Aniki Bóbó adopts a child's perspective (the title is from a rhyme) to tell a universal story of friendship and betrayal among poor youngsters on streets along Oporto's Douro River banks. This early neo-realist feature amazingly sparked controversy within the conservative Salazar regime, and Oliveira was effectively blacklisted for two decades. (1942, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 70 minutes)

Douro, faina fluvial presents a resonant and robust montage of images of Oporto's harbor, its fishermen, and townspeople. (1931, 35 mm, silent, 18 minutes )

The life of a loaf from field to bakery, The Bread began as a sponsored industrial documentary. In Oliveira's hands it became something more—a work of beautiful images, sensitive treatment, and oblique social criticism. (1959, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 29 minutes)

The Painter and the City was the director's first film in color, a documentary comparing photographs of Oporto with the paintings of local artist António Cruz. (1956, 35 mm, 23 minutes)

Oliveira enjoyed an opportunity to adapt José Régio's well-known 1947 play on the theme of religious hypocrisy. Benilde, the play's eccentric heroine, turns up unexpectedly pregnant but insists she has never been with a man. Her devout family and the curious townsfolk naturally fixate on immaculate conception. Blending theatrical and cinematic stratagems, Benilde is a landmark work in the director's stylistic development. (1975, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 110 minutes)

Rather than following Dante's trek through the realms of the dead, Oliveira gives each patient in a mental asylum the role (or sometimes more than one) of a figure from literature or history. Adam and Eve meet characters from Dostoyevsky, while others select from Nietzsche, José Régio, or the Latin classics. The obvious message: Western civilization is a madhouse. (1991, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 140 minutes)

Another literary adaptation, Camilo Castelo Branco's epic nineteenth-century novel about an eighteenth-century Romeo-and-Juliet-like affair set in Portugal, Amor de Perdição mixes conventions from theater and cinema and retains Branco's rich and multilayered language. Although intended originally as a television film, it was not a success until released theatrically. (1978, 16 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 265 minutes)

Although Oliveira's intent was to offer a sequel and homage to the 1961 classic Belle de Jour, in fact the urbane Belle Toujours stands on its own as a rich comedy of manners and enigmatic take on past relationships, longing, and illusion. The Belle in this case is Bulle Ogier and her pursuer Michel Piccoli. (2006, 35 mm, French with subtitles, 68 minutes)

Belle de Jour, featuring Catherine Deneuve's famously masochistic housewife, was Oliveira's inspiration for Belle Toujours. (Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, 1961, 35 mm, Spanish and French with subtitles, 101 minutes)

The final hours of Camilio Castelo Branco's (Portugal's great nineteenth-century writer) life are portrayed in thoughtfully poetic, quasi-documentary style. Speculating on his creative process and the lore surrounding his still baffling death, the film builds, wrote one reviewer, "a rare hallucinatory power." (1992, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 75 minutes)

An American professor (John Malkovich) and his French wife (Catherine Deneuve) spend time in a Spanish convent, steeped in research that will prove Shakespeare was Spanish-born. From this premise other ideas evolve, including Oliveira's explorations of good and evil, and an obvious fascination with Faust and the Catholic Church. (1995, 35 mm, English, French, and Portuguese with subtitles, 93 minutes)

"Oliveira daringly combines a one-act play (Prista Monteiro's The Immortals) and two stories (Antonio Patricio's Suzy and Agustina Bessa-Luis's The Mother of the River) into a single narrative: the characters in Suzy attend a performance of the play, and one of them then recounts to another The Mother of the River. The theme of existential identity links the three works, and de Oliveira's stately, reflective style fuses them into a seamless and luminous visual poem."—Jonathan Rosenbaum. (1998, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 110 minutes)

A married woman (Chiara Mastroianni) falls in love with a pop singer (Pedro Abrunhosa) but refuses to act on her feelings, even after her husband's death. One of Oliveira's rare contemporary works, The Letter in fact recreates the seventeenth-century novel The Princess of Cléves in the present day, imposing the morals of that earlier century on modern characters. (1999, 35 mm, French and Portuguese with subtitles, 107 minutes)

A troupe of actors and a director named Manoel (Marcello Mastroianni in his final role) travel around Portugal for this sublime version of the road movie. En route, one actor locates his ancient aunt (Isabel de Castro) and the ensuing set piece provides the film's luminous core, "an exquisitely sad and moving reflection on memory and personal roots."—The New York Times. (1997, 35 mm, French and Portuguese with subtitles, 95 minutes)

In this delightful history lesson Oliveira-style, Professor Leonor Silveira embarks on a voyage with her daughter. "The metaphor of privileged tourists blithely afloat on a luxury ship (John Malkovich is captain), taking a tour of that crime scene known as Europe and its colonial-era environs, is at once both blunt and brilliant. In its intellectual reach and simplicity of form, it bears resemblance to Russian Ark. . . but is far more devastating."—The New York Times. (2003, 35 mm, English, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Greek with subtitles, 96 minutes)

Oliveira's latest work, Christopher Columbus, The Enigma plays with a question—was Columbus really Portuguese? A doctor and his wife are consumed with validating his lineage. As the film travels from 1947 Portugual to 2007 New York, and their search becomes endless, Oliveira and his own wife appear as the couple, wistfully and wittily reflecting on their lives. (2007, 35 mm, Portuguese with subtitles, 70 minutes)