Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy
Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef

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 o...

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 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 ...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • France • 1960
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger

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 inspi...

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 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 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 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 Jia Zhang-Ke • 2002 • China
Starring Wu Qiong, Zhao Wei Wei, Zhao Tao

One of the first great films of the twenty-first century, Jia Zhang-Ke’s third feature (and his first shot on digital) sets an arresting tale of disaffected youth against the backdrop of a changing China. Evoking t...

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...

Criterion Collection Edition #711

Directed by Richard Lester • 1964 • United Kingdom

Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, John, Paul, George, and Ringo began working on a project that would bring their revolutionary tal...

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • 1967 • France, Italy
Starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between ...

Criterion Collection Edition #888

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1979 • Soviet Union
Starring Alisa Freindlikh, Aleksandr Kaidnovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic ex...

Criterion Collection Edition #868

Directed by Juzo Itami • 1985 • Japan
Starring Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho

The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle-shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe, this rapturous “ramen western” by Japa...

Directed by Wim Wenders • 1977 • Germany
Starring Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz

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.” Dennis Hopper oozes quirky menace as an amoral America...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason • 2022 • Iceland, Denmark
Starring Elliott Crosset Hove, Vic Carmen Sonne, Ingvar Sigurdsson

The struggle between the strictures of religion and our own brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychol...

Criterion Collection Edition #1001

Directed by Greg Mottola • 1996 • United States
Starring Parker Posey, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber

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 t...

Criterion Collection Edition #594

GODZILLA (a.k.a. GOJIRA) 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 reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Its rampaging radioactive be...

Directed by Jacques Tati • 1967 • France
Starring Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Georges Montant

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PLAYTIME. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-y...

Directed by Wim Wenders • 1987 • Germany, France
Starring Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Peter Falk

WINGS OF DESIRE is one of cinema’s loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the peopl...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1991 • France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Japan
Starring Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlan...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 1997 • Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, s...