Told through the eyes of François Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime.
François Truffaut
France,
1959
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1941
DVD
47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1941
DVD
One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s _8½_ (_Otto e mezzo_) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
The blind swordsman wanders into a town to celebrate the New Year. There, he befriends a young woman whose father has gone missing; as he tries to help her find him, he becomes entangled in a web of corruption and a series of tragic twists of fate.
Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Japan,
1964
Blu-ray, DVD
Rossellini’s three-part series is like a Renaissance painting come to life: a portrait of fifteenth-century Florence, ruled by the Medici political dynasty. With a lovely score from composer Manuel de Sica, this grand yet intimate work is a storybook conjuring of a way of life and thought.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1973
DVD
Technically, Alice in the Cities is Wim Wenders’s fourth film, but he often refers to it as his first, because it was during this film that he discovered the genre of the road movie.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1974
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the fascist period. The Academy Award–winning Amarcord remains one of cinema's enduring treasures.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1973
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Wim Wenders pays loving homage to rough-and-tumble Hollywood film noir with The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1977
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Fassbinder’s experimental noir is a subversive, self-reflexive gangster movie full of unexpected asides and stylistic flourishes, and features an audaciously bonkers final shot and memorable turns from many of the director’s rotating gallery of players.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1970
35 mm, DVD
Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia’s greatest icon painter.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Soviet Union,
1966
DVD
George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of this classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion's paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values.
Chester Erskine
United Kingdom,
1952
DVD
In 1986, Louis Malle set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers in middle- and working-class communities from coast to coast, Malle paints a generous, humane portrait of their individual struggles.
Louis Malle
France,
1986
16 mm, DVD
In Federico Fellini’s quirky, imaginative fable, a motley crew of European aristocrats (and a lovesick rhinoceros!) board a luxurious ocean liner on the eve of World War I to scatter the ashes of a beloved diva.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1984
DVD
With _An Angel at My Table,_ Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brings to the screen the harrowing true-life story of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. _Angel_ beautifully captures the color and power of the New Zealand landscape.
Jane Campion
New Zealand,
1990
DVD
A unique, enthralling cinematic experience, Teshigahara’s _Antonio Gaudí_, less a documentary than a visual poem, takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Japan,
1984
35 mm, DVD
As Apu progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1956
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In this gently devastating drama, a critical breakthrough for Naruse, he contrasts the life of an aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, with that of her youthful counterpart, a lovely young girl resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1933
DVD
Apu is now in his early twenties, out of college, and hoping to live as a writer. Alongside his professional ambitions, the film charts his romantic awakening, which occurs as the result of a most unlikely turn of events, and his eventual, fraught fatherhood.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1959
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In Kaurismäki’s drolly existential crime drama, a coal miner attempts to leave behind a provincial life of inertia and economic despair, only to get into ever deeper trouble. Yet a minor-key romance with a hilariously dispassionate meter maid might provide a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1988
35 mm, DVD
Kinoshita’s ambitious and intensely moving film begins as a multigenerational epic about the military legacy of one Japanese family, before settling into an emotionally complex portrayal of parental love during wartime.
Keisuke Kinoshita
Japan,
1944
DVD
On the last day of World War II, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment, we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1958
DVD
In this endlessly diverting compendium of four short films, Pierre Etaix regards the 1960s from his askew but astute perspective.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1966
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Based on events from writer-director Louis Malle’s own childhood, _Au revoir les enfants_ tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France.
Louis Malle
France,
1987
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1962
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
Autumn Sonata was the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans: Ingmar, the iconic director of The Seventh Seal, and Ingrid, the monumental star of Casablanca.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1978
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema.
Gabriel Axel
Denmark,
1987
Blu-ray, DVD
Robert Downey Sr.’s first feature is a rollicking, slapstick, ultra-low-budget 16 mm comedy experiment that introduced a twisted new voice to the New York underground.
Robert Downey Sr.
United States,
1964
DVD
A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing _The Bad Sleep Well._ Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of _Hamlet_ and American film noir to chilling effect.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1960
35 mm, DVD
In the first of Rohmer’s "Moral Tales," a law student (Barbet Schroeder) with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself full of sugar cookies and pastries daily in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1963
DCP, DVD
Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in brilliant color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work from Japan’s cinematic golden age, directed by the dynamic Keisuke Kinoshita.
Keisuke Kinoshita
Japan,
1958
Blu-ray, DVD
Vincent Price portrays legendary swindler James Addison Reavis, who in 1880 concocted an elaborate hoax to name himself the "Baron" of Arizona, and therefore inherit all the land in the state. Samuel Fuller adapts this tall tale to film with fleet, elegant storytelling and a sly sense of humor.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1950
DVD
This precisely wrought, emotionally penetrating romantic drama from Jacques Demy, set largely in the casinos of Nice, is a visually lovely but darkly realistic investigation into love and obsession.
Jacques Demy
France,
1963
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The filmmakers of _Grey Gardens_ went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, _The Beales of Grey Gardens,_ a tribute both to these indomitable women, Big and Little Edie Beale, and to the landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them counterculture icons.
Albert Maysles…
United States,
2006
Blu-ray, DVD
The remarkable and stark _Le beau Serge_ heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades.
Claude Chabrol
France,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.
Jean Cocteau
France,
1946
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, the fourth installment in François Truffaut’s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, _Bed and Board,_ is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.
François Truffaut
France,
1970
35 mm, DVD
Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her afternoon hours working in a bordello.
Luis Buñuel
France,
1967
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Based on the classic Emile Zola novel, Jean Renoir's _La bête humaine_, a suspenseful journey into the tormented psyche of a workingman, was one of the director's greatest popular successes—and earned star Jean Gabin a permanent place in the hearts of his countrymen.
Jean Renoir
France,
1938
DVD
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brazen depiction of the alternating currents of lethargy and mayhem inherent in moviemaking, a film crew deals with an aloof star (Eddie Constantine), an abusive director (Lou Castel), and a financially troubled production.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1970
35 mm, DVD
Mailer’s belief that we’re all capable of being either police or criminals was the impetus for his second feature, which takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.
Norman Mailer
United States,
1968
DVD
Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema.
Vittorio De Sica
Italy,
1948
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The Big City follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1972
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .).
Ousmane Sembène
Senegal,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray
This Freudian tale of adolescent sexuality set in a postapocalyptic world of shifting identities and talking animals is one of Malle’s most experimental films and a cinematic daydream like no other.
Louis Malle
France,
1975
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
Marcel Camus
France,
1959
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton
Agnès Varda
France,
1968
DCP, DVD
Perhaps Masaki Kobayashi’s most sordid film, Black River examines the rampant corruption on and around U.S. military bases in Japan following World War II.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
You’ve probably never seen anything quite like this manic, oddball, anti–buddy picture about a young, jazz-obsessed Japanese drifter and a black American GI on the lam in Tokyo.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1964
DVD
In this evocative, atmospheric biography, Roberto Rossellini brings to life philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who, amid religious persecution and ignorance, believed in a harmony between God and science.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1972
DVD
Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane, sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to music, food, and all sorts of regionally specific delights.
Les Blank
United States,
1968
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Before he stunned the cinematic world with the epic series The Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy, the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski made his first work of metaphysical genius, Blind Chance.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Poland,
1981
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
This razor-sharp modern film noir, the first film by Joel and Ethan Coen, introduced the brothers’ inimitable black humor and eccentric sense of character, a sensibility that has helped shape the course of contemporary American cinema.
Joel Coen
United States,
1984
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A young husband and father finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker in _Le bonheur_, one of Agnès Varda's most provocative films.
Agnès Varda
France,
1965
DCP, DVD
A low-key postpunk diary that took four years to complete, Allison Anders' _Border Radio_ features legendary rocker Chris D. as a singer/songwriter who has stolen loot from a club and gone missing, leaving his wife, a no-nonsense rock journalist, to track him down with the help of his friends.
Allison Anders…
United States,
1987
DVD
In Jean Renoir's satire of the bourgeoisie, Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, whose family decides to take in the irrepressible bum.
Jean Renoir
France,
1932
DCP, DVD
When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1967
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Lars von Trier became an international sensation with this galvanizing realist fable about sex and spiritual transcendence.
Lars von Trier
Denmark,
1996
Blu-ray, DVD
Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs.
Errol Morris
United States,
1991
Blu-ray, DVD
Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang is finally available for US audiences.
Edward Yang
Taiwan,
1991
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
With its combination of psychological and body horror, The Brood laid the groundwork for many of the director’s films to come, but it stands on its own as a personal, singularly scary vision.
David Cronenberg
Canada,
1979
Blu-ray, DVD
Michael Redgrave gives the performance of his career in Anthony Asquith’s adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s unforgettable play. Redgrave portrays Andrew Crocker-Harris, an embittered, middle-aged schoolmaster who begins to feel that his life has been a failure.
Anthony Asquith
United Kingdom,
1951
DVD
As hard-hitting as its title, _Brute Force_ was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well, starring Burt Lancaster.
Jules Dassin
United States,
1947
DVD
With a small film crew, Wim Wenders accompanied his old friend Ry Cooder, who had written the music for Paris, Texas and The End of Violence, on a trip to Havana. Cooder wanted to record his material for Ibrahim Ferrer’s solo album at a studio there—following the recording of the first Buena Vista Social Club CD.
Wim Wenders
United States,
1999
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
In Kon Ichikawa’s eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death, an Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song, while a private disguises himself as a Buddhist monk.
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1956
16 mm, DVD
When he was cutting _Phantom India_, Louis Malle found that the footage shot in Calcutta was so diverse, intense, and unforgettable that it deserved its own film. The result, released theatrically, is at times shocking—a chaotic portrait of a city engulfed in social and political turmoil.
Louis Malle
France,
1969
35 mm, DVD
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.
Kirsten Johnson
United States,
2016
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
One of Mexico’s most highly regarded works of political cinema, Canoa: A Shameful Memory is a daring commentary on ideological manipulation, religious fanaticism, and mass violence, as well as a visceral expression of horror.
Felipe Cazals
Mexico,
1976
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Two years after his worldwide hit _Closely Watched Trains,_ Jiří Menzel directed this amusing idyll about three middle-aged men whose mellow summer is interrupted by the arrival of a circus performer and his beautiful assistant.
Jiří Menzel
Czechoslovakia,
1968
DVD
A young woman in a small Kansas town survives a drag race accident, then agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she becomes haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion.
Herk Harvey
United States,
1962
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
As profoundly simple as its hero's famous statement "I think, therefore I am," Roberto Rossellini's Cartesius is an intimate, psychological study of obsession and existential crisis.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1974
DVD
Jacques Becker lovingly evokes the belle epoque Parisian demimonde in this classic tale of doomed romance. When gangster's moll Marie (Simone Signoret) falls for reformed criminal Manda (Serge Reggiani), their passion incites an underworld rivalry that leads inexorably to treachery and tragedy.
Jacques Becker
France,
1952
35 mm, DVD
Twenty years have passed: Fanny’s son, Césariot, is in a military academy, and Panisse is on his deathbed, where the local priest demands that he tell his son about his biological father.
Marcel Pagnol
France,
1936
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
This riot of bad taste was a breakthrough for Downey, thanks to rave notices. Visualized largely in still 35 mm photographs, it follows a shiftless downtown Manhattanite having his “annual November breakdown.”
Robert Downey Sr.
United States,
1966
DVD
After years of making mostly comedies and literary adaptations, Raffaello Matarazzo turned to melodrama with this intense tale of a tight-knit working-class family shattered by temptation.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1949
DVD
In Chantal Akerman's early short film _La chambre_, we see the furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York.
Chantal Akerman
Belgium,
1972
DCP, DVD
Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1964
Blu-ray, DVD
Jean Renoir’s ruthless love triangle tale, his second sound film, is a true precursor to his brilliantly bitter The Rules of the Game, displaying all of the filmmaker’s visual genius and fully imbued with his profound sense of humanity.
Jean Renoir
France,
1931
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child in _The Children Are Watching Us_, a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.
Vittorio De Sica
Italy,
1944
DVD
Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time.
Marcel Carné
France,
1945
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s later film career, Chimes at Midnight returns to the screen after being unavailable for decades.
Orson Welles
Spain,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin would term cinéma verité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France.
