Directed by Russ Meyer • 1970 • United States
Starring Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom
In 1970, Twentieth Century-Fox, impressed by the visual zing “King of the Nudies” Russ Meyer had been bringing to bargain-basement exploitation fare, handed the director a studio budget and the title...
Decadent, subversive, and bristling with artistic invention, the myth-born cinema of Jean Cocteau disturbs as much as it charms. Cocteau was the most versatile of artists in prewar Paris. Poet, novelist, playwright, painter, celebrity, and maker of cinema—his many talents converged in bold, dream...
Directed by Dorothy Arzner • 1940 • United States
Starring Maureen O’Hara, Lucille Ball, Louis Hayward
Judy (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball) move to New York City with dreams of ballet success, but Bubbles soon falls into a career in burlesque. And when Judy’s ballet company fails, sh...
Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 YEARS OF OLYMPIC FILMS: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a massive, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinema...
Directed by Bruno Dumont • 1997 • France
Starring David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel
With his stunning debut feature, the risk-taking auteur Bruno Dumont immediately established his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast on the cutting edge of French cinema. Blending unflinching realism with mo...
Directed by Jacques Audiard • 2015 • France
Starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby
With this Palme d’Or–winning drama, which deftly combines seemingly disparate genres, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard cemented his status as a titan of contemporary world ...
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) ...
Criterion Collection Edition #600
A virtuoso James Stewart plays a small-town Michigan lawyer who takes on a difficult case: the defense of a young army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering a local tavern owner who he believes raped his wife (Lee Remick). This gripping envelope-pusher, ...
Directed by Bruno Dumont • 1999 • France
Starring Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele
The transcendent second feature by Bruno Dumont probes the wonder and horror of the human condition through the story of a profoundly alienated police detective (the indelibly sad-eyed Emmanuel Schotté, winner o...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1952 • Italy, United States
Starring Orson Welles, Suzanne Cloutier, Micheál MacLiammóir
Gloriously cinematic despite its tiny budget, Orson Welles’s OTHELLO is a testament to the filmmaker’s stubborn willingness to pursue his vision to the ends of the earth. Unmatched...
Directed by James Ivory • 1986 • United Kingdom
Starring Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis
Merchant Ivory Productions, led by director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, became a household name with A ROOM WITH A VIEW, the first of their extraordinary adaptations of E. ...
Directed by Steve James • 1994 • United States
Two ordinary inner-city Chicago kids dare to reach for the impossible, professional basketball glory, in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, HOOP DREAMS, by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, follows y...
Directed by Richard Linklater • 1991 • United States
Starring Richard Linklater, Kathy McCarty, Rudy Basquez
SLACKER, directed by Richard Linklater, presents a day in the life of a loose-knit Austin, Texas, subculture populated by eccentric and overeducated young people. Shooting on 16 mm for a ...
Directed by Hal Ashby • 1979 • United States
Starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas
In one of his most finely tuned performances, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted, childlike Chance, a gardener who is forced into the wilds of Washington, D.C., when his wealthy guardian dies....
Directed by David Cronenberg • 1981 • Canada
Starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside
With SCANNERS, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabb...
Directed by Francesco Rosi • 1979 • Italy
Starring Gian Maria Volontè, Paolo Bonacelli, Alain Cuny
An elegy of exile and an epic immersion in the world of rural Italy during the regime of Benito Mussolini, Francesco Rosi’s sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and politica...
Directed by Luchino Visconti • 1963 • Italy, France
Starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon
Luchino Visconti’s THE LEOPARD is an epic on the grandest possible scale. The film recreates, with nostalgia, drama, and opulence, the tumultuous years of Italy’s Risorgimento—when the ari...
Directed by Mike Leigh • 1999 • United Kingdom
Starring Allan Corduner, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall
The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in director Mike Leigh’s extraordinary dramatization of the staging of the duo’s legendary 1885 comic opera THE MIKADO. Jim Broadbent and All...
Directed by Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne • 1999 • Belgium
Starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Anne Yernaux
The Belgian filmmaking team of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne turned heads with ROSETTA, an intense vérité drama that closely follows a poor young woman struggling ...
Criterion Collection Edition #739
Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extr...
Directed by Claudia Weill • 1978 • United States
Starring Melanie Mayron, Eli Wallach, Christopher Guest, Bob Balaban
When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out to get married, Susan (Melanie Mayron), a wannabe gallery artist slumming it as a bar mitzvah photographer on Manhattan’s ...
Directed by Stanley Kubrick • 1960 • United States
Starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons
Stanley Kubrick took the sword and sandals epic to new heights with this thrilling pop-culture touchstone. A commanding Kirk Douglas delivers his most iconic performance as the eponymous glad...
Directed by Monte Hellman • 1966 • United States
Starring Jack Nicholson, Cameron Mitchell, Harry Dean Stanton
Working from a thoughtful script by Jack Nicholson, Monte Hellman fashioned this moody and tense western about a trio of cowhands who are mistaken for robbers and must outrun and hide f...
Directed by John Lurie • 1992 • United States
John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in FISHING WITH JOHN. Traveling with his special guests to the most exotic and dangerous places on earth, John Lurie battles sha...
