed mothers having problems with their daughters. But the fact that Lana Turner's own daughter had stabbed her lover during a domestic dispute ensured that Sirk's remake became a box-office hit. However, he had tired of Hollywood and spent the next three decades in retirement, although he did supervise a few shorts at the Munich film school before dying aged 89 in 1987.

Emulating his hero, Erich von Stroheim, fellow Wiener Josef von Sternberg added the nobility particle to his surname during the 1920s. He found fame in shaping the screen persona of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930), but struggled to move on from their seven-film collaboration. A combination of misfortune, ill-health and artistic incompatibility left Von Sternberg in the wilderness for many years. Yet, he managed to have two last films. His Pacific War drama, The Saga of Anatahan, appeared in 1953. But, four years later, Universal released Jet Pilot, which had taken 18 months to shoot at various intervals between 1949-53, by which time, Von Sternberg had completed Macao (1952). Typically, RKO producer Howard Hughes had been unable to resist tinkering with Jet Pilot and it had remained on the shelf after he sold the studio.

Production problems also dogged Lewis Milestone's swan song, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Born in Odessa, Lev Milstein was raised in what is now the Moldovan city of Chisinau before he took a boat to the United States around the time of his 18th birthday. He found his way to Hollywood after Great War service and won Oscars for both Two Arabian Nights (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Over the next three decades, he consistently demonstrated his versatility with such works as Of Mice and Men (1939) and Ocean's 11 (1960). But he wasn't offered another feature after replacing Carol Reed on the colour remake of the Frank Lloyd version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) that had won the Oscar for Best Picture.

There are other tales of Europeans who made good under the studio system, some of whom we'll encounter below. But we shall end Cinema Paradiso's survey with Andre De Toth, the Hungarian who famously made House of Wax (1953) in 3-D having lost an eye at an early age. Helped to find his feet in Hollywood through his friendship with Alexander Korda, De Toth made films as different as The Other Love (1947) and The Indian Fighter (1955) before winding down his career with Play Dirty (1968), a Second World War adventure starring Michael Caine. A decade later, however, De Toth also did some uncredited second unit work on Richard Donner's comic-strip blockbuster, Superman (1978).

Crossing the Continent (and Beyond)

How very different the history of cinema would have been without the world wars. Although film-making had started in Hollywood before the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, influential directors like D.W. Griffith were comparatively rare - and he tended to borrow techniques devised by others rather than being a great innovator himself. But American cinema was allowed to develop without competition for three years, as Europe's warring governments failed to cotton on to the propaganda potential of the moving image and halted film production to divert chemical supplies to the manufacture of munitions.

By the time normality returned in the early 1920s, Hollywood ruled the roost, as audiences caught up with titles they had missed during the war years. This left little screen time for home-produced products at a time when the absence of dialogue meant it was relatively easy to insert translated intertitles into mummed movies with a universal appeal. In response, French film-makers experimented with the avant-garde, while their counterparts in Weimar Germany explored how visuals could convey a character's psychological state, as Cinema Paradiso explained in 100 Years of Expressionism

. In the newly formed Soviet Union, the editing technique known as montage became the way to convey a message, as we saw in A Brief History of Soviet Cinema.

The control imposed on film by the Kremlin would be replicated by the fascist dictators in Italy, Germany and Spain during the 1930s. Consequently, the majority of the pictures produced during this period have been tainted and are rarely shown today, particularly in the case of the pernicious anti-Semitic propaganda produced in the Third Reich. Yet, non-politicised entertainments were made and some remain enduring favourites in their countries of origin.

Such was the potency of the studio system that Hollywood features continued to find a global audience during the Jazz Age. However, the coming of sound and a resistance among moviegoers to dubbing and subtitles gave rival industries a chance to claw back a corner of the market. The unlucky loser in this regard was Britain, as a common language meant that American films continued to hold sway at the box office, even though popular music-hall stars like Gracie Fields, George Formby and Will Hay carved a nice little niche for themselves. We'll return to them in a future Cinema Paradiso article.