Jean Rouch…
France,
1961
Blu-ray, DVD
Two heartsick Hong Kong cops cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out restaurant stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye works. _Chungking Express_ is one of the defining works of nineties cinema and the film that made Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai an instant icon.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
1994
Blu-ray, DVD
In this uplifting romantic drama, the wife of a mechanic and former fighter pilot falls in love with the idea of flying herself. This soon becomes an obsession, and she undertakes a lofty feat: the longest solo flight ever made by a woman
Jean Grémillon
France,
1944
DVD
When we first meet Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp in this comic gem, he’s in typical straits: broke, hungry, destined to fall in love, and just as sure to lose the girl.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1928
35 mm
The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical Virginia Cherrill) and mistakes him for a millionaire.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1931
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
“Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?” says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and her blonde stepsister, Claire.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1970
DCP, DVD
Lodge Kerrigan’s raw, ravaging _Clean, Shaven_ is a headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schizophrenic as he tries to track down his daughter after he is released from an institution.
Lodge Kerrigan
United States,
1994
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, _Cléo from 5 to 7_ is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (_The Umbrellas of Cherbourg_) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
Agnès Varda
France,
1962
DCP, DVD
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Wry and tender, Jirí Menzel's Academy Award-winning _Closely Watched Trains_ is a masterpiece of human observation.
Jiří Menzel
Czechoslovakia,
1966
16 mm, DVD
Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and the fiction-documentary hybrid Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1990
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
One of the world’s most influential and provocative filmmakers, the Oscar–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precision and artistry.
Michael Haneke
France,
2000
Blu-ray, DVD
In Rohmer’s first color film, a bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1967
DCP, DVD
Many of the lost souls of _Ossos_ and _In Vanda’s Room_ return in the spectral landscape of _Colossal Youth,_ which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon.
Pedro Costa
Portugal,
2006
DVD
One of Japanese cinema’s supreme emulations of American noir, Takashi Nomura’s _A Colt Is My Passport_ is a down-and-dirty but gorgeously photographed _yakuza_ film starring Joe Shishido as a hard-boiled hit man caught between rival gangs.
Takashi Nomura
Japan,
1967
DVD
In Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunning debut, the brutalized corpse of a Roman prostitute is found along the banks of the Tiber River. The police round up a handful of possible suspects and interrogate them, one by one, each account bringing them closer to the killer.
Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy,
1962
DVD
Orson Welles’s _Mr. Arkadin_ (a.k.a. _Confidential Report_) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a Cold War European landscape.
Orson Welles
United States,
1955
35 mm, DVD
A startling tale of heartbreak and violence set against the backdrop of bloody revolution, Volker Schlöndorff's _Coup de grâce_ is a powerful film that explores the interrelation of private passion and political commitment.
Volker Schlöndorff
Germany,
1976
DVD
In _Les cousins,_ Claude Chabrol crafts a sly moral fable about a provincial boy who comes to live with his sophisticated bohemian cousin in Paris. This dagger-sharp drama won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and was an important early entry in the French New Wave.
Claude Chabrol
France,
1959
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintarô Ishihara, and critically savaged for its lurid portrayal of the postwar sexual revolution among Japan’s young and privileged, _Crazed Fruit_ is an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation.
Kô Nakahira
Japan,
1956
DVD
An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary color photography of Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behavior in the face of death.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1972
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
In Ingmar Bergman's feature directing debut, urban beauty-shop proprietress Miss Jenny arrives in an idyllic rural town one morning to whisk away her eighteen-year-old daughter, Nelly, whom she abandoned as a child, from the loving woman who has raised her.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1946
DVD
Fresh out of the slammer, Togawa (Branded to Kill’s Joe Shishido) has no chance to go straight because he is immediately coerced by a wealthy mob boss into organizing the heist of an armored car carrying racetrack receipts.
Takumi Furukawa
Japan,
1964
DVD
_Daisies_ is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that’s widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.
Věra Chytilová
Czechoslovakia,
1966
35 mm, DVD
This unique love story follows the maneuverings of a society lady as she connives to initiate a scandalous affair between her aristocratic ex-lover and a prostitute. With his second feature film, director Robert Bresson was already forging his singularly brilliant filmmaking technique.
Robert Bresson
France,
1945
DVD
Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution.
Andrzej Wajda
France,
1983
DVD
David Lynch: The Art Life looks at Lynch’s art, music, and early films, shining a light into the dark corners of his unique world and giving audiences a better understanding of the man and the artist.
Olivia Neergaard-Holm…
United States,
2016
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.
Jean Renoir
France,
1936
Blu-ray, DVD
The young wife of an older pastor falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village, where stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Carl Dreyer's _Day of Wrath_ remains an intense, unforgettable experience.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1943
DVD
Charlie decides to take his wife and children on a boat trip, but the family car proves somewhat recalcitrant.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1919
35 mm
Genius provocateur Nagisa Oshima, an influential figure in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, made one of his most startling political statements with the compelling pitch-black satire Death by Hanging.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1968
Blu-ray, DVD
Upper-class geometry professor Juan and his wealthy, married mistress, Maria José, driving back from a late-night rendezvous, accidentally hit a cyclist, and run. Juan Antonio Bardem's charged melodrama _Death of a Cyclist_ was a direct attack on 1950s Spanish society under Franco’s rule.
Juan Antonio Bardem
Spain,
1955
DVD
This masterwork by Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements in visual storytelling.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Poland,
1988
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Donna Deitch’s swooning and sensual first film, Desert Hearts, was groundbreaking upon its 1986 release: a love story about two women, produced and directed by a woman.
Donna Deitch
United States,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Sacha Guitry exchanges his usual top hat for a uniform in _Désiré,_ playing a cavalier valet embroiled in an awkward flirtation with his new employer, played by the actor-director’s real-life wife, Jacqueline Delubac.
Sacha Guitry
France,
1937
DVD
With his customary restraint and ruthless attention to detail, director Jean-Pierre Melville follows the parallel tracks of French underworld criminal Gu (Lino Ventura), escaped from prison and roped into one last robbery, and the suave inspector, Blot (Paul Meurisse), relentlessly seeking him.
Jean-Pierre Melville
France,
1966
DVD
After a streak of bad luck tempts a hard-working farmer to bargain with the Devil, he enlists the aid of the legendary orator and politician Daniel Webster. William Dieterle’s stylish film features an unforgettable score by Bernard Herrmann and a truly diabolical performance from Walter Huston.
William Dieterle
United States,
1941
DVD
Before Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Repulsion, there was Diabolique, a heart-grabbing benchmark in horror filmmaking, featuring outstanding performances by Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
France,
1955
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Pietro Germi’s hilarious and cutting satire of Sicilian male-chauvinist culture, Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) longs to marry his nubile young cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), but one obstacle stands in his way: his fatuous and fawning wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca).
Pietro Germi
Italy,
1961
35 mm, DVD
Documenteur is a small-scale fiction about a divorced mother and her child (played by Agnès Varda’s own son) leading a quiet existence on L.A.’s margins.
Agnès Varda
France,
1981
DCP, DVD
By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s _Dodes’ka-den_ follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Kurosawa’s gloriously shot first color film displays all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1970
35 mm, DVD
Thanks to a dog he finds, Charlie ends up in possession of some stolen loot. But the wrongdoers want their ill-gotten gains back.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1918
35 mm
A topsy-turvy riches-to-rags fable with songs by Michel Legrand, Donkey Skin creates a tactile fantasy world that’s perched on the border between the earnest and the satiric.
Jacques Demy
France,
1970
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D. A. Pennebaker.
D. A. Pennebaker
United States,
1967
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Krzysztof Kieślowski's international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. _The Double Life of Véronique_ is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
France,
1991
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In Masahiro Shinoda’s striking adaptation of a Bunraku puppet play (featuring the music of famed composer Toru Takemitsu), a paper merchant sacrifices family, fortune, and, ultimately, life for his erotic obsession with a prostitute.
Masahiro Shinoda
Japan,
1969
35 mm, DVD
Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout film Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in the American landscape
Jim Jarmusch
United States,
1986
Blu-ray, DVD
This formally accomplished and psychologically complex gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a hardened career criminal, and Kazuko, the sweet-natured older sister of a newly initiated young hoodlum.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1933
35 mm, DVD
The Chinese Wuxia (martial arts) picture was never the same after King Hu’s legendary Dragon Inn.
King Hu
Taiwan,
1967
DCP, Blu-ray
Zoltán Korda’s charged adaptation of a novel by The Four Feathers author A. E. W. Mason features Sabu in his second film role, as the teenage Prince Azim, forced into hiding when his father, the ruler of a peaceful kingdom in northwest India, is assassinated by his own ruthless brother.
Zoltán Korda
United Kingdom,
1938
DVD
In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1948
35 mm, 16 mm
In his first film after the commercial and critical success of _Tokyo Story,_ Ozu examines life in postwar Japan through the eyes of a young salaryman, dissatisfied with career and marriage, who begins an affair with a flirtatious co-worker.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1956
35 mm, DVD
The Mamiya family is seeking a husband for their daughter, Noriko, but when she impulsively chooses her childhood friend, she fulfills her family’s desires while tearing them apart. Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer is a nuanced examination of life’s changes across three generations.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1951
35 mm, DVD
The most cherished work from French master Max Ophuls, The Earrings of Madame de . . . is a profoundly emotional, cinematographically adventurous tale of deceptive opulence and tragic romance.
Max Ophuls
France,
1953
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A mix of hilarious, anything-goes slapstick and biting satire of me-generation self-indulgence, Eating Raoul marked the end of the sexual revolution with a thwack.
Paul Bartel
United States,
1982
Blu-ray, DVD
Lars von Trier’s stunning debut film, influenced equally by Hitchcock and science fiction, is the story of Fisher, an exiled ex-cop who returns to his old beat to catch a serial killer with a taste for young girls.
Lars von Trier
Denmark,
1984
DVD
Jean Renoir’s delirious romantic comedy stars Ingrid Bergman in her most sensual role as a beautiful, but impoverished, Polish princess who drives men of all stations to fits of desperate love.
Jean Renoir
France,
1956
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
Elephant Boy served as the breakthrough showcase for the thirteen-year-old Sabu, whose beaming performance as a young mahout leading the British on an expedition made him a major international star.
Robert Flaherty…
United Kingdom,
1937
DVD
Set in a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, _Empire of Passion_ details the downfall of a married woman and her lover after they murder her husband and dump his body in a well. With eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1978
35 mm, DVD
The Kohayakawa family is thrown into distress when childlike father Manbei takes up with his old mistress, in one of Ozu's most deftly modulated blendings of comedy and tragedy.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1961
DVD
In Satyajit Ray’s absorbing contemporary adaptation of a play by Henrik Ibsen, a good-hearted doctor discovers that the serious illness befalling the citizens of his small Bengali town may be due to a contamination of the holy water at the local temple.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1989
DVD
Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in _Equinox Flower,_ his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1958
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty.
David Lynch
United States,
1977
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Lars von Trier’s hypnotic _Europa_ is a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. _Europa_ is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works.
Lars von Trier
Denmark,
1991
DVD
Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite racked by guilt over the shocking death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1952
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In the formally ravishing _Every-Night Dreams,_ set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo, a single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son—until her long-lost husband returns.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1933
DVD
A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece. Made one year after his international sensation _Viridiana,_ this is a furthering of Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the frivolous upper classes.
Luis Buñuel
Mexico,
1962
Blu-ray, DVD
At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—at a horrifying price.
Georges Franju
France,
1960
Blu-ray, DVD
In this staggering work of existential science fiction, Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Japan,
1966
35 mm, DVD
Picking up moments after the end of Marius, this film follows Fanny’s grief after Marius’s departure—and her realization that she’s pregnant
Marc Allégret
France,
1932
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Ingmar Bergman described _Fanny and Alexander_ as "the sum total of my life as a filmmaker." And in this, the full-length (312-minute) version of his triumphant valediction, his vision is expressed at its fullest.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1982
Blu-ray, DVD
Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1982
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction.
René Laloux
France,
1973
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Fat Girl is not only a portrayal of female adolescent sexuality and the complicated bond between siblings but also a shocking assertion by the always controversial Catherine Breillat that violent oppression exists at the core of male-female relations.
Catherine Breillat
France,
2001
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
From 1963 to 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon.
Murray Lerner
United States,
1967
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F for Fake, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies.
