In the early 1970s, a kung-fu dynamo named Bruce Lee side-kicked his way onto the screen and straight into pop-culture immortality.
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
A cinematic master-class in which Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami discusses his filmmaking in relation to his 2002 film Ten.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
2004
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
2017
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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
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
Janus Films is proud to present a touring retrospective spanning Abbas Kiarostami’s nearly five-decade career. This series includes new restorations, undertaken by the Criterion Collection and MK2, of The Koker Trilogy, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and rarely screened shorts and documentaries.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
2019
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray
In 2000, Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
2001
DCP, Blu-ray
A uniquely prolific and chameleonic figure of world cinema, Kon Ichikawa delivered a burst of stylistic bravado with this intricate tale of betrayal and retribution.
Kon Ichikawa
Japan,
1963
DCP, 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
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
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
Director Ishiro Honda returned again for the first Godzilla movie expressly for children.
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1969
DCP, Blu-ray
Conceived as an amusing diversion in the wake of the despairing The Silence, this comedy is Bergman’s first film in color, and it looks like a glorious chocolate box.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1964
DCP
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
DCP, 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
This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1955
Blu-ray, DVD
In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left 30,000 dead, Kiarostami returned to the village of Koker where his camera surveys not only the devastation but the teeming life that continues in its wake.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1992
DCP, Blu-ray, 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 his second feature, a towering epic that took him years to complete, Andrei Tarkovsky waded deep into the past and emerged with a visionary masterwork.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Soviet Union,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
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
Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed new restoration.
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 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
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
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
Wong Kar-wai’s scintillating debut feature is a kinetic, hyper-cool crime thriller graced with flashes of the impressionistic, daydream visual style for which he would become renowned.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
1988
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Shepitko’s emotionally overwhelming final film won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and has been hailed around the world as the finest Soviet film of its decade.
Larisa Shepitko
Soviet Union,
1977
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1984
DCP
Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy,
1960
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Volker Schlöndorff transported Bertolt Brecht’s 1918 debut play to contemporary West Germany for this vicious experiment in adaptation, seldom seen for nearly half a century.
Volker Schlöndorff
West Germany,
1970
DCP, 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
The warmth and wit of celebrated playwright turned auteur Marcel Pagnol (The Marseille Trilogy) shines through in this enchanting slice-of-life comedy.
Marcel Pagnol
France,
1938
DCP, Blu-ray
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
Tatsuya Nakadai stars as a vengeful ex-samurai commanding a gang of outlaws in an attack on the castle of his former master.
Hideo Gosha
Japan,
1978
35 mm
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
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.
Gillo Pontecorvo
Italy,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
With her senses-ravishing take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time.
Claire Denis
France,
1999
DCP, 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
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1980
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
When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure.
Jean-Jacques Beineix
France,
1986
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Enter a legend. Bruce Lee’s return to the Hong Kong film industry after a decade in America proved to be his big breakthrough, launching him to instant superstardom and setting a new standard for kung fu heroics.
Lo Wei
Hong Kong,
1971
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,
1970
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, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss
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
Firebrand auteur Nagisa Ōshima offers a devastating vision of moral rot within postwar Japanese society in the form of a hauntingly sad family tragedy.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1969
35 mm
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
“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1970
DCP, Blu-ray
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
Disciplined at school for breaking a window, a boy joins throngs of his schoolmates as they make a cacophonous exit into Tehran’s streets.
Abbas Kiarostami
1972
DCP
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
DCP, 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
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle.
Les Blank
United States,
1982
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend.
Howard Brookner
United States,
1983
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mind-set.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1979
DCP
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
The youngest generation of a Japanese family are forced to submit to a series of cruelly-enforced family traditions.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1971
35 mm
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
A husband and wife lie to each other about their weekend travel plans, only to both show up at the family's country house with their lovers.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1976
35 mm
An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out of his ear, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him.
Abbas Kiarostami
1982
DCP
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
DCP, 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
With a radical take on narrative, disturbing yet beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a decaying bourgeois family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel.
