Utamaro and his Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946) in 35 mm

Immortal beloved 

(Warning: plot twists explicitly discussed in detail)

Utamaro and His Five Women begins with a procession-- the camera gliding past men and women in elaborate kimonos with umbrellas held up like banners; cherry blossoms lining the boulevard, arthritic branches holding up tufts of cottony blossoms that suggest a startling depth (you're reminded of Max Fleischer's stereoptical experiments in Popeye). The procession drones on, the men stride forward, the women-- those perched on wooden clogs-- take huge circling steps, their heads bobbing up and down in sinuous waves. It's a fantastic throwaway gesture of virtuosity, as if Mizoguchi had decided to pick up the baton and conduct a warmup passage. 

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

Ghost story

(Warning: plot details and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail)

Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moon and Rain 1953) based on a collection of Ueda Akinari short stories of the same title (in particular "The House in the Thicket" and "The Lust of the White Serpent")--plus a bit of short fiction by Guy de Maupassant ("Decore!" or "How He Got the Legion of Honor")--is often considered the director's finest work, the supreme achievement of not just Japanese but world cinema.

Sansho the Bailiff, Come Drink with Me, Two Lovers

James Gray in an interview says The Yards (2000) came out of his father's job of supplying parts to the New York subway system, that Little Odessa (1994) and We Own the Night (2007) came out of years growing up knowing Russian gangsters, that We Own the Night also came from the fact that his stepbrother was a police officer. In the case of his latest film Two Lovers (2008) the project is, or so he claims, his least autobiographical and most personal work to date.