My own choice would be Cocteau's 1940s film, Beauty and the Beast. (You should be able to find it in a subtitled version at many better video stores.) It's a remarkable film, because Cocteau wasn't just a director; he was a poet, with a poet's vision. When he uses special effects, it isn't to make you just say "wow," but to make your mind turn in on itself and perhaps gain a few knots.
There are so many examples of this. For instance, when the Beast kills, Beauty knows it, because his hands smoke. And when the two are arguing and the tension in the hall is enormous, the faces of gilded plaster cherubims on the mantlepiece turn and watch the protagonists move, always *smiling*--as though these faces were somehow, unsettling real, while Beauty and the Beast were false; or perhaps because they know something that the others don't.
The visual atmsophere is sumptuous, deliberately striving to recreate the images of Gustave Dore, and succeeding. The dialog was by Cocteau himself, and so there's the surface, the sexual undertones, and a whole level of ambiguity that leaves you seeing shadows in way that Beauty sees them, but inside yourself.
Great film, this. Well worth renting.