Lucrecia Martel
Argentina,
2001
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray
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, Blu-ray, DVD
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
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
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 16 mm, DVD
Directed by the visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-Capped Star tells the story of a family who have been uprooted by the Partition of India and come to depend on their eldest daughter, the self-sacrificing Neeta (Supriya Choudhury).
Ritwik Ghatak
India,
1960
DCP, Blu-ray
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
An acclaimed early work by Olivier Assayas that has long remained unavailable, the deeply felt coming-of-age drama Cold Water at long last makes its way to U.S. theaters.
Olivier Assayas
France,
1994
DCP, 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
A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds.
Sergei Parajanov
Soviet Union,
1969
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Ostensibly also a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1976
DCP
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
This widely acclaimed film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a stunning, senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in present-day Belarus, teenage Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko, in one of the screen’s most searing depictions of anguish since Renée Falconetti’s Joan of Arc) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance.
Elem Klimov
Soviet Union,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart.
Mikhail Kalatozov
Soviet Union,
1957
DCP, 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
Czechoslovak New Wave iconoclast Juraj Herz’s terrifying, darkly comic vision of the horrors of the Nazi racial ideology stars a supremely chilling Rudolf Hrušínský as the pathologically morbid Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium director in 1930s Prague who believes fervently that death offers the only true relief from human suffering.
Juraj Herz
Czechoslovakia,
1969
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
DCP, 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
A different person has confessed to each of the serial killings in which an X has been cut into the throats of the victims, but none of them can explain their motives. Detective Takabe finds no clues to the connection between them until he encounters a strange young man...
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japan,
1997
35 mm
_Daisies_ is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that’s widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.
Věra Chytilová
Czechoslovakia,
1966
DCP, 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
35 mm, 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
Wong Kar-wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
1990
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
With its droll humor and bittersweet emotional heft, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Mottola announced the arrival of an unassumingly sharp-witted new talent on the 1990s indie film scene.
Greg Mottola
Canada,
1996
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.
Jim Jarmusch
United States,
1995
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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
The original Godzilla team of director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited for this kaiju extravaganza, which features no fewer than eleven monsters
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1968
DCP, Blu-ray
From the gutters of Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir.
Edgar G. Ulmer
United States,
1945
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
This sophisticated fantasy—the last Bergman film to be shot by the great Gunnar Fischer—is an engaging satire on petit-bourgeois morals.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1960
DCP
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
With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Jan Němec
Czechoslovakia,
1964
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played by Michel Piccoli.
Marco Ferreri
Italy,
1969
35 mm, 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
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
DCP, 35 mm, 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
DCP, 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
Grave and witty by turns, this drama develops into a probing study of the psychology of desire. Susanne (Eva Dahlbeck), head of a modeling agency, takes her protégée Doris (Harriet Andersson) to a fashion show in Gothenburg, where Susanne makes contact with a former lover, and Doris finds herself pursued by a married dignitary (Gunnar Björnstrand).
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1955
DCP, 16 mm
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
DCP, 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
The first Godzilla film directed by Jun Fukuda, who would go on to direct four more, is fast-paced and light in tone, and builds to a riveting race-against-time finale.
Jun Fukuda
Japan,
1966
DCP, Blu-ray
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
A young woman is married to a much older man and begins a flirtation with one of his close friends that leads to dire consequences.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1974
35 mm, DVD
Commissioned to make a working-class family drama, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, upending expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Germany,
1972
DCP, 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
For his feature debut, twenty-four-year-old Louis Malle brought together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis.
Louis Malle
France,
1958
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
“Life is a beastly mess,” states the great Laurence Olivier in this superb drama of the seedy music-hall life. He plays Archie Rice, a third-rate vaudevillian whose song-and-dance routines are crusty, unappealing, and decidedly boring.
