Directed by David Fincher • 1997 • United States
Starring Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger

The enormously wealthy and emotionally remote investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) receives a strange gift from his ne’er-do-well younger brother (Sean Penn) on his forty-ei...

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...

Directed by Héctor Babenco • 1985 • United States, Brazil
Starring William Hurt, Raúl Juliá, Sônia Braga

Featuring indelible performances from Raul Julia and an Academy Award–winning William Hurt, KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN is a work of radical compassion that boldly expands notions of love, gende...

Criterion Collection Edition #662

The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin is the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, SAFETY LAST! is the pe...

Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky • 2000 • Hungary
Starring Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla

This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIE...

Directed by Vittorio De Sica • 1946 • Italy
Starring Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni, Aniello Mele

An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets...

Directed by Nicolas Roeg • 1985 • United Kingdom
Starring Theresa Russell, Gary Busey, Tony Curtis

Four unnamed people who look and sound a lot like Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy converge in one New York City hotel room in this compelling, visually inventive ...

Directed by Liliana Cavani • 1974 • Italy
Starring Charlotte Rampling, Dirk Bogarde

In this unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar ...