Directed by Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...

Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1956 • United States
Starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack

The Technicolor expressionism of Douglas Sirk reached a fever pitch with this operatic tragedy, which finds the director pushing his florid visuals and his critiques of American culture to their sub...

Directed by Med Hondo • 1979 • Algeria, Mauritania, France
Starring Robert Liensol, Roland Bertin, Hélène Vincent

Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s staggering WEST INDIES: THE FUGITIVE SLAVES OF LIBERTY is a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joy...

Directed by Nagisa Oshima • 1960 • Japan
Starring Miyuki Kuwano, Yusuke Kawazu, Yoshiko Kuga

A scorching tale of toxic love in a toxic world, Nagisa Oshima’s second feature film marked the artistic breakthrough of one of the most radical voices in the history of Japanese cinema. Caught in the do...

Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it s...

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1977 • France
Starring Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina

Luis Buñuel’s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, ...

Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1988 • United States
Starring Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, by Martin Scorsese, is a towering achievement. Though it initially engendered enormous controversy, the film can now be viewed as the remarkable, profoundly per...

Directed by Terry Gilliam • 1998 • United States
Starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Ellen Barkin

It is 1971, and journalist Raoul Duke barrels toward Las Vegas—accompanied by a trunkful of contraband and his slightly unhinged Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo—to cover a motorcycle race. What shoul...

Directed by Jonathan Demme • 1991 • United States
Starring Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn

In this chilling adaptation of the best-selling novel by Thomas Harris, the astonishingly versatile director Jonathan Demme crafted a taut psychological thriller about an American obsession: ser...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1956 • United States
Starring James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau

Though ignored at the time of its release, Nicholas Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE is now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s. When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father...

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko • 1998 • United States
Starring Radha Mitchell, Gabriel Mann, Ally Sheedy

In a revelatory performance, Ally Sheedy stars in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, a wry and incisive look at the politics of the New York art scene wrapped in the guise of an em...

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 Jonathan Demme • 1986 • United States
Starring Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta

A straitlaced businessman meets a quirky, free-spirited woman at a downtown New York greasy spoon. Her offer of a ride back to his office results in a lunchtime motel rendezvous—just the beginni...

Directed by Wes Anderson • 2007 • United States
Starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman

In director Wes Anderson’s THE DARJEELING LIMITED, three estranged brothers reunite for a meticulously planned, soul-searching train voyage across India one year after the death of their father....

Directed by Alex Cox • 1984 • United States
Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter

A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox’s singular sci-fi comedy stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton as a weathered repo man in a desolate Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez ...

Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim

A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an ...

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 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 Djibril Diop Mambéty • Senegal • 1973
Starring Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, Aminata Fall

With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a fractured portrait of the disenchantment of postindependence Senegal in the early 1970s. In this picaresque f...

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1953 • Mexico
Starring Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Aurora Walker

Spanish surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s fiendish tale of love gone wrong is among the most perverse and unsettling films he made during his two decades of exile in Mexico. Folding his own neuroses int...

Directed by Man Ray • 2023 • France

The swirling surrealist dreams of Man Ray are high-water marks of 1920s avant-garde cinema, a nexus of cryptic themes, dark eroticism, and playful abstraction. Seemingly plucked from an unconscious realm, these four shorts—LE RETOUR À LA RAISON, EMAK BAKIA, L’...

Criterion Collection Edition #597

Lena Dunham got her start making YouTube videos, but she emerged as a major talent thanks to the breakthrough success of this exceptionally sharp comedy, which garnered the twenty-four-year-old writer-director-actor comparisons to the likes of Woody Allen. Dunha...

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi • 2021 • Japan
Starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima

Only Ryusuke Hamaguchi, with his extraordinary sensitivity to the mysterious resonances of human interactions, could sweep up international awards (including the Oscar for Best International Fe...