Orson Welles
United States,
1975
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
High schooler Kiroku Nanbu yearns for the prim, Catholic Michiko, but her only desire is to reform Kiroku's sinful tendencies. Hormones raging, Kiroku channels his unsatisfied lust into the only outlet available: savage, crazed violence.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1966
DVD
While on the road, Zatoichi befriends a young mother right before she is savagely murdered. Promising her that he will hand over her baby to its father, the blind masseur embarks on an adventure both sentimental and beset by perilous action.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1964
Blu-ray, DVD
A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman’s first color film, _The Firemen’s Ball_ (_Horí, má panenko_), is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire that chronicles a firemen’s ball where nothing goes right.
Miloš Forman
Czechoslovakia,
1967
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II, Kon Ichikawa's _Fires on the Plain_ is a compelling descent into psychological and physical oblivion, and one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile filmmakers.
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1959
35 mm, DVD
Unsparing in its portrait of the inner turmoil of a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself, _The Fire Within_ is one of Louis Malle's darkest and most personal films.
Louis Malle
France,
1963
35 mm, DVD
Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio.
Marco Bellocchio
Italy,
1965
DCP, DVD
An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all, in Yasujiro Ozu’s color collaboration with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1959
DVD
Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, Rossellini's _The Flowers of St. Francis_ is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1950
35 mm, DVD
Mikio Naruse’s earliest available film, _Flunky, Work Hard_ is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1931
DVD
Al Reinert’s visually dazzling documentary _For All Mankind_ is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon—told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences.
Al Reinert
United States,
1989
Blu-ray, DVD
This Technicolor spectacular, directed by Zoltán Korda, is considered the finest of the many adaptations of A. E. W. Mason’s classic 1902 adventure novel about the British empire’s exploits in Africa, and a crowning achievement of Alexander Korda’s legendary production company, London Films.
Zoltán Korda
United Kingdom,
1939
Blu-ray, DVD
A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1975
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
French Cancan, Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge, is a Technicolor tour de force starring Jean Gabin as a wily impresario juggling the love of two beautiful women in nineteenth-century Paris.
Jean Renoir
France,
1955
16 mm, DVD
Harold Lloyd’s biggest box-office hit was this silent comedy gem, featuring the befuddled everyman at his eager best as a new college student.
Sam Taylor…
United States,
1925
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In the shady black markets and bombed-out hovels of post–World War II Tokyo, a band of prostitutes eke out an existence, maintaining tenuous friendships and a semblance of order. But when a renegade ex-soldier stumbles into their midst, lusts and loyalties clash, with tragic results.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1964
DVD
A winner of Academy Awards for best foreign-language film and best costume design, Gate of Hell is a visually sumptuous, psychologically penetrating work from Teinosuke Kinugasa.
Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan,
1953
Blu-ray, DVD
In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.
Barbet Schroeder
France,
1974
DCP, DVD
Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1955
DVD
The insects are taking over in this nasty piece of disaster horror directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. A group of military personnel transporting a hydrogen bomb are left to figure out how and why swarms of killer bugs took down their plane.
Kazui Nihonmatsu
Japan,
1968
DVD
An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast.
David Gordon Green
United States,
2000
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin shown through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.
Roberto Rossellini
Germany,
1948
DVD
Carl Dreyer’s last film is a meditation on tragedy, individual will, and the refusal to compromise. A woman leaves her unfulfilling marriage and embarks on a search for ideal love—but neither a passionate affair with a younger man nor the return of an old romance can provide the answer she seeks.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1964
DVD
Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour.
David Maysles…
United States,
1970
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray
The goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to completely lose his bearings.
Wim Wenders
West Germany,
1971
DCP, Blu-ray
In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline.
Louis Malle
United States,
1985
16 mm, DVD
After an airplane is forced to crash-land in a remote area, its passengers find themselves face-to-face with an alien force that wants to possess them body and soul—and perhaps take over the entire human race.
Hajime Sato
Japan,
1968
DVD
Set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Jean Renoir’s ravishing, sumptuous tribute to the theater involves a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell’arte company (the vivacious Anna Magnani).
Jean Renoir
France,
1953
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
Charlie Chaplin’s comedic masterwork—which charts a prospector’s search for fortune in the Klondike and his discovery of romance (with the beautiful Georgia Hale)—forever cemented the iconic status of Chaplin and his Little Tramp character.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1942
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Ozu's hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent _I Was Born, But . . . , Good Morning_ (Ohayô) is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1959
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Despite having a loving and patient wife at home, a good-natured suit-and-tie man, played by writer-director Pierre Etaix, finds himself hopelessly attracted to his gorgeous new secretary in this gently satirical tale of temptation.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1969
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Featuring sensuous cinematography, a lush score, and an award-winning central performance by the great Toni Servillo, this transporting experience by the brilliant Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is a breathtaking Felliniesque tale of decadence and lost love.
Paolo Sorrentino
Italy,
2013
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1940
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion.
Albert Maysles…
United States,
1976
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi's _Hands over the City,_ a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion.
Francesco Rosi
Italy,
1963
DVD
Following the collapse of his clan, unemployed samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to commit ritual suicide on his property in Masaki Kobayashi’s fierce evocation of individual agency in the face of a corrupt and hypocritical system.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1962
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A Hard Day’s Night, in which the bandmates play cheeky comic versions of themselves, captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever.
Richard Lester
United Kingdom,
1964
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning _Harlan County USA_ unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs.
Barbara Kopple
United States,
1976
DVD
In this warmhearted comic yarn from Aki Kaurismäki, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a kindly old bohemian who shines shoes for a living in the French harbor city Le Havre.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
2011
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered from the same hysteria as turn-of-the-twentieth-century psychiatric patients. _Häxan_ is a witches’ brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Benjamin Christensen
Denmark,
1922
35 mm, DVD
The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa’s trademark deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action, and compassionate humanity.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Adapting Ed McBain's detective novel _King's Ransom,_ Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1963
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
An unsung comic triumph from David Lean, _Hobson’s Choice_ stars the legendary Charles Laughton as the harrumphing Henry Hobson, the owner of a boot shop in late Victorian northern England whose haughty, independent daughter decides to forge her own path, romantically and professionally.
David Lean
United Kingdom,
1954
35 mm, DVD
The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife’s political horizons, drives her into the arms of his radical school chum.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1984
DVD
Based on a shocking true story and shot in documentary-style black and white, The Honeymoon Killers is a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love.
Leonard Kastle
United States,
1969
Blu-ray, DVD
This landmark film, which documents the journeys of two remarkable families, continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.
Steve James
United States,
1994
DVD
In Ronald Neame’s film of Joyce Cary’s classic novel, Alec Guinness transforms himself into one of cinema’s most indelible comic figures: the lovably scruffy painter Gulley Jimson.
Ronald Neame
United Kingdom,
1958
DVD
Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux.
Chantal Akerman
United States,
1972
DCP, DVD
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet.
Nobuhiko Obayashi
Japan,
1977
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Richard E. Grant is the endlessly suave Dennis Bagley, a high-strung advertising executive whose shoulder sprouts an evil, talking boil. This caustic satire reunites the talented team behind the cult classic _Withnail and I_ to create a tour de force of verbal jousting and physical comedy.
Bruce Robinson
United Kingdom,
1988
DVD
In his documentary _Humain, trop humain_, Louis Malle presents his meditative investigation of the inner workings of a French automotive plant.
Louis Malle
France,
1973
35 mm, DVD
Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1959
35 mm, DVD
A parallel film to Vilgot Sjöman's controversial _I Am Curious—Yellow, I Am Curious—Blue_ also follows young Lena on her journey of self-discovery. In _Blue,_ Lena confronts issues of religion, sexuality, and the prison system, while at the same time exploring her own relationships.
Vilgot Sjöman
Sweden,
1967
DVD
This landmark document of Swedish society during the sexual revolution has been declared both obscene and revolutionary. It tells the story of a searching and rebellious young woman's personal quest to understand the social and political conditions in 1960s Sweden, and her own sexual identity.
Vilgot Sjöman
Sweden,
1967
DVD
In Koreyoshi Kurahara’s directorial debut, rebel matinee idol Yujiro Ishihara stars as a restaurant manager and former boxer who saves a beautiful, suicidal club hostess (Mie Kitahara) trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1957
DVD
Michelangelo Antonioni’s _Identification of a Woman_ is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1982
Blu-ray, DVD
The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul's reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this "folly" looks ever more fascinating.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1951
DVD
Charlie is the spitting image of a rich woman’s drunk husband. At a masked ball, her inability to distinguish one from the other leads to much confusion.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1921
35 mm
Ermanno Olmi’s masterful feature is the tender story of two Milanese fiancés whose strained relationship is tested when the man accepts a new job in Sicily. With the separation come loneliness, nostalgia, and, perhaps, some new perspectives that might rejuvenate their love.
Ermanno Olmi
Italy,
1962
DVD
In the high-octane, unorthodox romance I Hate But Love (Nikui anchikusho), a celebrity (played by megastar Yujiro Ishihara), dissatisfied with his personal and professional lives, impulsively leaves fast-paced Tokyo to deliver a much-needed jeep to a remote village.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1962
DVD
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity.
Antonio Pietrangeli
Italy,
1965
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
_I Live in Fear_ presents Toshiro Mifune as an elderly, stubborn businessman so fearful of a nuclear attack that he resolves to move his reluctant family to South America. Kurosawa depicts a society emerging from the shadows but still terrorized by memories of the past and anxieties for the future.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1955
35 mm, DVD
On his deathbed, a wealthy businessman announces that his fortune is to be split equally among his three illegitimate children, whose whereabouts are unknown to his family and colleagues.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1962
DVD
This utterly unclassifiable film—assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, made during the Nazi occupation—is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces.
Dušan Makavejev
Yugoslavia,
1968
DVD
Born in a rural farming village in 1918, Tomé survives decades of Japanese social upheaval, as well as abuse and servitude at the hands of various men. Yet Shohei Imamura refuses to make a victim of her, instead observing Tomé as a fascinating, pragmatic creature of twentieth-century Japan.
Shohei Imamura
Japan,
1963
DVD
Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), cursed by generations before her and neglected by her common-law husband, falls prey to a brutal home intruder. But rather than become a victim, she forges a path to her own awakening. _Intentions of Murder_ is gripping and audacious.
Shohei Imamura
Japan,
1964
DVD
With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
2000
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A graphic portrayal of insatiable sexual desire, In the Realm of the Senses, set in 1936 and based on a true incident, depicts a man and a woman consumed by a transcendent, destructive love while living in an era of ever escalating imperialism and governmental control.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1976
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The marvelously moody Intimidation (Aru kyouhaku) is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1960
DVD
With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa's _In Vanda’s Room_ takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.
Pedro Costa
Portugal,
2000
DVD
After years of crime reporting, screenwriting, and authoring pulp novels, Samuel Fuller made his directorial debut with the lonesome ballad of Robert Ford (played by Red River’s John Ireland), who fatally betrayed his friend, the notorious Jesse James.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1949
DVD
The debut feature by the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is a poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Soviet Union,
1962
Blu-ray, DVD
In Fellini’s semiautobiographical masterpiece, five young men linger in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small seacoast town. They while away their time spending the lira doled out by their indulgent families on drink, women, and nights at the pool hall.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1953
DVD
One of Ozu's most popular films, I Was Born, But . . . is a blithe portrait of the financial and psychological toils of one family, as told from the rascally point of view of a couple of stubborn little boys.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1932
35 mm, DVD
Masaki Kobayashi’s pitiless take on Japan’s professional baseball industry is unlike any other sports film ever made.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
Shimizu’s exquisite silent drama tells of the humiliating social downfall experienced by Sunako after jealousy drives her to commit a terrible crime. With its lushly photographed landscapes and innovative visual storytelling, this film shows a director at the peak of his powers and experimentation.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan,
1933
DVD
A sex-obsessed young woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, a gun-crazy wannabe gangster—these are just three of the irrational, oddball anarchists trapped in an underground hideaway in Oshima’s devilish, absurdist film.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1967
35 mm, DVD
Whether seen as an exacting character portrait or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, _Jeanne Dielman_ is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.
Chantal Akerman
Belgium,
1975
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
The world-famous artist Takashi Murakami made his directorial debut with Jellyfish Eyes, taking his boundless imagination to the screen in a tale of friendship and loyalty that also addresses humanity’s propensity for destruction.
Takashi Murakami
Japan,
2013
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Chris Marker's _La Jetée_ is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel told in still images.
Chris Marker
France,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
In her provocative first feature, Chantal Akerman stars as an aimless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend.
Chantal Akerman
France,
1975
DCP, DVD
After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by a mysterious, diabolical doppelgänger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell—literally. The gory _Jigoku_ created aftershocks that are still reverberating in contemporary world horror cinema.
