Directed by Danny Boyle • 1996 • United Kingdom
Starring Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle

A jolt of adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British cinema, this darkly funny adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel was a major breakthrough for director Danny Boyle, producer Andre...

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...

Criterion Collection Edition #982

With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig (Mitchell) ...

Directed by Terry Zwigoff • 1995 • United States
Starring Robert Crumb

Terry Zwigoff’s landmark 1995 film is an intimate documentary portrait of the underground artist Robert Crumb, whose unique drawing style and sexually and racially provocative subject matter have made him a household name in ...

Criterion Collection Edition #800

One of the most beloved American films of all time, THE GRADUATE earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon & Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) ha...

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...

Directed by Les Blank • 1974 • United States

Les Blank considered this free-form feature documentary about beloved singer-songwriter Leon Russell, filmed between 1972 and 1974, to be one of his greatest accomplishments. Yet it has not been released until now. Hired by Russell to film him at his ...

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 Robert Altman • 1992 • United States
Starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward

A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry ...

Directed by Jacques Becker • 1954 • France
Starring Jean Gabin, René Dary, Paul Frankeur

Jean Gabin is at his most wearily romantic as aging gangster Max le Menteur in the Jacques Becker gem TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (“Hands Off the Loot”). Having pulled off the heist of a lifetime, Max looks forwar...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1947 • United States
Starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford

As hard-hitting as its title, BRUTE FORCE was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster ...

Directed by Amir Naderi • 1984 • Iran
Starring Madjid Niroumand, Moussa Torkizadeh, Abbas Nazeri

Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi’s own boyhood, THE RUNNER is lit from within by Madjid Nirouman...

Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1923 • United States
Starring Edna Purviance, Clarence Geldert, Carl Miller

Remarkable for its psychological nuance and its boldly modern perspective on an independent woman’s search for fulfillment, Charlie Chaplin’s long-overlooked silent masterpiece A WOMAN OF PA...

Directed by Kazuki Omori • 1989 • Japan
Starring Kunihiko Mitamura, Yoshiko Tanaka, Masanobu Takashima

Diving into delirious realms of imagination, this second film of the Godzilla fran...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1988 • United States, Canada
Starring Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske

In DEAD RINGERS, David Cronenberg tells the chilling story of identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who share the sa...

Directed by John Mackenzie • 1980 • United Kingdom
Starring Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Dave King

A combustible performance from Bob Hoskins is the fuse that lights this underworld saga, a landmark of British crime cinema. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, an ambitious London mobster who, just as he at...