Directed by Buster Keaton • 1924 • United States
Starring Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton

Reality and movie fantasy merge to brilliantly surreal effect in one of Buster Keaton’s most formally innovative features—a whirlwind of astonishing optical tricks and meta-cinematic invention. H...

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 ...

Directed by Alan J. Pakula • 1971 • United States
Starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland

With her Oscar-winning turn in KLUTE, Jane Fonda reinvented herself as a new kind of movie star. Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels—a call girl and aspiring actor wh...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1970 • United States
Starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt

Robert Altman’s distinctive genius first announced itself with this innovative, smash-hit black comedy in which a pair of irreverent surgeons (Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould) at a mobile...

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 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...

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...

Directed by David Lynch • 1992 • United States

In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets, but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, foll...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical PERSONA, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary perf...

Directed by David Lynch • 1977 • United States
Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Judith Anna Roberts

David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, ERASERHEAD, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick El...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1988 • France
Starring Jane Birkin, Agnès Varda, Charlotte Gainsbourg

The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a ye...

Directed by Elem Klimov • 1985 • Soviet Union

This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish)...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1962 • France
Starring Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of ...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1963 • Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Bruno Agostini, Sandra Milo

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1950 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori

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. Four people give different accou...