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom,
1960
DCP
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
Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and assistant in a photographer’s studio, running errands, and, briefly, exchanging glances with a pretty middle-class girl.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1973
DCP
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
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Visionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (The Story of Film: An Odyssey) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists.
Mark Cousins
United Kingdom,
2018
DCP, 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
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
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
Lost souls reach out for human connection amidst the glimmering night world of Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked nocturne.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
1995
DCP, Blu-ray, 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,
1983
DCP, 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
Bergman had discovered the bleak, windswept island of Fårö while scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly in 1960.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1970
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Returning to Fårö after living in Germany for three years, Bergman undertook his second documentary tribute to the remote Swedish island he loved.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1979
DCP, 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
A woman in a stable-but-passionless marriage suddenly begins to lose her mind when she becomes pregnant with her second child.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1975
35 mm, DVD
Kiarostami’s fascination with both Tehrani car culture and the uses of power in postrevolutionary society combine in this documentary about a traffic officer assigned to enforce driving restrictions in central Tehran (a locale near the director’s office at Kanoon).
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1983
DCP
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
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
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
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
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
DCP, 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
Bruce Lee is at his most awe-inspiringly ferocious in this blistering follow-up to his star-making turn in The Big Boss, which turned out to be an even greater success than its predecessor.
Lo Wei
Hong Kong,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray, 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, Blu-ray, DVD
A piece of driftwood on the seashore, carried about by the waves...
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
2003
DCP, Blu-ray
One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1952
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray
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
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
Made during his self-imposed exile in Germany, Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes offers a lacerating portrait of a troubled marriage, and a complex psychological analysis of a murder.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1980
DCP
Released five years after Bruce Lee’s death, this eccentrically entertaining kung fu curio combines footage from an unfinished project directed by and starring Lee with original material shot by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse to create an entirely new work that testifies to the actor’s enduring place in the pop culture imagination.
Robert Clouse
Hong Kong,
1978
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, Blu-ray, 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
After laying waste to an alien civilization on Venus, the three-headed, lightning-emitting space monster Ghidorah brings its insatiable thirst for destruction to Earth, where fierce foes Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra must join forces in order to deal with the unprecedented threat.
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1964
DCP, Blu-ray
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, DVD
A young and innocent girl gets romantically involved with an older, married man.
Desmond Davis
United Kingdom,
1964
DCP
Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the ever-curious French cinema icon explores the little-known world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who survive by foraging for that which society throws away.
Agnès Varda
France,
2000
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Agnès Varda’s charming follow-up to her acclaimed documentary The Gleaners and I is a deceptively unassuming grace note that takes us deeper into the world of those who find purpose and beauty in the refuse of society.
Agnès Varda
France,
2002
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
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
_Godzilla_ is the roaring granddaddy of all monster movies. It’s also a remarkably humane and melancholy drama made in Japan at a time when the country was still reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing.
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Toho Studios followed the enormous success of the original Godzilla with this sequel, efficiently directed by Motoyoshi Oda as a straight-ahead monsters-on-the-loose drama.
Motoyoshi Oda
Japan,
1955
DCP, Blu-ray
An alien invasion prompts a tag-team battle between Godzilla and Anguirus, the planet protectors, and King Ghidorah and the new monster Gigan, a cyborg with scythe-like claws, an abdominal buzz saw, winglike back fins, and pincerlike mandibles.
Jun Fukuda
Japan,
1972
DCP, Blu-ray
Intended to address the crisis levels of pollution in postwar Japan, Godzilla vs. Hedorah finds the King of the Monsters fighting an alien life form that arrives on Earth and steadily grows by feeding on industrial waste.
Yoshimitsu Banno
Japan,
1971
DCP, Blu-ray
Godzilla’s evil twin Mechagodzilla first reared its head in this Jun Fukuda–directed film. A robot designed by aliens to conquer Earth, the enduringly popular villain has since been resurrected by Toho Studios several times.