What all this means is that disc access to world cinema produced during the first two-thirds of the 20th century is dismayingly restricted. As a consequence, the only last films made by the titans of Weimar cinema available to rent from Cinema Paradiso are F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931) and Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). Both men spent time in Hollywood, with Murnau creating a silent masterpiece with Sunrise (1927). But their most significant work was filmed in Berlin, with Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and The Last Laugh (1924) exerting a major influence on directors everywhere, while Lang showed that epics were possible outside Hollywood with Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927).

You can read about this divisive figure's career in The Instant Expert's Guide to Fritz Lang. Murnau is also covered in 100 Years of Expressionism, but we should remind you that cinematographer Floyd Crosby won an Academy Award for his lustrous work on Murnau's 'Story of the South Seas', which premiered in New York a week after the 42 year-old director was killed in a car crash in California.

As the major players in Das Neue Kino are still with us, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) is the only last film currently available from the second golden age of German cinema. Fassbinder is also the subject of an Instant Expert's Guide, but his posthumously released adaptation of Jean Genet's 1947 novel is well worth checking out for the boldness of its approach and the fine performances of Brad Davis as the Belgian sailor and Jeanne Moreau as the Brest bordello keeper.

One of the sad facts of screen history is that the vast majority of the films produced since 1895 are either lost or haven't been seen since their initial release. This is partly due to the evolution of the motion picture and changing audience tastes. But there is still a place for the golden oldie, as services like Cinema Paradiso prove.

While researching an item like this, however, it strikes home how few 'foreign-language' films are actually shown in the UK. The odd few get a general release, while a clutch bounce around the festival circuit before vanishing for good. This means that while UK audiences get lumped with the complete works of a Hollywood journeyman backed by a studio owned by a multinational conglomerate, the biggest names in world cinema have to jostle for screen space.

Even all-time greats like Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog have had releases overlooked by British distributors. This means that films fail to make it to disc, which puts them beyond the reach of even Cinema Paradiso, with its catalogue of over 10,000 titles.

If it's any consolation, the situation is the same in lots of other European countries. Thanks to America's century-long bid for cine-supremacy, the majority of film fans are more familiar with American movies than their homeland's classics. Consequently, decades' worth of cinematic history is left languishing on archive shelves and once bright stars and glowing directorial visions are been dimmed by indifference. This is a cultural calamity, especially in a digital age, when film institutes worldwide could be encouraging future generations by sharing their treasures.

In the meantime, it's essential that the likes of Cinema Paradiso keep offering users the chance to make new discoveries and expand their horizons, as that is the only way in which the artform we all love will not only survive, but thrive.

Despite their brilliance in the 1920s, Vsevolod Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia, 1928) and Alexander Dovzhenko ( Earth, 1930) struggled to have the same impact in the sound era. By contrast, Sergei Eisenstein produced three masterpieces either side of the divide, with Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927) being matched by Alexander Nevsky (1938), Ivan the Terrible (1944) and Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1958). The latter was completed in 1946, but Joseph Stalin took exception to the depiction of Tsar Ivan IV and prevented its release. Consequently, Eisensein was forced to abandon a third instalment prior to his death at the age of 50 in 1948. Complete with a couple of glorious colour sequences, 'The Boyars' Plot' was finally screened, five years after Stalin's demise, in 1958.

Having started his career in the silent era in avant-garde partnership with Leonid Trauberg, Grigori Kozintsev reinvented himself as a purveyor of literary adaptations. Following Don Quixote (1957) and Hamlet (1964), King Lear (1971) featured an exceptional performance by the Estonian actor, Jüri Järvet. He would also excel in Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris (1972), in the role taken by George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake.

The son of a renowned poet, Tarkovsky specialised in a densely symbolic form of intellectual cinema that explored such themes as spirituality, nature, memory and existence. Filmed in long takes that challenged the viewer to seek meaning within and beyond the frame, features like Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979) earned Tarkovsky an international reputation and the suspicion of the Kremlin. Having left the USSR to make Nostalgia (1983) in Rome, he shot his final offering, The Sacrifice (1986), in Sweden. He died in Paris later that year, but some have claimed that the 54 year-old didn't succumb to cancer and was actually poisoned by the KGB.

Another director who refused to follow the Communist-approved brand of socialist realism was Sergei Parajanov. A Georgian whose work reflected his passion for Ukraine and Armenia, Parajanov was very much influenced by Tarkovsky and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as he created such distinctive and boldly subversive films as Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). Unable to fathom the delicate symbolism, the Kremlin decided that Parajanov was dangerous and he spent several years in gulags on trumped-up charges. Such was his courage, however, that he continued to make films like The Legend of the Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988), an adaptation of a Mikhail Lermontov story about a wandering minstrel that proved to be his final feature, as Parajanov died of cancer in 1990 before he could complete Confession.

Parajanov was 66 when he passed, but Larisa Shepitko was only 41 when she was killed in a car crash in 1979. Her husband, Elem Klimov (Come and See, 1985), finished the film on which she had been working as Farewell (1983). However, Cinema Paradiso users can rent her last completed project, The Ascent (1977), a partisan story set during the Great Patriotic War that saw Shepitko become only the second woman (after Hungarian Márta Mészáros for Adoption, 1975) to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

For almost six decades, Andrjez Wajda was the cinematic conscience of Poland. His wartime trilogy of A Generation (1954), Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) remains potent and Wajda frequently returned to the fight against the Nazis after making a crucial contribution to the Cinema of Moral Anxiety with Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981). Frustratingly, the powerful Afterimage (2016) isn't available on disc, but Cinema Paradiso can bring you the last works of compatriot Krzysztof Kieslowski, who followed the monumental Dekalog: The Ten Commandments (1989) with the trilogy based on the French flag, Three Colours: Blue, Three Colours: White (both 1993) and Three Colours: Red (1994). Kieslowski was only 54 when he died, but two of the scripts he left for a second triptych have since been filmed by Tom Tykwer (Heaven, 2002) and Danis Tanovic ( Hell, 2005).

As one of the 669 brought to Britain in 1938 through Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport scheme, Karel Reisz is usually considered a British director. But the maker of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) was born in the Czechoslovakian city of Ostrava. His final feature, Everybody Wins (1990), was scripted by Arthur Miller from his own play and is well worth renting from Cinema Paradiso.

Reisz was well established as a prominent social realist by the time the Czech New Wave broke in the mid-1960s. It bore the influence of shorts like Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), which is contained in the BFI's excellent 2006 collection, Free Cinema. Among the movement's most significant adherents was Miloš Forman, whose early features, Black Peter (1964), A Blonde in Love (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967), all bear its imprint.

Once in Hollywood after fleeing the Soviet incursion in 1969, Forman won the Oscar for Best Director for both One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). His subsequent record was patchy, but Forman was incapable of making a poor film and he concluded his career with Goya's Ghosts (2006), in which the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgard) seeks to protect his muse, Ines (Natalie Portman), from Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) of the Inquisition. Forman had no intention of this being his final project, however, and sought to cast Sean Connery and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Ember, a story of class within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ghost of Munich, a French perspective on the 1938 peace conference that would have seen Gérard Depardieu and Mathieu Amalric sharing the role of Prime Minister Édouard Daladier.

Despite the excellent work done by labels like Second Run, the final films of the other major players in the Czech Film Miracle have gone unreleased. But the same is true for most countries across the continent, with even the biggest names being remembered only for their greatest hits. There are exceptions, as Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer was rediscovered in his final years after having been feted for such early works as Michael (1924), The Master of the House (1925) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Consequently, Cinema Paradiso can present such solemn masterpieces as Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964)

The latter was never intended to be a farewell, as Dreyer was working on a life of Jesus Christ when he died aged 79 in 1968. By contrast, Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman did consciously retire from film-making at the age of 85. Cinema Paradiso has celebrated his incalculably influential career in 21 Reasons to Love Ingmar Bergman, which mentions his final feature behind the camera, Saraband (2003), which reunited Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann as Jonas and Marianne, who had last been seen bickering incessantly in Scenes From a Marriage (1973).

