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 George Stevens • 1942 • United States
Starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Fay Bainter

George Stevens’s WOMAN OF THE YEAR, conceived to build on the smashing comeback Katharine Hepburn had made in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, marked the beginning of the personal and professional uni...

Criterion Collection Edition #833

The first of the horror films producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures redefined the genre by leaving its most frightening terrors to its audience’s imagination. Simone Simon stars as a Serbian émigré in Manhattan who believes that, because of an ancient curse,...

Directed by Howard Hawks • 1940 • United States
Starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy

One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, HIS GIRL FRIDAY stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in fo...

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...

Criterion Collection Edition #902

Directed by Donna Deitch • 1985 • United States
Starring Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau

Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely inde...

Criterion Collection Edition #958

Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu shot to international prominence with this rigorously realistic Palme d’Or–winning second feature. In 1987, during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, college roommates Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Găbița (Laura Vasiliu) ...

Directed by Matteo Garrone • 2008 • Italy
Starring Toni Servillo, Salvatore Abruzzese, Gianfelice Imparato

Matteo Garrone’s GOMORRAH—presented here in its 2020 New Edition director’s cut—is a stark, shocking vision of contemporary gangsterdom, and one of cinema’s most authentic depictions of org...