Jun Fukuda
Japan,
1974
DCP, Blu-ray
Nuclear testing unleashes mayhem on the undersea kingdom of Seatopia, causing a series of environmental disasters that nearly wipes out Rokuro, the schoolboy protagonist at the center of this film.
Jun Fukuda
Japan,
1973
DCP, Blu-ray
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
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
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
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
While on summer vacation, a lonely woman attempts to deal with her personal feelings of isolation.
Eric Rohmer
France,
1986
DCP, 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.
David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer
United States,
1976
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts.
Mathieu Kassovitz
France,
1995
DCP, 35 mm, 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
A young woman waits and waits for her delayed husband to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
Pierre Etaix
France,
1962
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar-wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again.
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong,
1997
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
France,
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
When a soldier returns home at the end of World War II, he refuses to forgive his wife for prostituting herself one night in order to pay off medical bills after their son's sudden illness.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1948
35 mm
In this psychologically rich character study, written and directed by Satyajit Ray, Bengali film star Uttam Kumar draws on his real-world celebrity to play Arindam Mukherjee, a matinee idol on the brink of his first flop.
Satyajit Ray
India,
1966
Blu-ray, 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
In Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1989
DCP
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
DCP, 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
The strangest and most disturbing of the films Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, Hour of the Wolf stars Max von Sydow as a haunted painter living in voluntary exile with his wife (Liv Ullmann).
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1968
DCP
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
A torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal is unleashed under one roof in this venomous melodrama from South Korean master Kim Ki-young.
Kim Ki-young
South Korea,
1960
DCP, 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
Evidently the first installment in a series that didn’t continue, this instructional film shows idle twelve- and sixteen-year-old brothers learning how to improve their surroundings by painting an old door.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1977
DCP
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
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
A college student attempts to cheat on his final exams by scribbling notes on his shirt; naturally his best-laid plans go awry.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1930
35 mm
An unemployed college graduate attempts to trick his family into thinking that he has a job.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1929
35 mm
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
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
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
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
35 mm, 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
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
A visionary work of Eastern Bloc science fiction, this mesmerizing Czechoslovak adaptation of a novel by Stanisław Lem melds Cold War ideology and utopian futurism into a tour de force of space-age modernism.
Jindřich Polák
Czechoslovakia,
1963
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
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
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
Join Janus Films in 2018 as we celebrate the centennial of the Swedish director’s birth with a traveling retrospective of all of his theatrical films!
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
Unemployed Kihachi and his two sons struggle to make ends meet, but that doesn't keep Kihachi from wooing single mother Otaka.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1935
35 mm
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
The marvelously moody Intimidation (Aru kyouhaku) is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan,
1960
DVD
Aliens from Planet X make an irresistible offer to the people of Earth: let them borrow Godzilla and Rodan to help defeat King Ghidorah, and in return they will provide a cure for all known human disease.
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1965
DCP, Blu-ray
Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires.
Olivier Assayas
France,
1996
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Agnès Varda’s tender evocation of the childhood of her husband, Jacques Demy—a dream project of his that she realized when he became too ill to direct the film himself—is a wonder-filled portrait of the artist as a young man and an enchanting ode to the magic of cinema.
Agnès Varda
France,
1991
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
In this preternaturally assured feature debut by Carlos Reygadas, a man (Alejandro Ferretis) travels from Mexico City to an isolated village to commit suicide; once there, however, he meets a pious elderly woman (Magdalena Flores) whose quiet humanity incites a reawakening of his desires.
Carlos Reygadas
Mexico,
2002
DCP, 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
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
France,
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
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.
Chris Hegedus…
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
A gripping disaster film and a stirring plea for international cooperation, Kameradschaft cemented G. W. Pabst’s status as one of the most morally engaged and formally dexterous filmmakers of his time.
G. W. Pabst
Germany,
1931
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
Seeking to invigorate the American documentary format, which he felt was rote and uninspired, Robert Drew brought the style and vibrancy he had fostered as a Life magazine correspondent to filmmaking in the late fifties. He did this by assembling an amazing team—including such eventual nonfiction luminaries as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—that would transform documentary cinema.
