Directed by John Carpenter • 1976 • United States
Starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer

John Carpenter’s lean, mean second feature puts a gritty exploitation spin on Howard Hawks’s classic western RIO BRAVO, transposing the story to a soon-to-be-closed LA police station where a gr...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet ...

Criterion Collection Edition #539

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? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip abou...

Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...

Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle

Claire Denis’s poetic take on the body-horror genre is an atmospheric reverie of blood and lust that lays bare the filmmaker’s core artistic concerns around power, desire, and delirium. Newlyweds Shane...

Criterion Collection Edition #408

There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for “Cahiers du cinèma.” With its lack of polish,...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1971 • United States
Starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, René Auberjonois

This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as two newcomers to ...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1963 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU), the highly influential domesti...

Directed by Ken Russell • 1971 • United Kingdom
Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed

The most controversial film of the 1970s was banned across the world for its deliriously overheated, shockingly blasphemous tale of sexual frenzy and demonic possession in a seventeenth-century French convent....

Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1976 • United States
Starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks

Scripted by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese, TAXI DRIVER is a powerful study of a dangerously fractured psyche, as well as a vividly grimy portrait of New York City in the 1970s....

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1976 • United States
Starring Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, John Lithgow

Nearly twenty years after his wife’s tragic death, a guilt-ridden man (Cliff Robertson) meets her exact look-alike (Gen...

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson • 1999 • United States
Starring Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Altmanesque portrait of a day in the crisscrossing lives of various San Fernando Valley residents—including a sleazy pickup artist (Tom Cruise); a distraugh...

Directed by David Lynch • 1997 • United States
Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinemati...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1999 • United States
Starring Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman

Jim Jarmusch combined his love for the ice-cool crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki with the philosophical dimensions of samurai mythology for an eccentrically postmodern take o...

Directed by Wim Wenders • 1984 • France, West Germany
Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski

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 ...

Directed by Michael Mann • 1986 • United States
Starring William Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen

Michael Mann’s hypnotic, hyperstylized adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel “Red Dragon” was the first film to introduce audiences to the infamous Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham (William Petersen) is a...

Directed by René Clément • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt

Alain Delon was at his most impossibly beautiful when PURPLE NOON was released and made him an instant star. This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel “The Talented Mr. R...

Criterion Collection Edition #743

Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2001 • Argentina
Starring Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora Balcarce

The release of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturb...

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • 1974 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield

The ultimate Watergate-era paranoia thriller, Francis Ford Coppola’s cold-sweat neonoir stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, an obsessive audio-surveillance expert who has been hired to track ...

Directed by Johnnie To • 2005 • Hong Kong
Starring Simon Yam, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Louis Koo

Superstar director Johnny To’s magnum opus breathed new life into the Hong Kong crime drama by offering a boldly deromanticized vision of a gangland underworld defined by corrosive greed. Every two years, ...

Directed by Cy Endfield • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins

Blacklisted from Hollywood, American director Cy Endfield found a fresh start in Britain, where he brought a pronounced anticapitalist punch to this exciting crime drama set in the trucking industr...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1973 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden

Robert Altman updates Raymond Chandler for the liberated, hedonistic 1970s in this brilliantly idiosyncratic adaptation of one of the writer’s most renowned novels. Elliott Gould brings a ...

Directed by Jia Zhangke • 2002 • China
Starring Wu Qiong, Zhao Wei Wei, Zhao Tao

One of the first great films of the twenty-first century, Jia Zhangke’s third feature (and his first shot on digital) sets an arresting tale of disaffected youth against the backdrop of a changing China. Evoking the...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1962 • France, Italy, Yugoslavia
Starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime pl...