Nobuo Nakagawa
Japan,
1960
DVD
_Jimi Plays Monterey_ and _Shake! Otis at Monterey_, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker's _Monterey Pop_ companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology.
D. A. Pennebaker…
United States,
1986
Blu-ray, DVD
Jaromil Jireš’s brilliant adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel tells the fragmentary tale of a man expelled from the Communist Party because of a political joke.
Jaromil Jireš
Czechoslovakia,
1969
DVD
Among the most influential films of the postwar era, Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) charts the declining marriage of a couple from England (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) on a trip in the countryside near Naples.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
With _Jubilee,_ legendary British filmmaker Derek Jarman channeled political dissent and artistic daring into a revolutionary blend of history and fantasy, musical and cinematic experimentation, satire and anger, fashion and philosophy.
Derek Jarman
United Kingdom,
1978
DVD
Combining stylish sixties modernism with silent-cinema touches and even a few unexpected sci-fi accents, Judex is a delightful bit of pulp fiction and a testament to the art of illusion.
Georges Franju
France,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession.
François Truffaut
France,
1962
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Giulietta Masina plays a betrayed wife whose inability to come to terms with reality leads her along a hallucinatory journey of self-discovery in Fellini’s first color feature, a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1965
DVD
This Korda brothers film is the definitive version of Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of fables, starring Sabu as Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, who can communicate with all the beasts of the jungle.
Zoltán Korda
United Kingdom,
1942
DVD
“Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives,” announces a narrator, foretelling the tragedy that unfolds as a war-ravaged company of Home Army resistance fighters tries to escape the Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw. Kanal was the first film about the Warsaw Uprising.
Andrzej Wajda
Poland,
1957
DVD
Before he left his mark on cinema forever with the revolutionary _The Battle of Algiers,_ Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo directed this uncompromising World War II drama about a young Jewish woman (Susan Strasberg) in a Nazi concentration camp.
Gillo Pontecorvo
Italy,
1959
DVD
Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan make a miraculous pair in this nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, a film that is, as its opening title card states, “a picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear.”
Charlie Chaplin
United States,
1921
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In this pitch-black action comedy by Kihachi Okamoto, based on the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa’s _Sanjuro,_ a pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute.
Kihachi Okamoto
Japan,
1968
35 mm, DVD
Forced out of the U.S. in 1952, Charlie Chaplin lashed back with this scathing satire of everything American—from McCarthyist witch hunts to CinemaScope and rock and roll—as he played his last full role, as a deposed and impoverished monarch seeking refuge in Manhattan (though the film was shot in the United Kingdom).
Charles Chaplin
United Kingdom,
1957
35 mm
The King of Kings is the Greatest Story Ever Told as only Cecil B. DeMille could tell it. In 1927, working with one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, DeMille spun the life and Passion of Christ into a silent-era blockbuster.
Cecil B. DeMille
United States,
1927
DVD
Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road is about a friendship between two men: Bruno, a.k.a. King of the Road (Rüdiger Vogler), who repairs film projectors and travels along the inner German border in his truck, and the psychologist Robert, a.k.a. Kamikaze (Hanns Zischler), who is fleeing from his own past.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1976
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller, still one of the greatest feature debuts in film history.
Roman Polanski
Poland,
1962
35 mm, DVD
In 1977, acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder entered the universe of the world’s most famous primate to create the entertaining, troubling, and still relevant documentary _Koko: A Talking Gorilla._
Barbet Schroeder
France,
1978
DCP, DVD
In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. Onibaba, Kuroneko (Black Cat) is a spectacularly eerie twilight tale.
Kaneto Shindo
Japan,
1968
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
After more than a decade of sober political dramas and socially minded period pieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1965
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
One of the first French films to address the issue of collaboration during the German occupation, Louis Malle’s brave and controversial _Lacombe, Lucien_ traces a young peasant’s journey from potential Resistance member to Gestapo recruit.
Louis Malle
France,
1974
35 mm, DVD
Gory revenge is raised to the level of visual poetry in Toshiya Fujita’s stunning Lady Snowblood.
Toshiya Fujita
Japan,
1973
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
More politically minded than the original, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is full of exciting plot turns and ingenious action sequences.
Toshiya Fujita
Japan,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Pierre Etaix’s most radical film, and perhaps unsurprisingly the one that effectively ended his career in cinema, Land of Milk and Honey is a fascinating investigative documentary about post–May ’68 French society.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1971
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency.
Robert Bresson
France,
1983
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping character study. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, this is Truffaut’s tribute to art overcoming adversity.
François Truffaut
France,
1980
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Peter Weir's _The Last Wave_, Richard Chamberlain stars as Australian lawyer David Burton, who takes on the defense of a group of aborigines accused of killing one of their own.
Peter Weir
Australia,
1977
35 mm, DVD
In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope.
Jean Vigo
France,
1934
Blu-ray, DVD
The great actress and Ozu regular Setsuko Hara plays a mother gently trying to persuade her daughter to marry in this glowing portrait of family love and conflict—a reworking of Ozu's 1949 masterpiece _Late Spring_.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1960
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, _Late Spring_ (Banshun) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1949
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1960
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A delightful cast of British all-stars, including Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, and Roger Livesey, brings to life this precisely calibrated caper, which was immensely popular and influenced countless Hollywood heist films.
Basil Dearden
United Kingdom,
1960
DVD
The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise, L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Alain Delon).
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1962
Blu-ray, DVD
The singular French director Maurice Pialat puts his distinctive stamp on the lost-youth film with this devastating portrait of a damaged foster child.
Maurice Pialat
France,
1968
DVD
A struggling Siberian rock band leaves the lonely tundra to tour the United States because, as they’re told, “they’ll buy anything there.”
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1989
DVD
Living in Mexico with a top-ten hit under their belts, the Leningrad Cowboys have fallen on hard times. When they head north to rejoin their manager (Kaurismäki mainstay Matti Pellonpää) for a gig in Coney Island, he has turned into a self-proclaimed prophet.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1994
DVD
This epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace, starring the astounding Kinuyo Tanaka as an imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution, was the movie that gained the director international attention, ushering in a new golden period for him.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
LIGHTNING OVER WATER is a film about the last months in the life of American director Nicholas Ray, who is probably best known for his cult film “Rebel Without a Cause”. Wenders and Ray got to know each other at the set of “The American Friend” and became friends
Wim Wenders
West Germany,
1980
DCP
Charlie Chaplin’s masterful drama about the twilight of a former vaudeville star is among the writer-director’s most touching films. Chaplin plays Calvero, a once beloved musical-comedy performer, now a washed-up alcoholic who lives in a small London flat.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
An early work of independent Latin American filmmaking, Limite was famously difficult to see for most of the twentieth century. It is a pioneering achievement that continues to captivate with its timeless visual poetry.
Mário Peixoto
Brazil,
1931
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Agnès Varda goes to Los Angeles, taking New York counterculture with her. In a rented house in the sun-soaked Hollywood Hills, a woman and two men delight in one another’s bodies while musing on love, stardom, and politics.
Agnès Varda
France,
1969
DVD
Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman met in 1965 during the filming of Persona. Both were married, and there was a difference in age: Liv was 25, and Ingmar was 47. But none of it mattered.
Dheeraj Akolkar
Sweden,
2012
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In this atmospheric tale of revenge from beyond the watery grave, a pirate-ransacked freighter’s violent past comes back to haunt a young woman living in a seaside town.
Hiroshi Matsuno
Japan,
1968
DVD
In Fassbinder’s satiric tribute to capitalism, Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute, launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1981
35 mm, DVD
Jacques Demy’s crystalline debut gave birth to the fictional universe in which so many of his characters would live, play, and love. It’s among his most profoundly felt films, a tale of crisscrossing lives in Nantes.
Jacques Demy
France,
1961
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Max Ophuls’s final film, _Lola Montès_ is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.
Max Ophuls
France,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
This exploitation-cinema classic took the action and graphic violence of the Lone Wolf and Cub series to delirious new heights.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In this distinctly lowbrow entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Itto Ogami is hired by the Owari clan to assassinate a tattooed woman who is killing her enemies and cutting off their topknots.
Buichi Saito
Japan,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Balancing physical action with Buddhist musings on life and death, the most spiritual of the Lone Wolf and Cub films finds Ogami’s combat skills put to the test by five different warrior-messengers.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1973
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The third Lone Wolf and Cub film follows Itto Ogami and Daigoro as they stumble upon a crime scene involving a group of lowlife swordsmen from the watari-kashi class.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The inaugural film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series immediately thrust Itto Ogami into the ranks of the all-time great samurai movie icons.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In the final Lone Wolf and Cub film, star Tomisaburo Wakayama decided to make the sort of wild movie he’d always wanted to: one in which Lone Wolf battles zombies and Daigoro’s baby cart zips improbably across an icy landscape on skis.
Yoshiyuki Kuroda
Japan,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Bob Hoskins, in his breakthrough film role, stars as a London racketeer fast losing control of his gangland empire; Helen Mirren shines as his classy moll.
John Mackenzie
United Kingdom,
1979
DVD
In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding’s legendary novel about the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center.
Peter Brook
United Kingdom,
1963
DCP, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
When Katharina Blum spends the night with an alleged terrorist, her quiet, ordered life falls into ruins. Suddenly a suspect, Katharina is subject to a vicious smear campaign by the police and a ruthless tabloid journalist, testing the limits of her dignity and her sanity.
Volker Schlöndorff…
Germany,
1975
DVD
Crumb director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America.
Terry Zwigoff
United States,
1985
DVD
This story of the tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist (Slobodan Aligrudic) in Belgrade is an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom.
Dušan Makavejev
Yugoslavia,
1967
DVD
In the luminous final chapter to Rohmer’s "Moral Tales," the bourgeois business executive Frédéric, though happily married to an adoring wife, cannot banish from his mind the multitude of attractive Parisian women who pass him every day. Then arrives Chloé, an audacious, unencumbered old flame.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1972
DCP, DVD
For his feature debut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla), and his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel).
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1969
35 mm, DVD
Antoine Doinel strikes again! In the final chapter of François Truffaut’s saga, we find Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now in his thirties, convivially concluding his marriage, enjoying moderate success as a novelist, and clinging to his romantic fantasies.
François Truffaut
France,
1979
35 mm, DVD
A deeply felt and luxuriously filmed fairy tale for grown-ups, _The Lovers_ presents Jeanne Moreau as a restless bourgeois wife whose eye wanders from both her husband and her lover to an attractive passing stranger.
Louis Malle
France,
1958
35 mm, DVD
A tender and humorous look at a young woman's journey from the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, _Loves of a Blonde_ immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and earned Milos Forman the first of his Academy Award nominations.
Miloš Forman
Czechoslovakia,
1965
35 mm, DVD
Working with his most celebrated actor, Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa faithfully adapts Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play, keeping the original’s focus on the conflict between illusion and reality.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, DVD
Jean Renoir’s adaptation of Gorky’s classic proletariat play takes license with the dark nature of its source material, softening the play’s bleak outlook in a reaction to the rise of Hitler and the Popular Front in 1930s France.
Jean Renoir
France,
1936
Blu-ray, DVD
A shimmering glass hotel at the top of a remote Provençal mountain provides the setting for a tragicomic tapestry about an obsessive love pentangle, whose principals range from an artist to a hotel manager to a dam worker.
Jean Grémillon
France,
1943
DVD
In this bold, genre-defying horror-musical mashup — the playful and confident debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska — a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters are drawn ashore in an alternate '80s Poland to explore the wonders and temptations of life on land.
Agnieszka Smoczyńska
Poland,
2015
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Ingmar Bergman puts his indelible stamp on Mozart’s exquisite opera in this sublime rendering of one of the composer’s best-loved works: a celebration of love, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of man.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1975
35 mm, DVD
Ingmar Bergman's The Magician (Ansiktet) is an engaging, brilliantly conceived tale of deceit from one of cinema’s premier illusionists, a diabolically clever battle of wits that’s both frightening and funny.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1958
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A young provincial in search of adventure stumbles into the subterranean world of sadomasochism when he is implicated in a burglary of a Paris apartment in Barbet Schroeder's _Maîtresse_.
Barbet Schroeder
France,
1973
DCP, DVD
Wendy Hiller plays one of George Bernard Shaw’s most memorable and controversial characters, Barbara Undershaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her Christian charity organization.