Robert Drew
United States,
DCP, Blu-ray
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
Silent-comedy legend Harold Lloyd goes west in this irresistible blend of action, romance, and slapstick invention.
Ted Wilde
United States,
1927
DCP, 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
In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope.
Jean Vigo
France,
1934
DCP, 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
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
Bernardo Bertolucci's _The Last Emperor_, about the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated.
Bernardo Bertolucci
China,
1987
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
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
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
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
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
One of Bergman’s most satisfying marital comedies, A Lesson in Love stars the droll and sparkling duo of Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand as a couple deep into their married years and seeking fresh pastures.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm
The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent.
Mikhail Kalatozov
Soviet Union,
1959
Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
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
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
West Germany,
1981
35 mm, 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
Germany,
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
Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is a university graduate, and the husband of a woman of some means, but he has rejected middle class dreams, and operates a candy stall at the local flea market.
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom,
1958
DCP
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 breathtaking vision of Cuban revolutionary history wrought with white-hot intensity, Humberto Solás’s operatic epic tells the story of a changing country through the eyes of three women, each named Lucía. I
Humberto Solás
Cuba,
1968
DCP, Blu-ray
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
Peter Lorre stars as serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s harrowing masterwork _M_, a suspenseful panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.
Fritz Lang
Germany,
1931
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
DCP, 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
DCP, 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,
1976
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
When a man chases down his stolen movie camera, the thief commits suicide by jumping off a building. But after the police take the camera as evidence, it becomes unclear if there was ever a thief in the first place.
Nagisa Oshima
Japan,
1970
35 mm
The first of Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1975
DCP
Mixing visceral, documentary-like realism with the narrative focus of Hollywood noir and melodrama, Manila in the Claws of Light is a howl of anguish from one of the most celebrated figures in Philippine cinema.
Lino Brocka
Philippines,
1975
DCP, Blu-ray, 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,
1979
35 mm, DVD
Marcel Pagnol’s epic love story hunkers down on the waterfront of Marseille, where restless young barkeep Marius is in love with the cockle monger Fanny but cannot quell his wanderlust.
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
When a rash of strikes and political turmoil bubbles up in 1968 France, Milou (Michel Piccoli) finds himself unable to bury his mother.
Louis Malle
France,
1990
35 mm
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
One of the first Cuban films to achieve significant success abroad, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s intimate and densely layered Memories of Underdevelopment is a landmark work of the country’s cinema.
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Cuba,
1968
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
United Kingdom,
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
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
A decade after he broke through with BREAKER MORANT, Australian director Bruce Beresford made another acclaimed film about the effects of colonialism on the individual.
Bruce Beresford
United States,
1990
35 mm
Described by director François Truffaut as “my first real film,” this exuberant, freewheeling short set the stage for the cinematic revolution of the French New Wave.
François Truffaut
France,
1957
35 mm, Blu-ray, 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).
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1936
DCP, 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
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
DCP, 35 mm, 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
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
Charlie Chaplin plays shockingly against type in his most controversial film, a brilliant and bleak black comedy about money, marriage, and murder.
Charles Chaplin
United States,
1947
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
An art-house sensation that paved the way for a wave of gritty addiction dramas, Barbet Schroeder’s feature debut is a sublimely fatalistic portrait of 1960s counterculture imploding.
Barbet Schroeder
West Germany,
1969
DCP
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
After her husband kills his boss and himself, Mother Kusters becomes drawn into the activities of the German Communist party and then a group of anarchists.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1975
35 mm
Family turmoil ensues when, after his father's death, an eldest son is revealed as a scion of a long-dead first wife.
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan,
1934
35 mm
Godzilla faces off against the benevolent insect monster-god Mothra in this clash of the titans, a crossover battle between two of Toho Studios’ most popular monsters—the last in which Godzilla would figure as a malevolent villain rather than a fearsome hero
Ishiro Honda
Japan,
1964
DCP, Blu-ray
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
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,
1981
DCP, DVD
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
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
For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the conventions of period romance.
Gillian Armstrong
Australia,
1979
DCP, 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
DCP, 35 mm, 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
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
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
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
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
Shot outside of Pittsburgh at a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood feature by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is one of the great stories of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time.
George A. Romero
United States,
1968
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
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
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
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
Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of contemporary American cinema’s most independent artists.
Kelly Reichardt
United States,
2006
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history.
Leni Riefenstahl
Germany,
1938
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history.
Leni Riefenstahl
Germany,
1938
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
Agnès Varda’s unsung feminist anthem is both a buoyant chronicle of a transformative friendship and an empowering vision of universal sisterhood.
Agnès Varda
France,
1977
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
The first shot shows students descending a staircase in calm, orderly fashion, then the second details the same action as a chaotic rush.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1981
DCP
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
This wry, melancholic comedy from Aki Kaurismäki, a clear-eyed response to the current refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a place to call home.
Aki Kaurismäki
Finland,
2017
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, 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
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball scene.
Jennie Livingston
United States,
1990
DCP, Blu-ray
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
France,
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
The fifth drama that Bergman shot on his beloved Fårö describes a mood of fear and spiritual guilt.
Ingmar Bergman
Sweden,
1969
DCP
Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy are brought to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent achievements of the silent era.
Carl Th. Dreyer
France,
1928
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
DCP, 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
DCP, 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
DCP, 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
With its bracing blend of unflinching realism and aching humanity, Héctor Babenco’s electrifying look at lost youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society helped put the country’s cinema on the international map.
Héctor Babenco
Brazil,
1980
DCP, Blu-ray
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,
1955
DCP, DVD
The jaw-dropping set pieces fly fast and furious in Jackie Chan’s breathtakingly inventive martial-arts comedy, a smash hit that made him a worldwide icon of daredevil action spectacle.
Jackie Chan
Hong Kong,
1985
DCP, Blu-ray
Jackie Chan followed up the massive success of Police Story with an even bigger box-office hit. Having been demoted to a lowly traffic cop for his, ahem, unorthodox policing methods, Chan’s go-it-alone officer Ka-Kui quits the force in protest.
Jackie Chan
Hong Kong,
1988
DCP, Blu-ray
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
DCP, 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
Buddy Red Bow is struggling, in the face of persecution, by greedy developers and political in-fighting, to keep his nation on a Montana Cheyenne Reservation financially solvent and independent.
Jonathan Wacks
United States,
1989
DCP
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
Jean Vigo was twenty-five when he made this, his debut film, a silent cinematic poem that reveals, through a thrilling and ironic use of montage, the economic reality hidden behind the facade of the Mediterranean resort town of Nice.
Jean Vigo…
France,
1930
DCP, 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
In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen), one worker’s terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers.
Emilio Gómez Muriel…
Mexico,
1936
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
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD
The rare early Kiarostami film made outside of Kanoon, and one of the most downbeat of his features, this adult drama concerns a civil servant besieged on two fronts: he’s accused of taking bribes, and his marriage is collapsing (Kiarostami has admitted this latter element was autobiographical).
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1977
Blu-ray
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
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal
Ritwik Ghatak
Bangladesh,
1973
DCP, Blu-ray
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, Blu-ray, 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,
1961
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 rare Kanoon film that doesn’t involve children, this unusual road movie was made during the revolution and afforded Kiarostami what may have been a welcome escape from the capital.
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran,
1978
DCP
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.
David Maysles…
United States,
1969
DCP, Blu-ray, 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
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 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
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
Toshiro Mifune plays a large-nosed samurai who woos a princess in Hiroshi Inagaki's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan,
1959
35 mm
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
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
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
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A famous poet who hasn't written a word in two years unconsciously plagarizes the work of Stefan George, he comes to believe he is the reincarnation of the dead writer.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany,
1976
35 mm
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
DCP, 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