Jean Vigo’s first fiction film, an anarchic, disorienting vision of life in a French boarding school, was banned for anti-French sentiment and reissued in 1945 after the liberation. Drawn from Vigo’s own childhood experiences, the film focuses on four schoolboys who, fed up by the petty restrictions imposed on them, organize a revolt. One of the great subversive works of the cinema, it is an eloquent parable of freedom versus authority.

The most incisive of the Marx Brothers’ films, Duck Soup masks its trenchant satire on fascism and war in a cloak of hilarious sightgags, clever repartee, and song. Set in the tiny country of Freedonia (Land of the Spree and Home of the Knave), the film brings together Groucho as newly appointed president Rufus T. Firefly, Harpo and Chico as enemy spies, and Zeppo as a tenor. Patriotism, religion, diplomacy, courtroom justice, and general matters of state are irreverently spoofed in such memorably zany scenes as the Parliament’s song-and-dance rendition of “All God’s Chillun Got Guns,” a surreal response to Groucho’s call to arms, and the rightfully famous “mirror” sequence.