Gabriel Pascal
United Kingdom,
1941
35 mm, DVD
This graceful study of a family at a turning point in history is a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs, shot in rich, vivid colors.
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1983
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A romantic deadbeat has a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant in _Mala Noche_, Gus Van Sant's important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and a fascinating capsule from a period and place that continues to haunt its director's work.
Gus Van Sant
United States,
1985
35 mm, DVD
In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s neorealist take on society’s marginalized and dispossessed, Anna Magnani delivers a powerhouse performance as a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Italy,
1962
35 mm, DVD
Controversial winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, _Man Bites Dog_ stunned audiences worldwide with its unflinching imagery and biting satire of media violence.
Rémy Belvaux…
France,
1992
DVD
With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Robert Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time in A Man Escaped.
Robert Bresson
France,
1956
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_Man Is Not a Bird_ is an antic, free-form portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor in a copper factory. This is one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts.
Dušan Makavejev
Yugoslavia,
1965
DVD
Marius and Fanny, two young shopkeepers on the harbor front of Marseille, always seemed destined to marry, but Marius cannot overcome his urge to break free and voyage on the open sea.
Alexander Korda
France,
1931
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vančura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence.
František Vláčil
Czechoslovakia,
1967
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
After her husband disappears in the last days of World War II, Maria uses her beauty and ambition to prosper in 1950s Germany. The first part of Fassbinder’s “postwar trilogy” is a heartbreaking character study as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1978
35 mm, DVD
A pair of blind masseurs, an enigmatic city woman, a lonely man and his ill-behaved nephew—The Masseurs and a Woman is made up of crisscrossing miniature studies of love and family at a remote resort in the mountains.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan,
1938
DVD
Brought pristinely to the screen by Jonathan Demme, this compellingly abstract reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Bygmester Solness features Shawn (who also wrote the adaptation) as a visionary but tyrannical middle-aged architect haunted by figures from his past,
Jonathan Demme
United States,
2014
Blu-ray, DVD
Before he turned to the story of Joan of Arc, the Danish cinema genius Carl Theodor Dreyer fashioned this ahead-of-its-time examination of domestic life.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1925
Blu-ray, DVD
Kati Outinen is memorably impenetrable as Iris, whose grinding days as a cog in a factory wheel, and nights as a neglected daughter living with her parents, ultimately send her over the edge. The Match Factory Girl closes out the “Proletariat Trilogy” with a bang—and a whimper.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1990
35 mm, DVD
A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher’s England, Mike Leigh’s Meantime was the culmination of the writer-director’s pioneering work in television.
Mike Leigh
United Kingdom,
1984
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1945
DVD
In this anguished yet mordantly funny film, Fassbinder charts the decline of a self-destructive former policeman and war veteran struggling to make ends meet for his family by working as a fruit vendor.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1971
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In this captivating, skewed World War II drama from Nagisa Oshima, David Bowie regally embodies the character Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. This was one of Oshima’s greatest successes.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1983
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
By turns charming and inventive, René Clair’s lyrical masterpiece about the journey of a winning lottery ticket had a profound impact on not only the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin but the American musical as a whole.
René Clair
France,
1931
DVD
Hailed by film critics around the world as the greatest screen adapation of Victor Hugo's mammoth nineteenth-century novel, Raymond Bernard's dazzling, nearly five-hour _Les misérables_ is a breathtaking tour de force, unfolding with the depth and detail of its source.
Raymond Bernard
France,
1934
DVD
Paul Schrader's visually stunning, collagelike portrait of acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted an impossible harmony between self, art, and society.
Paul Schrader
United States,
1985
DVD
Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg's visually innovative, Cannes Grand Prix-winning adaptation of August Strindberg's renowned 1888 play brings to scalding life the excoriating words of the stage's preeminent surveyor of all things rotten in the state of male-female relations.
Alf Sjöberg
Sweden,
1951
DVD
Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Paulette Goddard).
Charlie Chaplin
United States,
1936
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_The Moment of Truth,_ from director Francesco Rosi, is a visceral plunge into the life of a famous torero—played by real-life bullfighting legend Miguel Mateo, known as Miguelín.
Francesco Rosi
Italy,
1965
Blu-ray, DVD
Bob Hoskins (who snagged an Oscar nomination for his performance) plays George, a small-time loser employed as a chauffeur to an enigmatic, high-class call girl in writer-director Neil Jordan’s brilliant, noir-infused love story.
Neil Jordan
United Kingdom,
1986
DVD
Mon oncle is a supremely amusing satire of mechanized living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
Jacques Tati
France,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another.
Jacques Tati
France,
1953
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the first Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll.
D. A. Pennebaker
United States,
1968
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet it anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1944
DVD
One of the best and most literate movies from the great days of horror, _The Most Dangerous Game_ stars Leslie Banks as a big-game hunter with a taste for the world’s most exotic prey—his houseguests.
Ernest B. Schoedsack…
United States,
1932
35 mm, DVD
Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. Bresson’s hugely empathetic drama is an essential work of French filmmaking.
Robert Bresson
France,
1967
DVD
Shimizu’s endearing road movie follows the long and winding route of a sweet-natured bus driver—nicknamed Mr. Thank You for his constant exclamation to pedestrians who kindly step out of his path—traveling from rural Izu to Tokyo.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan,
1936
DVD
David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.
David Lynch
United States,
2001
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
John Waters’ gloriously grotesque, unavailable-for-decades second feature comes to theaters at long last, replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema’s most memorably blasphemous moments.
John Waters
United States,
1970
DCP, Blu-ray
Alain Resnais’s Muriel, or The Time of Return, the director’s follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad, is as radical a reflection on the nature of time and memory as its predecessor.
Alain Resnais
France,
1963
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed _Murmur of the Heart_ gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.
Louis Malle
France,
1971
35 mm, DVD
After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city.
Agnès Varda
France,
1980
DCP, DVD
An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India’s most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1958
Blu-ray, DVD
Jean-Pierre Gorin’s gripping and unique film about a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, is, like other works by the filmmaker, a probing look at a closed community with its own rules, rituals, and language.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
United States,
1992
DVD
Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between.
Louis Malle
United States,
1981
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_My Life as a Dog_ is the story of Ingemar, a working-class twelve-year-old sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. There, with the help of the warmhearted eccentrics who populate the town, the boy finds both refuge from his misfortunes and unexpected adventure.
Lasse Hallström
Sweden,
1985
Blu-ray, DVD
In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, a pious Catholic engineer who unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, where his rigid ethical standards are challenged.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1969
DCP, DVD
Made with its director’s customary precision and wit, Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train is a triptych of stories that pay playful tribute to the home of Stax Records, Sun Studio, Graceland, Carl Perkins, and, of course, the King himself, who presides over the film like a spirit.
Jim Jarmusch
United States,
1989
Blu-ray, DVD
Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin's dazzling police procedural _The Naked City_ was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir.
Jules Dassin
United States,
1948
DVD
The setup is pure pulp: A former prostitute (a crackerjack Constance Towers) relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit in with mainstream society.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1964
Blu-ray, DVD
Robert Flaherty’s classic film tells the story of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family as they struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay region.
Robert Flaherty
United States,
1922
DVD
Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of New York City in the 1970s is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.
Chantal Akerman
United States,
1976
DCP, DVD
Zatoichi is back—and in color! Hoping to leave violence behind, the blind masseur wanders to a village, where he meets an old friend fallen on hard times.
Tokuzo Tanaka
Japan,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Alain Resnais' documentary _Night and Fog_ (_Nuit et Brouillard_) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.
Alain Resnais
France,
1955
DVD
Five cities. Five taxicabs. Jim Jarmusch's lovingly askew view of humanity from the passenger seat makes for one of his most charming and beloved films.
Jim Jarmusch
United States,
1991
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In this unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna.
Liliana Cavani
Italy,
1974
Blu-ray, DVD
In _No Blood Relation,_ a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim the daughter she abandoned years before.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1932
DVD
Nobody’s Children is the first half of an overflowing diptych of melodramas chronicling the labyrinthine misfortunes of a couple torn cruelly apart by fate (and meddling villains).
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1952
DVD
Downey takes his camera and microphone onto the streets (and into some bedrooms) for a look at Manhattan’s singles scene of the late sixties.
Robert Downey Sr.…
United States,
1968
DVD
In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, who transforms herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist during a tumultuous decade in Japanese history.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1946
DVD
A brother and sister flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. A work of social realism imbued with dreamlike imagery, El Norte is a lovingly rendered, heartbreaking story of hope and survival.
Gregory Nava
United States,
1983
Blu-ray, DVD
In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father. _À nos amours_ is one of Maurice Pialat's greatest achievements.
Maurice Pialat
France,
1983
DVD
This “diary film,” as director Wim Wenders calls it, investigates the similarities of filmmaking craft to that of the Tokyo-based fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Wim Wenders
West Germany,
1989
DCP
In Luchino Visconti’s exquisite Dostoyevsky adaptation, Marcello Mastroianni is a lonely city transplant and Maria Schell is a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise who meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion.
Luchino Visconti
Italy,
1957
DVD
One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair's _À nous la liberté_ tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old jail pal Emile) to upset his carefully laid plans.
René Clair
France,
1931
DVD
This affectionate paean to young love is also a frank examination by Akira Kurosawa of the harsh realities of postwar Japan. During a Sunday trip into war-ravaged Tokyo, Yuzo and Masako look for work and lodging, as well as affordable entertainments to pass the time.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1947
DVD
In Kaneto Shindo’s chilling folktale, a mother and her daughter-in-law eke out a desperate existence in the lonely marshes of war-torn medieval Japan. When a neighbor returns from the skirmishes, lust, jealousy, and rage—and a horrifying fate at the hands of an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask—ensue.
Kaneto Shindo
Japan,
1964
35 mm, DVD
Yasujiro Ozu’s first talkie, the uncommonly poignant _The Only Son_ is among the Japanese director’s greatest works, a simple story about a good-natured mother who gives up everything to ensure her son’s education and future.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1936
35 mm, DVD
In Carl Dreyer's _Ordet_, a farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1955
DVD
This historical drama by Mario Monicelli, brimming with humor and honesty, is a beautiful and moving ode to the power of the people.
Mario Monicelli
Italy,
1963
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Two bruised souls enact a tender, hesitant romance in Shimizu’s alternately poignant and playful wartime love story. A soldier is waylaid at a rural spa when he accidentally cuts his foot on the titular object. Soon enough he tracks down its lovely owner and finds himself smitten.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan,
1941
DVD
Jean Cocteau’s update of the Orpheus myth depicts a famous poet (Jean Marais), scorned by the Left Bank youth, and his love for both his wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa), and a mysterious princess (Maria Casarès).
Jean Cocteau
France,
1950
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director's often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1936
DVD
After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, _Ossos_ is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation.
Pedro Costa
Portugal,
1997
DVD
Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage with a fictional narrative, this immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-Day brings to life all the terrors and isolation of war with jolting authenticity.
Stuart Cooper
United Kingdom,
1975
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan, which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1946
DVD
In this cool, seductive jewel of the Japanese New Wave, a yakuza, fresh out of prison, becomes entangled with a beautiful and enigmatic gambling addict; what at first seems a redemptive relationship ends up leading him further down the criminal path.
Masahiro Shinoda
Japan,
1964
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
For his final film, Jacques Tati takes his camera to the circus, where the director himself serves as master of ceremonies.
Jacques Tati
France,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Suffused with a lingering post–World War II disillusionment while also evincing the playfulness and fascination with theatrical performance and conspiracy that would become hallmarks for the director, Paris Belongs to Us marked the provocative start to a brilliant directorial career.
Jacques Rivette
France,
1961
Blu-ray, DVD
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1984
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The first of many films featuring the endearing single-dad Kihachi (played wonderfully by Takeshi Sakamoto), Passing Fancy is a humorous and heartfelt study of a close, if fraught, father-son relationship.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1933
35 mm, DVD
Carl Th. Dreyer’s _The Passion of Joan of Arc,_ in which Renée Falconetti gives one of the greatest performances ever recorded on film, convinced the world that movies could be art.
Carl Th. Dreyer
France,
1928
DVD
A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation of a number of years in the life of a family introduces us to both little Apu and, just as essentially, the women who will help shape him.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Saul J. Turell's Academy Award-winning documentary short _Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist_, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces his career through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, "Ol' Man River."