In Fred Scott's documentary, Being a Human Person, Roy Andersson (who is now 79) intimated that About Endlessness (both 2019) may well be his last hurrah. Similarly, Finn Ari Kaurismäki has insisted that The Other Side of Hope (2017) will be his last venture. Hungarian Béla Tarr has made much the same claim about The Turin Horse (2011). Such is their brilliance that we live in hope that, at 65 and 66, Kaurismäki and Tarr may feel they still have one more picture left in them. As is true of the cherishably droll Andersson, who can take heart from Hayao Miyazaki, who called it at day after The Wind Rises (2013), only to be lured back to work on the forthcoming How Do You Live? in 2016.

All three of Japan's most renowned directors have been the subject of Instant Expert Guides, so head there to learn more about Kenji Mizoguchi 's Street of Shame (1956), Yasujiro Ozu 's An Autumn Afternoon (1962) and Akira Kurosawa 's Madadayo (1993). Also worth noting is Nagisa Oshima's Gohatto (1999), which saw the onetime enfant terrible responsible for such contentious pictures as Naked Youth (1960), Violence At High Noon (1966) and Ai no corrida (1976) return to directing for the first time since Max Mon Amour (1986), in which Charlotte Rampling had enjoyed a close encounter of the simian kind.

Elsewhere in Asia, final films that are available on disc in the UK are few and far between. However, Cinema Paradiso can bring you The Stranger (1991), the swan song of another Instant Expert recipient, Satyajit Ray, and The Mystic Masseur (2001), a rare directorial outing for Ismail Merchant to go with The Courtesans of Bombay (1983), The Proprietor (1995) and Cotton Mary (1999).

A native of Mumbai, Merchant was only 68 when he died in 2005, ending his fabled partnership as a producer with American director James Ivory, who has only made the rather overlooked The City of Your Final Destination (2009) since Merchant-Ivory closed for business with The White Countess (2005). That said, Ivory did become the oldest winner (at 89) of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name (2017), which he had originally been slated to co-direct.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere

Another director who has been profiled in Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert series, Luis Buñuel is among those who spent much of their career in exile. He left his native Spain under Generalisimo Francisco Franco, with the result that some of his finest films were made in Mexico, including Los Olvidados (1950) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). However, he closed his career where it had begun, with Un Chien andalou (1928) and L'Age d'or (1930), in France, with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), in which Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina share the role of the maid who torments the aristocratic Fernando Rey.

Few other Spanish directors have travelled as well, with neither 1940s stalwart Edgar Neville nor the postwar pair of Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem enticing UK DVD distributors. The same is true of Portugal, with the notable exception of Manoel De Oliveira, who came into vogue in his 90s. However, his final outing (produced at the grand old age of 104), A Igreja do Diabo (2013), didn't make it out of the festival circuit.

Considering the significance of Italian cinema since the early silent era, surprisingly few of its masterworks are available on disc. None of the so-called 'White Telephone' comedies of the 1930s or the 'calligraphist' historical dramas of the 1940s have been picked up, largely because they are associated with the regime of Benito Mussolini. Even the major figures in the postwar neo-realist boom that transformed film-making in every corner of the planet have been given short shrift when it comes to their later careers.

There's no sign, therefore, of Roberto Rossellini's last non-documentary, The Messiah (1975). And the same is true of Vittorio De Sica's The Voyage (1974), even though it was adapted from a novel by Luigi Pirandello and reunited Sophia Loren and Richard Burton from after they headlined Alan Bridges's 1974 remake Alan Bridges of David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945).

Cinema Paradiso does have plenty of films by both Rossellini and De Sica if you type their names into the searchline. The same is true of

Luchino Visconti, whose Ossessione (1942) and La terra trema (1948) were two of the cornerstones of neo-realism, alongside Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). However, Visconti opted for a more opulent style after Senso (1954) and there is a plushness to The Innocent (1976), which was adapted from Gabriele d'Annunzio's The Intruder and features a fine performance by Giancarlo Giannini, as the 19th-century aristocrat, who reacts badly to the news he is being cuckolded by his long-suffering wife, Laura Antonelli.

