Directed by Michael Roemer • 1964 • United States
Starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris

Michael Roemer’s groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the...

Directed by Nicolas Roeg • 1973 • United Kingdom
Starring Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie mesmerize as a married couple on an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terr...

Directed by René Clément • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt

Alain Delon was at his most impossibly beautiful when PURPLE NOON was released and made him an instant star. This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel “The Talented Mr. R...

Criterion Collection Edition #647

Marlon Brando gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry. A raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and social corruption, ON THE WATERFRONT follows Terry’s deepening m...

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich • 1968 • United States
Starring Boris Karloff, Tim O'Kelly, Peter Bogdanovich

Old Hollywood collides with New Hollywood, and screen horror with real-life horror, in the startling debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Produced by Roger Corman, this chillingly prescie...

Directed by Daniel Petrie • 1961 • United States
Starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee

Lorraine Hansberry’s immortal “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. Two years later, the production came to the screen, directed by Daniel Petrie. T...

Criterion Collection Edition #803

The name John Frankenheimer became forever synonymous with heart-in-the-throat filmmaking when this quintessential sixties political thriller was released. Set in the early fifties, this razor-sharp adaptation of the novel by Richard Condon concerns the decora...

Directed by John Frankenheimer • 1966 • United States
Starring Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. SECONDS, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfi...

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 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 Olivier Assayas • 2016 • France
Starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz

With this intimate supernatural drama, the celebrated French filmmaker Olivier Assayas conjures a melancholy ghost story set in the world of celebrity and haute couture. Starring Kristen Stewart, ...

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 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 #779

A love story in the city of dreams . . .
Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s ident...

Directed by Gregory Nava • 1983 • Guatemala, United States
Starring Ernesto Gómez Cruz, David Villalpando, Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a ...

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • 2021 • France
Starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska

Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve embarks on a luminous summertime odyssey to the home of Ingmar Bergman for her seventh feature, a graceful, shape-shifting tale about the interplay of life and art and the ...

Directed by Michael Cimino • 1980 • United States
Starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt

A breathtaking depiction of the promise and perils of America’s western expansion, HEAVEN’S GATE, directed by Michael Cimino, is among Hollywood’s most ambitious and unorthodox epics. Kri...

Directed by Leo McCarey • 1939 • United States
Starring Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya

Golden-age Hollywood’s humanist master Leo McCarey brings his graceful touch and relaxed naturalism to this sublime romance, one of cinema’s most intoxicating tear-wringers. Irene Dunne and Char...

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1972 • France
Starring Fernando Rey, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and ima...

Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson

In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil wa...

Criterion Collection Edition #304

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a daring exploration of science fiction as an art form. The story of an alien on an elaborate rescue mission provides the launching pad for Nicolas Roeg’s visual tour de force, a formally adventurous examination of alienation in cont...

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1952 • Japan
Starring Shin Saburi, Michiyo Kogure, Keiko Tsushima

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secre...

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1962 • Japan
Starring Chishu Ryu, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada

The last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization. Though the widower Shuhei...

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1936 • Japan
Starring Choko Iida, Shinichi Himori, Masao Hayama

Yasujiro Ozu’s first talkie, the uncommonly poignant THE ONLY SON is among the Japanese director’s greatest works. In its simple story about a good-natured mother who gives up everything to ensure her son’...