Directed by Terry Zwigoff • 2001 • United States
Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi

Terry Zwigoff’s first fiction film, adapted from a cult-classic comic by Daniel Clowes, is an idiosyncratic portrait of adolescent alienation that is at once bleakly funny and wholly endearin...

Directed by John M. Stahl • 1945 • United States
Starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain

Novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) seems to have found the perfect woman in Ellen (Gene Tierney), a beautiful socialite who initiates a whirlwind romance and steers him into marriage before he...

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 Jessica Beshir • 2021 • Ethiopia, United States, Qatar

A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once p...

Directed by David Lynch • 1999 • United States
Starring Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton

In between the dark, florid surrealism of the LA-set neonoirs LOST HIGHWAY and MULHOLLAND DR., director David Lynch took a detour to America’s heartland for this surprisingly down-to-eart...

Directed by Preston Sturges • 1941 • United States
Starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake

Tired of churning out lightweight comedies, Hollywood director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) decides to make O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?—a serious, socially responsible film about human suffering. After his pr...

Directed by Jonathan Demme • 2008 • United States
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin

When Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she brings a long history of personal demons, family conflict, and tragedy ...

Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1985 • United States
Starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the...

Directed by Jacques Demy • 1964 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo

The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a h...

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1960 • United States
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

Jack Lemmon stars in one of Billy Wilder’s most beloved films as C. C. Baxter, a company man anxious to please his superiors at the New York insurance firm where he works—enough to let his boss...

Criterion Collection Edition #335

Directed by Louis Malle • 1958 • France
Starring Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly

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 n...

Directed by George A. Romero • 1968 • United States
Starring Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman

Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of in...

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...

Criterion Collection Edition #304

Directed by Nicolas Roeg • 1976 • United States
Starring David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a daring exploration of science fiction as an art form. The story of an alien on an elaborate rescue mission provides the launching pad for ...

Directed by Robert Bresson • 1977 • France
Starring Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc

“My sickness is that I see clearly.” Robert Bresson’s most controversial film (the French government banned viewers under the age of eighteen from seeing it, believing it would incite a rash of ...

Directed by Cheryl Dunye • 1996 • United States
Starring Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker

The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye s...

Criterion Collection Edition #516

Directed by John Ford • 1939 • United States
Starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine

This is where it all started. John Ford’s smash hit and enduring masterpiece STAGECOACH revolutionized the western, elevating it from B movie to the A-list and establis...

Directed by Julie Dash • 1991 • United States
Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones

Julie Dash’s rapturous vision of black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a wide release. In ...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1972 • West Germany
Starring Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional regi...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

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 America...

Directed by Jackie Chan • 1985 • Hong Kong
Starring Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung

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. The director/star...

Criterion Collection Edition #147

Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 2000 • Hong Kong
Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk

Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are form...

Directed by Jafar Panahi • 2022 • Iran
Starring Naser Hashemi, Bakhtiyar Panjeei, Vahid Mobaser

One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite being bann...

Directed by George Sluizer • 1988 • Netherlands
Starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege

A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation dra...