The prominent members of the Second Italian Film Renaissance have been more fortunate, when it comes to DVD and Blu-ray. While it's a shame that talents like Ettore Scola, Pietro Germi, Luigi Comencini and Lina Wertmüller have sometimes been marginalised, Cinema Paradiso can still treat users to the last works of four undisputed masters.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's career was brutally cut short, when he was murdered at the age of 53 in November 1975. Three weeks later, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was premiered to an outcry that had never died down. Based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade and set during the short-lived Republic of Salò (1943-45), this treatise on the abuse of power and wealth encapsulates the anger that had informed Pasolini's cinema from Accatone (1961) onwards.

While Pasolini had been a poet before turning to film, Federico Fellini had worked as a cartoonist prior to making his way as a screenwriter in the 1940s. His achievement has been considered in another Instant Expert's Guide, which will introduce readers to such landmark features as La strada (1954), La dolce vita (1960), 8 ½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973). But don't overlook The Voice of the Moon (1990), in which Roberto Benigni plays a fake well inspector who is dismayed by his discoveries while travelling through the Italian countryside.

A former film critic, Michelangelo Antonioni made his name with 'women's pictures' like Story of a Love Affair (1950) and The Girlfriends (1955). However, he adopted a more modernist style in such austere studies of alienation as L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). He moved into colour with The Red Desert (1964) and caught the spirit of Swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) before accepting an invitation to make a documentary in Communist China. The epic Chung Kuo, Cina (1972) was released between the cult English-language duo of Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), which starred Jack Nicholson.

In 1985, Antonioni suffered a debilitating stroke. But Wim Wenders helped him make Beyond the Clouds (1995), which he followed with a short entitled 'The Dangerous Thread of Things', which joined Wong Kar-wai's 'The Hand' and Steven Soderbergh's 'Equilibrium' in the 2004 anthology, Eros. Antonioni died at the age of 94 in July 2007. Cinema Paradiso paid tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci when he passed away at the age of 77 in the same week as Nicolas Roeg in November 2018. Bertolucci had been working on a film about Antonioni's pet theme of 'incommunicability', but had to be content with Me and You (2012) rounding off a career that had contained such masterworks as The Conformist, The Spider's Strategem (both 1970) and 1900 (1976), as well as provocative outings like Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the multi-Oscar-winning epic, The Last Emperor (1987).

Bertolucci had also contributed to the screenplay of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Although he had originally made 'sword and sandal' pictures like The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), Leone had become synonymous with the Spaghetti Western, thanks to the Clint Eastwood trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). However, Leone closed his career with the crime saga, Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Italy was a hive of genre activity in the 1960s, with the Peplum, Poliziottescho, Spaghetti Western, Macaroni Combat and Giallo strands attracting cult audiences. As directors often adopted Anglicised pseudonyms, it wasn't always easy for devotees to keep up with the leading purveyors. Pinning down available final films is equally tricky, but Cinema Paradiso can offer Umberto Lenzi's House of Lost Souls (1989), a follow-up to Ghosthouse (1987), from the director who had launched the cannibal sub-genre with Man From Deep River (1972). Cinema Paradiso has lots of Lenzi available to rent, as well as spine-tinglers from Mario Bava, his son Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento. Simply type in the names, order the films and wait for the envelope to land on your doormat!

We end where projected motion pictures began, in France. Sadly, Georges Méliès's Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1913) didn't make the cut for Jacques Meny's Méliès the Magician (1997), but there's plenty to enjoy in this tribute to the man who had transformed the moving image from a novelty into a unique form of art and entertainment.

Cinema Paradiso has chronicled the golden age of Poetic Cinema in a special article, which reflected upon the careers of such remarkable talents as René Clair, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné. Unfortunately, it's not possible to rent any of their final films. But it was tragic that Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) was released in the same year that this visionary film-maker died of tuberculosis at the age of just 29.

Equally influenced by the Surrealists, the polymathic Jean Cocteau's started making films in the 1930s. His debut, The Blood of a Poet (1930) would form the first part of an Orphic trilogy that would be completed by Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1959), which proved to be his last feature before his death at the age of 74 in 1963.

A year earlier, Jean Renoir had brought down the curtain on his cinematic career with The Vanishing Corporal (1962), an adaptation of a Jacques Perret novel whose POW camp setting makes it a perfect companion to La Grande illusion (1937). Struggling to find funding for other projects, Renoir spent much of his remaining 17 years writing. He did direct The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir (1970), but we'll bend the rules and disqualify it on the grounds it was made for television.

