Directed by Otto Preminger • 1949 • United States
Starring Jeanne Crain, Madeleine Carroll, George Sanders

Oscar Wilde’s classic drawing room comedy LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN comes to the screen with a sparkling script cowritten by another legendary wit, Dorothy Parker, and under the typically sophi...

Directed by Atom Egoyan • 1984 • Canada
Starring Patrick Tierney, Berj Fazlian, Sirvart Fazlian

Atom Egoyan’s striking debut finds the director already working through the themes of technology, isolation, and identity that recur obsessively throughout his work. Peter (Patrick Tierney) is cataton...

Directed by Steven Soderbergh • 1999 • United States
Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren

Steven Soderbergh’s stylish, fascinatingly fractured revenge thriller stars Terence Stamp as a British ex-con who, following his release from prison, heads to Los Angeles to investigate hi...

Directed by Christian Blackwood • 1982 • United States, West Germany
Starring Eartha Kitt

Filmed in 1982 at the legendary singer’s remote home and during multiple live performances, ALL BY MYSELF: THE EARTHA KITT STORY is a deeply moving and personal glimpse into the star’s life and career. Know...

Directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren • 1953 • Sweden
Starring Eva Henning, Sonja Wigert, Hjördis Petterson

Strikingly shot in inky chiaroscuro, this stylish, twist-laden mystery—something like a Swedish riff on Otto Preminger’s noir classic LAURA—features a striking performance from Eva Henning as (w...

Directed by William Lustig • 1980 • United States
Starring Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Gail Lawrence

Banned across the world for its graphic violence (enhanced by the landmark gore effects of Tom Savini), this relentlessly shocking cult classic remains one of the most notorious and influential ...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1983 • United States
Starring Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett

Recut and restored twenty-five years after its ill-fated premiere, Charles Burnett’s second feature is an eye-opening revelation—wise, funny, heartbreaking, and timeless. Pierce Mundy w...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1971 • West Germany

Considered by many to be the quintessential masterpiece among Werner Herzog’s early works, FATA MORGANA can be described as an expressionist documentary. Consisting of three parts, the film is an absorbing collection of images shot in an around the...

Directed by Jean Rollin • 1979 • France
Starring Franca Maï, Jean-Marie Lemaire, Brigitte Lahaie

Jean Rollin’s erotic masterpiece is often described as a vampire film—yet, more than nearly any other horror movie, its true subject is blood fetishism. Set in 1905, the story concerns a group of ari...

Directed by Abel Ferrara • 1981 • United States
Starring Zoë Lund, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto

Abel Ferrara’s exploitation-scuzz classic takes place in the cesspool of 1980s New York, where mute garment-district worker Thana (Zoë Lund, who also cowrote Ferrara’s BAD LIEUTENANT) is raped once, t...

Directed by Christopher Nolan • 1999 • United Kingdom
Starring Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw

Before he became a sensation with the twisty revenge story MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan fashioned this low-budget, 16 mm black-and-white neonoir with comparable precision and cunning. Providing irrefutable evi...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1974 • United States
Starring Brian Narelle, Dan O'Bannon, Cal Kuniholm

John Carpenter made his feature debut with this gleefully gonzo science-fiction satire, which began life as a student film and went on to become a cult classic. Onboard the titular spaceship, a t...

Directed by Roy William Neill • 1946 • United States
Starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre

Based (loosely) on a novel by legendary crime writer and master of existential dread Cornell Woolrich (REAR WINDOW, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK), this bleakly atmospheric noir stars everyone’s favorite s...

Directed by Harold Clurman • 1946 • United States
Starring Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Bill Williams

This strikingly stylized psychological thriller boasts a remarkable pedigree: written by Clifford Odets, based on a novel by noir icon Cornell Woolrich, and lensed by famed cinematographer Nichola...

Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power

A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s DRYLONGSO embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rat...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1984 • United States, Germany
Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint

With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at it...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien • 1980 • Taiwan
Starring Kenny Bee, Anthony Chan Yau, Chang Ping-Yu

One of the great poets of modern cinema, Hou Hsiao-hsien, made his feature debut with this sweet and lighthearted romantic comedy. Pop star Kenny Bee plays the poor city boy who, while working as an e...

Directed by Al Reinert • 1989 • United States

In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Al Reinert’s documentary FOR...

Directed by Youssef Chahine • 1958 • Egypt
Starring Youssef Chahine, Farid Shawqi, Hind Rostom

Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with this masterpiece, which, though initially a commercial failure in Egypt, would become one of the most influential and celebrated works in ...

Directed by John Coney • 1974 • United States
Starring Sun Ra, Barbara Deloney, Raymond Johnson

Avant-jazz mystic Sun Ra brought his pioneering Afrofuturist vision to the screen with this film version of his concept album. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic whirl of science fiction, sharp social comment...

Directed by Tony Maylam • 1977 • United Kingdom

British documentary film-maker and producer Tony Maylam invigorated the sports documentary genre with WHITE ROCK, an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging account of the XII Olympic Winter Games Innsbruck 1976. He did so by placing music front and cen...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1975 • France, Iran, Germany

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 illu...

Directed by René Laloux • 1973 • France

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. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the pla...