Saul J. Turell
United States,
1979
16 mm, DVD
Charlie is a bricklayer who sets off to celebrate payday with his pals. But his wife is waiting with the rolling pin.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1922
35 mm
Sacha Guitry plays four roles in this whirlwind of pageantry investigating the history of seven pearls, four of which end up on the crown of England and three of which go missing. The Pearls of the Crown rockets through four centuries of European history with imaginative, winking irreverence.
Sacha Guitry
France,
1937
16 mm, DVD
A manifesto of sorts for the Czech New Wave, this five-part anthology shows off the breadth of expression and the versatility of the movement’s directors.
Jiří Menzel…
Czechoslovakia,
1966
DVD
People on Sunday, an effervescent, sunlit silent, about a handful of city dwellers (a charming cast of nonprofessionals) enjoying a weekend outing, offers a rare glimpse of Weimar-era Berlin, would influence generations of film artists around the world.
Robert Siodmak…
Germany,
1930
Blu-ray, DVD
Pépé le moko is a wanted man: women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam, Pépé is safe from the clutches of the police, until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life. _Pépé le moko_ is a landmark of poetic realism.
Julien Duvivier
France,
1937
DVD
By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1966
Blu-ray, DVD
Based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, this extraordinarily rich and innovative silent classic (which inspired Ingmar Bergman to make movies) is a Dickensian ghost story and a deeply moving morality tale, as well as a showcase for groundbreaking special effects.
Victor Sjöström
Sweden,
1921
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Louis Malle called his gorgeous and groundbreaking _Phantom India_ the most personal film of his career. And this extraordinary journey to India, originally shown as a miniseries on European television, is infused with his sense of discovery, as well as occasional outrage, intrigue, and joy.
Louis Malle
France,
1969
DVD
Academy Award–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke shifted his focus from the social to the psychological for this riveting study of female sexuality and the dynamics of control, an adaptation of a controversial 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek.
Michael Haneke
France,
2001
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers.
Robert Bresson
France,
1959
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema.
Peter Weir
Australia,
1975
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A dazzling, unruly portrait of postwar Japan, _Pigs and Battleships_ details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. The film is shot in gorgeously composed, bustling cinemascope.
Shohei Imamura
Japan,
1962
DVD
Having escaped from prison, Charlie disguises himself as a pastor. In a village, he’s mistaken for the new curate.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1923
35 mm
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kobo Abe, _Pitfall_ is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black and white.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Japan,
1962
35 mm, DVD
In _Place de la république_, Louis Malle presents his entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris.
Louis Malle
France,
1974
35 mm, DVD
Max Ophuls brings his astonishing visual dexterity and storytelling bravura to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure.
Max Ophuls
France,
1952
DVD
A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry satire from Robert Altman.
Robert Altman
United States,
1992
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PlayTime, a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
Jacques Tati
France,
1967
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A corrupt businessman blackmails the lovelorn reprobate Atsushi into watching over his suitcase full of embezzled cash while he serves a jail sentence. Rather than wait for the man to retrieve his money, however, Atsushi decides to spend it all in one libidinous rush.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1965
35 mm, DVD
A Poem Is a Naked Person is a work of rough beauty that serves as testament to Les Blank’s cinematic daring and Leon Russell’s immense musical talents.
Les Blank
United States,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Agnès Varda's discursive, gorgeously filmed debut—a graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village—was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the coming French New Wave.
Agnès Varda
France,
1956
DCP, DVD
Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family in controversial director Shohei Imamura’s comic treatment of voyeurism and incest.
Shohei Imamura
Japan,
1966
DVD
Berit, a suicidal young woman living in a working-class port town, unexpectedly falls for Gösta, a sailor on leave. Haunted by a troubled past and held in a vice grip by her domineering mother, Berit begins to hope that her relationship with Gösta might save her from self-destruction.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1948
35 mm, DVD
When young Domenico ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company in Ermanno Olmi's tender coming-of-age story.
Ermanno Olmi
Italy,
1961
35 mm, DVD
Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
United States,
1980
DVD
Charles Laughton gulps beer and chomps on mutton, in his first of many iconic screen roles, as King Henry VIII, the ultimate anti-husband. Alexander Korda’s first major international success is a raucous, entertaining, even poignant peek into the boudoirs of the infamous king and his six wives.
Alexander Korda
United Kingdom,
1933
DVD
La promesse is the breakthrough feature from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who would go on to become a force in world filmmaking. This is a brilliantly economical and observant tale of a boy’s troubled moral awakening.
Luc Dardenne…
Belgium,
1996
Blu-ray, DVD
As David Goliath, in the popular British drama _The Proud Valley_, Paul Robeson is the quintessential everyman, an American sailor who joins rank-and-file Welsh miners organizing against the powers that be.
Pen Tennyson
United Kingdom,
1940
DVD
This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by the versatile René Clément, stars Delon as Tom Ripley, a duplicitous American charmer in Rome.
René Clément
France,
1960
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a "proper lady" in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.
Anthony Asquith…
United Kingdom,
1938
35 mm, DVD
A sparkling four-way affair overflowing with dialogue that showcases writer-director Sacha Guitry’s wit, _Quadrille_ stars Guitry as a magazine editor whose longtime girlfriend—to whom he plans to finally propose—is uncontrollably drawn to a handsome American movie star.
Sacha Guitry
France,
1938
DVD
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Yasujiro Ozu’s first post–World War II film takes place in an impoverished Toyko neighborhood that has been partly destroyed in bombing raids.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1947
35 mm
Albert Lamorisse’s exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris.
Albert Lamorisse
France,
1956
35 mm, DVD
A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa's _Red Beard_ chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director (Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa).
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1965
35 mm, DVD
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events. Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1964
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Charles Laughton once again teams up with Korda for this moving, elegantly shot biopic about the Dutch painter. Beginning when Rembrandt’s reputation was at its height, the film then tracks his quiet descent into loneliness and isolated self-expression.
Alexander Korda
United Kingdom,
1936
DVD
Jacques Prévert cowrote this atmospheric tale of the romantic trials of a tugboat captain, played by the iconic French star Jean Gabin.
Jean Grémillon
France,
1941
DVD
In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, Anna, an accomplished filmmaker (played by Aurore Clément), makes her way through a series of European cities to promote her latest movie.
Chantal Akerman
France,
1978
DVD
In Jan Němec’s surreal fable, a picnic is rudely transformed into a lesson in political hierarchy when a handful of mysterious authority figures show up.
Jan Němec
Czechoslovakia,
1966
DVD
This raw psychological drama about an engineer unable to adjust to the world around him following his suicide attempt is at heart a scathing portrait of social alienation and moral compromise.
Evald Schorm
Czechoslovakia,
1967
DVD
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, _Revanche_ is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann, a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption.
Götz Spielmann
Austria,
2008
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Richard III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life
Laurence Olivier
United Kingdom,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Working from a thoughtful script by Jack Nicholson, Monte Hellman fashioned this moody and tense western about a trio of cowhands who are mistaken for robbers and must outrun and hide from a posse of bloodthirsty vigilantes in the wilds of Utah.
Monte Hellman
United States,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A quick-witted and compelling dramatization of the troubled marriage of Catherine II (played by German actress Elisabeth Bergner, in her English-language debut) to Peter III (a randy Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and her subsequent ascension to the throne as Empress of Russia.
Paul Czinner
United Kingdom,
1934
DVD
In one of Ingmar Bergman’s most stylized and political films, three traveling actors are accused of taking part in a performance deemed pornographic by the state’s authorities.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1969
35 mm
Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold.
Jean Renoir
France,
1951
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1945
DCP, DVD
Soldiers, chambermaids, poets, prostitutes, aristocrats—all are on equal footing in Max Ophuls's multicharacter merry-go-round of love and infidelity.
Max Ophuls
France,
1950
DVD
What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lovely and distinctly American film.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
United States,
1986
DVD
Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners.
Jean Renoir
France,
1939
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A man receives a breakup letter from his sweetheart, who sends him back his photo, in pieces. The pained lover decides to reply. Fountain pen, penholder, desk, stamps, paper, and inkwell all contrive diabolically to thwart him.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1962
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Toshio Masuda’s smash _Rusty Knife,_ Yujiro Ishihara and fellow top Nikkatsu star Akira Kobayashi play former hoodlums trying to leave behind a life of crime, but their past comes back to haunt them when the authorities seek them out as murder witnesses.
Toshio Masuda
Japan,
1958
DVD
The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin is the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is the perfect introduction to him.
Fred Newmeyer…
United States,
1923
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses—then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. A landmark American documentary.
Albert Maysles…
United States,
1968
DVD
The true story of the death of Italy’s most wanted criminal and celebrated hero, Francesco Rosi’s groundbreaking political film is a startling exposé of Sicily and the tangled relations between its citizens, the Mafia, and government officials.
Francesco Rosi
Italy,
1962
DVD
Hired by a yakuza boss to eliminate an accused debtor, Zatoichi fulfills his task, only to witness the victim’s sister paying the owed amount minutes later. When the crime lord tries to possess the woman along with the cash, the blind swordsman wrestles with the injustice he has caused.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1968
Blu-ray, DVD
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture, maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece _Le Samouraï_ defines cool.
Jean-Pierre Melville
France,
1967
DVD
Toshiro Mifune furiously embodies swordsman Musashi Miyamoto as he comes into his own in the action-packed middle section of the Samurai Trilogy.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
A disillusioned Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) has turned his back on the samurai life, becoming a farmer in a remote village, while his nemesis Kojiro (Koji Tsuruta) now works for the shogun.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1956
Blu-ray, DVD
In the first part of the epic Samurai Trilogy, Toshiro Mifune thunders onto the screen as the iconic title character.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1954
Blu-ray, DVD
Toshiro Mifune stars as an aging swordsman in director Masaki Kobayashi's _Samurai Rebellion_, the gripping story of a peaceful man who finally decides to take a stand against injustice.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1967
35 mm, DVD
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil.
Masahiro Shinoda
Japan,
1965
DVD
Paul Robeson moved his family to London in 1928, headlining six British films in twelve years. Robeson's first British production, Zoltán Korda's _Sanders of the River_, however, ended up an embarrassment, its story of an African tribal leader transformed into a celebration of the British Empire.
Zoltán Korda
United Kingdom,
1935
DVD
In Kurosawa's sly companion piece to _Yojimbo,_ jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a "proper" samurai on its ear.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1962
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Kurosawa’s effortless debut is a thrilling martial arts action tale, but it’s also a moving story of moral education that’s quintessential Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1943
DVD
Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1945
DVD
Under Kenji Mizoguchi’s dazzling direction, this classic Japanese story became one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, a monumental, empathetic expression of human resilience in the face of evil.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1954
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A complex journey into time and memory, Chris Marker’s mind-bending free-form travelogue roams from Africa to Japan, guided by associative editing and an unnamed narrator.
Chris Marker
France,
1983
Blu-ray, DVD
The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner and his performer girlfriend, Ingmar Bergman's film features dreamlike detours and twisted psychosexual power plays that presage the director's Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1953
DVD
A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DVD
A trademark Cronenberg combination of the visceral and the cerebral, this phenomenally gruesome and provocative film about the expanses and limits of the human mind was the Canadian director’s breakout hit in the United States.
David Cronenberg
Canada,
1981
Blu-ray, DVD
Ingmar Bergman’s _Scenes from a Marriage_ chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partners.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1973
DVD
Over the course of his amazing sixty-plus year career, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman created countless substantial, multidimensional roles for female actors.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1952
35 mm
Shotgun weddings, kidnapping, attempted murder, emergency dental work—the things Don Vincenzo will do to restore his family's honor! Pietro Germi's _Seduced and Abandoned_ was the follow-up to his sensation _Divorce Italian Style_, and in many ways it's even more audacious.
Pietro Germi
Italy,
1964
35 mm, DVD
In Akira Kurosawa's _Seven Samurai_ (_Shichinin no samurai_), sixteenth-century villagers hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This thrilling three-hour ride is one of the most beloved movie epics of all time.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1954
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1957
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Lonely garbageman Nikkander (Matti Pellonpää) finds himself directionless after losing his friend and co-worker to a sudden heart attack; unlikely redemption comes in the form of plain supermarket cashier Ilona (Kati Outinen), with whom he begins a tentative love affair.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1986
DVD
Seeking a Pulitzer Prize, reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) has himself committed to a mental hospital to investigate a murder. As he closes in on the killer, insanity closes in on him. Sam Fuller’s _Shock Corridor_ masterfully charts the uneasy terrain between sanity and madness.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1963
Blu-ray, DVD
In this eerie, existential western directed by Monte Hellman and written by Carole Eastman, Warren Oates and Will Hutchins play a bounty hunter and his sidekick who are talked by a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) into leading her into the desert on a murkily motivated revenge mission.
