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 Arthur Penn • 1975 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns

Arthur Penn’s haunting neonoir reimagines the hard-boiled detective film for the disillusioned, paranoid 1970s. In one of his greatest performances, Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a pr...

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 Wes Anderson • 2001 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller

Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), had three children—Chas, Margot, and Richie—and then they separated. Chas (Ben Stiller) started buying real estate in his e...

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich • 1973 • United States
Starring Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Madeline Kahn

Peter Bogdanovich revisits the lyrical strain of bittersweet nostalgia he tapped into in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW in this 1930s-set comedy about the unlikely partnership that develops between a sm...

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 Pedro Almodóvar • 1999 • Spain
Starring Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, Marisa Paredes

This Oscar-winning melodrama, one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most beloved films, provides a dizzying, moving exploration of the meaning of motherhood. In an instant, nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) loses the t...

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...

Directed by Jacques Rivette • 1974 • France
Starring Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier

Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cin...

Directed by Masahiro Shinoda • 1979 • Japan
Starring Tamasaburo Bando, Go Kato, Tsutomu Yamazaki

Japanese New Wave renegade Masahiro Shinoda transforms a classic Kabuki tale with his own extravagant visual style in this dimension-shattering folk-horror fantasia. When a lone traveler (Tsutomu Yam...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1962 • France, Italy, Yugoslavia
Starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime pl...

Directed by Mira Nair • 1991 • United States, Uganda
Starring Denzel Washington, Sarita Choudhury, Roshan Seth

The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South come together in Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA, a luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot. Yea...

Directed by David Lynch • 1997 • United States
Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinemati...