Directed by Ken Russell • 1980 • United States
Starring William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban

With its totally unrestrained, mind-bending use of special effects, Ken Russell’s visionary first foray into Hollywood filmmaking is one of the most intense, exhilarating stylistic achievements of the ...

Criterion Collection Edition #963

A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, this third feature by Charles Burnett is a singular piece of American mythmaking. In a towering performance, Danny Glover plays the enigmatic southern drifter Harry, a devilish charmer who turns up out of the blue on...

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar • 2001 • Spain, United States, France
Starring Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan

A remote manor; hushed, candlelit atmosphere; and shivery, supernatural menace. With his first English-language feature, Chilean Spanish writer-director-composer ...

Directed by John Woo • 1992 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Teresa Mo

Violence as poetry, rendered by a master—brilliant and passionate, John Woo’s HARD BOILED tells the story of jaded detective “Tequila” Yuen (played with controlled fury by Chow Yun-fat). Woo’s dizzying ...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1961 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy

With A WOMAN IS A WOMAN, compulsively innovative director Jean-Luc Godard presents “a neorealist musical—that is, a contradiction in terms.” Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean-Paul...

Directed by John Woo • 1989 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh

Hong Kong’s preeminent director, John Woo, transforms genres from both the East and the West to create this explosive and masterful action film. Featuring Hong Kong’s greatest star, Chow Yun-fat, as a killer with...

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 Guy Maddin • 2007 • Canada

The geographical dead center of North America and the beloved birthplace of Guy Maddin, Winnipeg is the frosty and mysterious star of Maddin’s “docu-fantasia.” A work of memory and imagination, the film burrows into what the director calls “the heart of the...

Criterion Collection Edition #408

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 inspired him as a writer for “Cahiers du cinèma.” With its lack of polish,...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1975 • United States
Starring Keith Carradine, Karen Black, Shelley Duvall

This cornerstone of 1970s American moviemaking from Robert Altman is a panoramic view of the country’s political and cultural landscapes, set in the nation’s music capital. NASHVILLE weaves the...

Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer • 1975 • United States

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampt...

Directed by Miranda July • 2005 • United States
Starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson

With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange—an original vision of creativ...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1999 • Iran, France

The mysteries of everyday life come into astonishing focus in one of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic achievements. A slyly self-reflexive commentary on the director’s own artistic practice, THE WIND WILL CARRY US unfolds with unhurried maj...

Directed by Alan J. Pakula • 1974 • United States
Starring Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels

Perhaps no director tapped into the pervasive sense of dread and mistrust that defined the 1970s more effectively than Alan J. Pakula, who, in the second installment of his celebrated Paranoia ...

Directed by Sean Baker • 2008 • United States
Starring Prince Adu, Karren Karagulian, Aiden Noesi

Staking out territory on the cold winter streets of midtown Manhattan, West African immigrant Lucky (Prince Adu) uses the gift of gab and a hustler’s shrewdness to peddle designer knockoffs for Leba...

Directed by Sammo Hung • 1987 • Hong Kong
Starring Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Joyce Mina Godenzi

Legendary actor-director Sammo Hung delivers a bazooka blast of pure adrenaline in this exemplar of Hong Kong action cinema at its most entertaining. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood war films like TH...

Directed by François Girard • 1993 • Canada
Starring Colm Feore, Derek Keurvorst, Katya Ladan

A rare film biography as boldly unconventional as its subject, writer-director François Girard’s visionary portrait of iconoclastic, world-renowned pianist Glenn Gould explodes the conventions of the fo...

Directed by Julian Schnabel • 2024 • United States
Starring Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper

Julian Schnabel’s tribute to his friend and fellow painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is less a conventional biopic than an impressionistic, sensory immersion into the much-mythologized downtown-Manh...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1977 • United States
Starring Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy

A quiet revelation of American independent filmmaking, Charles Burnett’s lyrical debut feature unfolds as a mosaic of Black life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Stan (Henr...

Directed by Robert Epstein • 1984 • United States

A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised peop...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1977 • United States
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule

In a dusty, underpopulated California resort town, a naive southern waif, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), idolizes and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate and “thoroughly modern” Mill...