Monte Hellman
United States,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair.
François Truffaut
France,
1960
35 mm, DVD
An inept Czech peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and tragedy fuse in this scathing exploration of one cowardly man’s complicity in the horrors of a totalitarian regime.
Ján Kadár…
Czechoslovakia,
1965
DVD
New 2K digital restorations of six short films by Lynch: Six Men Getting Sick (1967), The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970), The Amputee, Version 1 and Version 2 (1974), and Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995),
David Lynch
United States,
2002
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Enlisted during the First World War, Charlie discovers the hard life of the trenches and the dangers of combat.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1918
35 mm
Regarded as one of the most sexually provocative films of its day, Ingmar Bergman’s _The Silence_ follows two sisters as they travel by train with Anna’s young son to a foreign country seemingly on the brink of war.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1963
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
Jean-Pierre Melville began his superb feature filmmaking career with this powerful adaptation of an influential underground novel written during the Nazi occupation of France.
Jean-Pierre Melville
France,
1949
Blu-ray, DVD
Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel’s wicked and wild take on the life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God.
Luis Buñuel
Mexico,
1965
DVD
Four sexually hungry high school students prepare for their university entrance exams in Oshima’s hypnotic, free-form depiction of generational political apathy, featuring stunning color cinematography.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1967
DVD
A stylish paean to female destructiveness, De Palma’s first foray into horror voyeurism is a stunning amalgam of split-screen effects, bloody birthday cakes, and a chilling score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.
Brian De Palma
United States,
1973
DVD
The independent, unsentimental Omocha and her sister, the more tradition-minded Umekichi, are both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi's film is an uncompromising look at the forces that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1936
35 mm, DVD
French filmmaker Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin) never shied away from dipping his toes in the fanciful, but A Slightly Pregnant Man takes a full dive into the delightfully absurd.
Jacques Demy
France,
1973
DCP
In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to navigate the laws of attraction. During a weekend in the country, the women collude to force the men’s hands in matters of the heart.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1955
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Truffaut made The Soft Skin at a time when he was immersing himself in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and that master’s influence can be felt throughout this complex, insightful, and underseen French New Wave treasure.
François Truffaut
France,
1964
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
With Solaris, the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky created a brilliantly original science-fiction epic that challenges our conceptions about love, truth, and humanity itself.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Soviet Union,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The ultimate Italian road comedy, Il sorpasso stars the unlikely pair of Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant as, respectively, a waggish, freewheeling bachelor and the straitlaced law student he takes on a madcap trip from Rome to Tuscany.
Dino Risi
Italy,
1962
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Italian cinema dream team Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against glamorous type and deliver two of the finest performances of their careers in this moving, quietly subversive drama from Ettore Scola.
Ettore Scola
Italy,
1977
Blu-ray, DVD
Widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Victor Erice’s _The Spirit of the Beehive_ is a visually arresting, bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life.
Víctor Erice
Spain,
1973
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
One of the most immersive and rarefied experiences in the history of cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker embarks on a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Russia,
1979
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
_The State of Things_ is Wim Wenders’s highly personal film about filmmaking in Europe and America. It is about a film crew stranded at the westernmost tip of Europe.
Wim Wenders
West Germany,
1982
DCP
Despite its relatively low budget, this portrait of Korean War soldiers dealing with moral and racial identity crises remains one of Samuel Fuller's most gripping, realistic depictions of the blood and guts of war, as well as a reflection of Fuller's irreducible social conscience.
Samuel Fuller
United States,
1951
DVD
Jean-Pierre Léaud returns in the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually love-struck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he embarks on a series of misadventures.
François Truffaut
France,
1968
35 mm, DVD
This fleet, witty picaresque about a gambler and petty thief is a whimsical delight. Guitry himself stars as the tricheur looking back fondly on a life of crime, which he narrates with an effervescence matched by that of the film's skillful editing and cinematography.
Sacha Guitry
France,
1936
35 mm, DVD
In Seijun Suzuki's tragic love story, Harumi, volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1965
DVD
An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all, in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1934 silent classic.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1934
35 mm, DVD
This achingly gorgeous emotional epic from the incomparable Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the triumphs of Japanese cinema.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1939
DCP
Federico Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naive girl sold into the employ of a brutal strongman in a traveling circus, in this poetic fable of love and cruelty, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Federico Fellini
Italy,
1954
16 mm, DVD
Based on the filmmaker’s own story, The Stranger involves a bourgeois couple who are taken off guard when a man claiming to be the wife’s long-lost uncle sends word that he will be coming to stay with them after years of travel.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1991
DVD
With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch's one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, _Stranger Than Paradise_, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema.
Jim Jarmusch
United States,
1984
35 mm, DVD
When a pickpocket steals a rookie detective’s gun on a hot, crowded bus, the cop goes undercover in a desperate attempt to right the wrong. Kurosawa’s thrilling noir probes the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1949
35 mm, DVD
For his final film, Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to bear on the heartbreaking tale of a brothel in Tokyo’s red light district, full of women whose dreams are constantly being shattered by the socioeconomic realities surrounding them.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1956
35 mm, DVD
Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1934
DVD
The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island.
Roberto Rossellini
Italy,
1950
DCP, DVD
Pierre Etaix’s first feature introduces the droll humor and oddball charm of its unique writer-director-star.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1963
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1951
Blu-ray, DVD
In David Lean’s visually enchanting _Summertime_, Katharine Hepburn plays a lonely American spinster whose dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome—but married—Italian man while vacationing in Venice.
David Lean
United States,
1955
35 mm, DVD
Inspired by the earthy eroticism of Harriet Andersson, in the first of her many roles for him, Ingmar Bergman had a major international breakthrough with this sensual and ultimately ravaging tale of young love.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1953
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Rohmer's second “Moral Tale,” Bertrand bides his time in a casually hostile and envious friendship with college chum Guillaume. But when ladies’ man Guillaume seems to be making a play for the spirited, independent Suzanne, Bertrand watches bitterly with disapproval and jealousy.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1963
DCP, DVD
Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature, _Sweetie,_ which focuses on the hazardous relationship between the buttoned-down, superstitious Kay and her rampaging, devil-may-care sister, Sweetie.
Jane Campion
New Zealand,
1989
Blu-ray, DVD
With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Makavejev’s cult staple _Sweet Movie_ is a full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching.
Dušan Makavejev
France,
1974
DVD
Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune star in the story of a wandering samurai who exists in a maelstrom of violence. A gifted swordsman plying his craft during the turbulent final days of shogunate rule in Japan, Ryunosuke (Nakadai) kills without remorse or mercy.
Kihachi Okamoto
Japan,
1966
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Legendary swordplay filmmaker Hideo Gosha's _Sword of the Beast_ chronicles the flight of the low-level swordsman Gennosuke, who kills one of his ministers as part of a reform plot. His comrades then turn on him and, his sense of honor shaken, he decides to live in the wild, like an animal.
Hideo Gosha
Japan,
1965
DVD
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid _Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One_, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making.
William Greaves
United States,
1968
35 mm, DVD
Edward Yang’s mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present illuminates the precariousness of domestic life and the desperation of Taiwan’s globalized modernity.
Edward Yang
Taiwan,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
At the beginning of Seijun Suzuki’s taut and twisty whodunit, a prison truck is attacked and a convict inside is murdered. The penitentiary warden on duty, Daijiro (Michitaro Mizushima), is accused of negligence and suspended, only to take it upon himself to track down the killers.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1960
DVD
Zatoichi is hired to give a massage to a powerful political official who, he discovers, is mentally ill—a secret that the nobleman’s retinue is determined to keep at any cost.
Kazuo Mori
Japan,
1962
Blu-ray, DVD
Juzo Itami’s rapturous “ramen western” returns to U.S. screens for the first time in decades, in a new 4K restoration.
Juzo Itami
Japan,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Middle-aged Mr. Badii drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, searching for someone to rescue or bury him, in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami’s emotionally complex meditation on life and death.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1997
35 mm, DVD
With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, Richardson’s classic is a still startling benchmark work of realism.
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom,
1961
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
This multiple-Oscar-winning film by Roman Polanski is an exquisite, richly layered adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Roman Polanski
United Kingdom,
1979
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In Fritz Lang’s landmark of mystery and suspense, Berlin’s star detective must connect the fragmented clues of an insane criminal mastermind’s last will: a manifesto establishing a future empire of crime.
Fritz Lang
Germany,
1933
Blu-ray, DVD
Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, _That Hamilton Woman_ is a gripping account of the scandalous adulterous affair between the British Royal Navy officer Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) and the renowned beauty Emma, Lady Hamilton (Vivien Leigh).
Alexander Korda
United Kingdom,
1941
DVD
In noirish darkness, a man commits a shocking robbery. But, as we soon learn, this seeming criminal mastermind is actually a sensitive everyman driven to desperation by the need to provide for his family.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1930
35 mm, DVD
Yasujiro Ozu’s frequent leading man Chishu Ryu is riveting as Shuhei, a widowed high school teacher who finds that the more he tries to do what is best for his son’s future, the more they are separated.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1942
35 mm, DVD
Among the first Japanese films to deal directly with the scars of World War II, this drama about a group of rank-and-file Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity was adapted from the diaries of real prisoners.
Masaki Kobayashi
Japan,
1956
DVD
Prince Ahmad, cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place and the heart of a princess in Alexander Korda’s _The Thief of Bagdad_, an eye-popping special-effects pioneer and one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made.
Tim Whelan…
United Kingdom,
1940
DVD
A landmark collaboration between writer H. G. Wells, producer Alexander Korda, and designer and director William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come is a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress.
William Cameron Menzies
United Kingdom,
1936
Blu-ray, DVD
Kurahara adapted a novel by Yukio Mishima for Thirst for Love (Ai no kawaki), a tense psychological drama about a young woman who is widowed after marrying into a wealthy family.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1967
DVD
In the devastating first film of the Three Colors trilogy, Juliette Binoche gives a tour de force performance as Julie, a woman reeling from the tragic deaths of her husband and young daughter.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
France,
1993
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Krzysztof Kieślowski closes his Three Colors trilogy in grand fashion with an incandescent meditation on fate and chance, starring Irène Jacob as a sweet-souled yet somber runway model in Geneva whose life intersects with that of a bitter retired judge, played by Jean‑Louis Trintignant.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
France,
1994
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The most playful and also the grittiest of Kieślowski’s Three Colors films follows the adventures of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant living in France. _White_ is both a dark comedy about the economic inequalities of Eastern and Western Europe and a reverie about twisted love.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
France,
1994
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This first film by the legendary Hideo Gosha is among the most canonized chambara (sword-fighting) films.
Hideo Gosha
Japan,
1964
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A trio of bumbling young men frolic at the beach. While they swim, their clothes are stolen and replaced with new outfits. Donning these, they are mistaken for undocumented Koreans and end up on the run from comically outraged authorities.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1968
DVD
A vivid, visceral Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Winner of the 1962 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman's _Through a Glass Darkly_ presents an unflinching vision of a family’s near disintegration and a tortured psyche further taunted by God’s intangible presence.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1961
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
A highly unconventional romance that came on the spike heels of Almodóvar’s international sensation Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this is a splashy, sexy central work in the career of one of the world’s most beloved and provocative auteurs.
Pedro Almodóvar
Spain,
1990
Blu-ray, DVD
In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarfs.
Terry Gilliam
United Kingdom,
1981
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it’s a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk’s message of hope and equality to a wider audience.
Robert Epstein
United States,
1984
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
The Tin Drum, is Volker Schlöndorff’s visionary adaptation of Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s acclaimed novel, characterized by surreal imagery, arresting eroticism, and clear-eyed satire.
Volker Schlöndorff
Germany,
1979
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
An orchestra violinist's dreams of becoming a celebrated soloist and fears of his own mediocrity get in the way of his marriage to the patient, caring Marta in Ingmar Bergman's heartbreaking _To Joy_.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1949
DVD
Low wage–earning dad Okajima is depending on his bonus, and so are his wife and children, yet payday doesn't exactly go as planned. Exquisite and economical, Yasujiro Ozu's film alternates between brilliantly mounted comic sequences and heartrending working-class realities.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1931
35 mm, DVD
In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is thwarted when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang.