None of the great literary directors of the 1930s make the cut when it comes to last films. But, while Cinema Paradiso users will have to content themselves with other works by Abel Gance and Sacha Guitry, they can enjoy (albeit in a round-about manner), Marcel Pagnol's cinematic swansong. He had had so enjoyed making Manon des sources (1952) that he novelised and expanded the screenplay as Letters From My Windmill (1954). This, of course, provided Claude Berri with the inspiration to make the timeless duo of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (both 1986).

It seems odd that someone who had devoted his life to comedy should have ended his career with a documentary about football. But Jacques Tati had always been a sporty type, even playing semi-professional rugby for Racing Club de France. Among his music-hall set-pieces was 'Impressions sportives', which included a mime about a goalkeeper. This love of football is evident in Forza Bastia, which captured the 1978 UEFA Cup Final between SC Bastia of Corsica and PSV Eindhoven. The film was only completed by daughter Sophie Tatischeff before her death in 2001 and it can be found on the Blu-ray, The Short Films of Jacques Tati.

Interestingly, around this period, Tati had been developing a project called Confusion with Ron and Russell Mael. They would finally make a film with a French director, when they scored and featured in Leos Carax's Annette, the making of which is touched upon in Edgar Wright's fine documentary, The Sparks Brothers (both 2021).

During the 1950s, a number of French directors had their reputations damaged by Cahiers du Cinéma's attack on 'Cinéma du Papa'. Held up against these meticulously made features that prioritised dialogue over the visuals, were titles that bore the director's personal style and explored their recurring themes. Several of the Frenchmen (as they were all male) to make this 'auteur' pantheon have last films available from Cinema Paradiso, including Max Ophüls (Lola Montès, 1955), Jacques Becker (Le Trou, 1960), Jean-Pierre Melville (Un Flic, 1972), Georges Franju ( Nuits rouge, 1974) and Robert Bresson ( L'Argent, 1983). Another film-maker to find fame at this time was Roger Vadim, whose final feature happened to be a remake of his debut. Causing something of a sensation in 1956, ...And God Created Woman made Brigitte Bardot an overnight superstar. By contrast, the 1988 version did little to further the career of Rebecca De Mornay.

The names associated with the nouvelle vague are sufficiently well known for us to simply divide them into those whose final films are not on disc - Jacques Demy (Three Seats For the 26th, 1988), Louis Malle (Vanya on 42nd Street, 1994), Jacques Rivette (Around a Small Mountain, 2009) - and those whose are: François Truffaut (Finally, Sunday!, 1983), Éric Rohmer (Romance of Astrea and Celadon, 2007), Alain Resnais (Life of Riley, 2014) and Agnès Varda (Varda By Agnès, 2019).

As readers of our recent Instant Expert's Guide will know, Claude Chabrol's Bellamy (2009) is also missing. But amends of sort are made by the fact that his 1994 thriller, L'Enfer, made use of the screenplay for Henri-Georges Clouzot's unfinished final project, whose story is expertly told in Serge Bromberg's Inferno (2009). Also worth seeking out are a clutch of final films by members of the post-New Wave fraternity (because, again, they are all men), including Claude Sautet's Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), Alain Corneau's Love Crime (2010) and Claude Miller's Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012).

Fittingly rounding things off are two unmissable documentaries. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: The Four Sisters (2018) completed the sequence of Shoah (1985), A Visitor From the Living (1997), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m (2001), The Karski Report (2010) and The Last of the Unjust (2013) that provides the most sustained and restrained analysis of the Holocaust ever committed to celluloid. Each one should be watched and its lessons learned.

We end on a lighter note, however. Emulating Martin Scorsese's approach in

A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Cinema (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999), Bertrand Tavernier's A Journey Through French Cinema (2016) is a crash course in Gallic screen history that will have viewers feverishly tapping titles into the Cinema Paradiso searchline. In an ideal world, we would have them all for you (even those from Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America). But, rest assured, when it comes to postal rental, we have more than anyone else.