Seijun Suzuki
Japan,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
“My journey to Tokyo was no pilgrimage. I was curious to see if I could discover something from this time, whether something was left of his work, images perhaps, or people, even . . . Or if in the twenty years since Ozu’s death so much had changed in Tokyo that there was nothing left to be found.” —Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
West Germany,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
One of Ozu's most piercing portraits of family strife, _Tokyo Twilight_ follows the parallel paths of two sisters contending with an absent mother, unwanted pregnancy, and marital discord.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1957
35 mm, DVD
Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay was for the great Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg's _Torment,_ a dark coming-of-age drama about a boarding-school senior, Widgren, terrorized by his sadistic Latin teacher.
Alf Sjöberg
Sweden,
1944
DVD
Anna flees her home, where she has been victimized for years by her spineless father’s mean-spirited second wife, to be with her lover, an honest businessman yet to make his fortune. When he is accused of a murder he didn’t commit, the couple’s domestic tranquillity is upended.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1950
DVD
Aki Kaurismäki’s film of the Leningrad Cowboys’ massive concert in Helsinki’s Senate Square with the 150-member Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble is a loving tribute to the rock band he made famous.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
1994
DVD
In King Hu’s grandest work, Yang (Hsu Feng), a fugitive noblewoman at risk of being captured and executed, hides in a small village and then must escape into the wilderness with a shy scholar and two aides. There, the quartet face a massive group of fighters and are joined by a band of Buddhist monks surprisingly skilled in the art of battle.
King Hu
Taiwan,
1971
DCP
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's free-ranging assault on consumer capitalism and the establishment left tells the story of a wildcat strike at a sausage factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand).
Jean-Luc Godard…
France,
1972
DVD
In this, his final outing, Hulot is employed as an auto company’s director of design, and accompanies his new product (a “camping car” outfitted with absurd gadgetry) to an auto show in Amsterdam.
Jacques Tati
France,
1971
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is intimate in scale but epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.
Ermanno Olmi
Italy,
1978
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
A lifetime officer and an educated scion of an old military family battle each other to win the loyalties of a peacetime Scottish battalion. Ronald Neame’s portrayal of the rigid hierarchy of military life also examines the institutional contradictions and class divisions of English society.
Ronald Neame
United Kingdom,
1960
35 mm, DVD
One of Japan’s most popular and enduring classics, Keisuke Kinoshita’s _Twenty-Four Eyes_ is an elegant, emotional chronicle of a teacher’s unwavering commitment to her students, her profession, and her sense of morality.
Keisuke Kinoshita
Japan,
1954
DVD
In the town of Twin Peaks, everyone has their secrets—but especially Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder.
David Lynch
United States,
1992
DCP
Aided by the marvelous, impressionist-styled images of cinematographer Nestor Almendros and a swooning score by Georges Delerue, François Truffaut transforms his second adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché (author of Jules and Jim) into an overwhelming sensory experience.
François Truffaut
France,
1971
35 mm, 16 mm
“A film without a beginning or an end,” in Downey’s words.
Robert Downey Sr.
United States,
1975
DVD
Derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, Ugetsu, a ghost story like no other, is surely the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi's supreme achievement and one of the most beautiful films ever made.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1953
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This neorealist masterpiece by Vittorio De Sica follows an elderly pensioner as he strives to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic recovery.
Vittorio De Sica
Italy,
1952
Blu-ray, DVD
Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through the lilting songs of the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
Jacques Demy
France,
1964
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In her effervescent first California film, Agnès Varda delves into her own family history.
Agnès Varda
France,
1967
DCP, DVD
In René Clair's irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, _Under the Roofs of Paris_ is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.
René Clair
France,
1930
DVD
John Huston's ambitious tackling of Malcolm Lowry's towering, “unadaptable” novel Under the Volcano follows the final day in the life of self-destructive British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force), on the eve of World War II.
John Huston
United States,
1984
35 mm, DVD
In this musical melodrama set against the backdrop of a workers’ strike in Nantes, Dominique Sanda plays a young woman who wishes to leave her brutish husband (Michel Piccoli) for an earthy steelworker (Richard Berry), though he is involved with another.
Jacques Demy
France,
1982
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In order to enable his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau) to see, Dr. Farber (Max von Sydow) invents a process that makes it possible to transmit the images recorded in the brains of sighted people directly into the visual systems of blind people. Farber’s son Sam (William Hurt) sets out on a journey around the world in order to “see” and record the various stations of his mother’s life for her. The Frenchwoman Claire (Solveig Dommartin) falls in love with him and sets out in pursuit of him. She, in turn, is followed by the author Eugene (Sam Neill), who is recording her adventure.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1991
DCP
In making a film based on the life of a renowned eighteenth-century painter and woodblock portraitist, the great Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi created one of his most autobiographical statements on the artistic process as well as another of his trenchant observations about the place of women in Japanese society.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1946
35 mm
Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona in Agnès Varda's sparse, poetic _Vagabond_.
Agnès Varda
France,
1985
DCP, 35 mm, DVD
A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream.
Jaromil Jireš
Czechoslovakia,
1970
Blu-ray, DVD
With _Vampyr,_ Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result is nearly unclassifiable. _Vampyr_ is one of cinema's great nightmares.
Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark,
1932
DVD
A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation draws the attention of her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a clinically diabolical mind.
George Sluizer
Netherlands,
1988
Blu-ray, DVD
Director Shohei Imamura turns this fact-based story—about the seventy-eight-day killing spree of a remorseless man from a devoutly Catholic family—into a cold, perverse, and at times diabolically funny examination of the primitive coexisting with the modern.
Shohei Imamura
Japan,
1979
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet Veronika Voss lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. She meets a sportswriter, and the two develop an unlikely relationship. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, _Veronika Voss_ is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1982
35 mm
Basil Dearden’s unmistakably political taboo buster was one of the first films to address homophobia head-on, a cry of protest against British laws forbidding homosexuality.
Basil Dearden
United Kingdom,
1961
35 mm, DVD
This deadpan tragicomedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris is among the most beguiling films by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
Aki Kaurismäki
France,
1992
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Containing more than two thousand cuts and a wealth of inventive widescreen compositions, this coolly fragmented character study is a mesmerizing investigation of criminality and social decay.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1966
DVD
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman’s _The Virgin Spring_ is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1960
35 mm, DVD
Novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism. Luis Buñuel’s irreverent vision of life as a beggar’s banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece.
Luis Buñuel
Spain,
1961
35 mm, 16 mm, DVD
Two strangers dressed as minstrels (Arletty and Alain Cuny) arrive at a castle in advance of court festivities—and are revealed to be emissaries of the devil, dispatched to spread heartbreak and suffering. Their plans, however, are thwarted by an unexpected intrusion: human love.
Marcel Carné
France,
1942
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_Vivre sa vie_ was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. Anna Karina plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute.
Jean-Luc Godard
France,
1962
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route—a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
France,
1953
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A young sister and brother are abandoned in the harsh Australian outback and must learn to cope in the natural world, without their usual comforts, in this hypnotic masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg.
Nicolas Roeg
Australia,
1971
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
This was the Japanese master’s first true homage to American crime movies, and it is a fleetly told, expressively shot work of humor and emotional depth.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1930
35 mm, DVD
The anarchic descent into amoral madness that is The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no kisetsu) sounded a lost generation’s cry for help and was one of the films that kicked off Japan’s cinematic sixties with a bang.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1960
DVD
This is a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits under terrible threat from modern forces.
Martin Rosen
United States,
1978
Blu-ray, DVD
This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them.
Jean-Luc Godard
France,
1967
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_When a Woman Ascends the Stairs_ might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour—a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern postwar Ginza district, and entertains businessmen after work.
Mikio Naruse
Japan,
1960
DVD
In The White Angel, Raffaello Matarazzo’s sequel to his blockbuster Nobody’s Children, the perpetually put-upon Guido and Luisa (Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson) return for a new round of trials and tribulations.
Raffaello Matarazzo
Italy,
1955
DVD
In the south of France, in a vast plain region called the Camargue, lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him.
Albert Lamorisse
France,
1952
35 mm, DVD
Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1957
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. _Wings of Desire_ forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1987
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
In Ingmar Bergman's stark depiction of spiritual crisis, small-town pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. _Winter Light_ is beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1962
DVD
In this acclaimed adaptation of the novel by legendary Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, John Huston brings to life a world of vivid, poetic American eccentricity. Brad Dourif, in an impassioned performance, is Hazel Motes, who, fresh out of the army, attempts to open the Church Without Christ.
John Huston
United States,
1979
DVD
Two unemployed actors drown their frustrations in booze, pills, and lighter fluid. When an uncle offers his cottage, they escape the squalor of their flat for a week in the country. Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical cult favorite is intelligent, superbly acted, and hilarious.
Bruce Robinson
United Kingdom,
1986
DVD
In this art-house sensation, an amateur entomologist has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he spends the night with a young widow who lives at the bottom of a sand dune.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Japan,
1964
35 mm, DVD
For his premiere United Artists release, Charlie Chaplin chose a sophisticated drama sans himself (apart from a heavily disguised cameo), with frequent leading lady Edna Purviance as the eponymous femme kept by rich philanderer Adolphe Menjou.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1923
35 mm
Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters—Fusako, a war widow, and Natsuko, having an affair with a narcotics smuggler—who along with their younger friend Kumiko descend into prostitution and moral chaos amid the postwar devastation surrounding them.
Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan,
1948
DVD
Hailed by the _New York Times_ on its Paris release as "one of the great films in motion picture history," Raymond Bernard's _Wooden Crosses_, France's answer to _All Quiet on the Western Front_, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I.
Raymond Bernard
France,
1932
DVD
Originally made for German television, this recently rediscovered, three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1973
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions) in his surreal documentary-fiction collision _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_.
Dušan Makavejev
Yugoslavia,
1971
35 mm, DVD
Glückstadt, in Northern Germany; Bonn; a palace along the Rhine; a housing project on the outskirts of Frankfurt; and finally the Zugspitze—these are the stations of the journey that the young Wilhelm Meister (Rüdiger Vogler) hopes will save him from the gloomy irritability and despondency that plague him in his hometown. In unfamiliar places, he thinks that he will be able to do what he has always had an uncontrollable drive to do—to write. He wants to become an author. With the journey, which his mother (Marianne Hoppe) gives him permission to make, he hopes to broaden his horizons and, above all, to find himself.
Wim Wenders
Germany,
1975
DCP
When a crew of scientists returns from Mars with a sample of the space spores that contaminated their ship, they inadvertently bring about a nightmarish earth invasion.
Kazui Nihonmatsu
Japan,
1967
DVD
The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral.
Edward Yang
Taiwan,
2000
Blu-ray, DVD
To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) turns a range war between two evil clans to his own advantage in Akira Kurosawa's visually stunning and darkly comic _Yojimbo._
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1961
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
With its jazzy Michel Legrand score, pastel paradise of costumes, and divine supporting cast (George Chakiris, Grover Dale, Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, and Gene Kelly), The Young Girls of Rochefort is a tribute to Hollywood optimism from sixties French cinema’s preeminent dreamer.
Jacques Demy
France,
1967
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
At an Austrian boys' boarding school in the early 1900s, shy, intelligent Törless observes the sadistic behavior of his fellow students, doing nothing to help a victimized classmate—until the torture goes too far. Young Törless is adapted from Robert Musil's acclaimed novel.
Volker Schlöndorff
Germany,
1966
DVD
This elaborately conceived and brilliantly mounted comedy is Pierre Etaix’s most beloved movie, as well as his personal favorite.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1965
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s _Z_ was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and is a technically audacious and emotionally gripping masterpiece.
Costa-Gavras
France,
1969
DVD
Kenji Misumi, who directed the first installment of the Zatoichi series, returns with this tale in which the blind swordsman once again finds himself the protector of a child: a little girl pursued by both devious family members and bloodthirsty ruffians.
Kenji Misumi
Japan,
1965
Blu-ray, DVD
After arriving in a small village, Zatoichi finds himself accused of stealing the citizens’ hefty tax payments. To clear his name, he must face off against a corrupt official, a succession of hired blades, and a bullwhip-wielding titan.
Kazuo Ikehiro
Japan,
1964
Blu-ray, DVD
An elderly prisoner accused of murder begs Zatoichi to find evidence of his innocence. The blind swordsman, for the first time, chooses not to help, but fate has other plans for him.
Kazuo Mori
Japan,
1965
Blu-ray, DVD