Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1971 • United States
Starring Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales

A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, a...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 2014 • France, Germany, Switzerland
Starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz

This multilayered, immensely entertaining drama from the great contemporary French director Olivier Assayas is a singular look at the intersection of high art and popu...

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg • 1998 • Denmark
Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen

The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with THE CELEBRATION, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the...

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 Olivier Assayas • 1996 • France
Starring Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard

Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1972 • United States
Starring Joe Keyes Jr., Rhetta Hughes, Avon Long

Melvin Van Peebles’s film version of his own Tony Award–nominated Broadway musical is a bold blend of theater and nervy, New Wave–inflected cinematic invention. A cast of Black stage and screen...

Directed by Stanley Kwan • 1987 • Hong Kong
Starring Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man Chi-leung

Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung display the androgynous magnetism that made them icons as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1991 • France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Japan
Starring Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlan...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1967 • United States
Starring Harry Baird, Nicole Berger, Hal Brav

Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the langu...

Criterion Collection Edition #1002

Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix • 1986 • France
Starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon

When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a s...

Directed by Lodge Kerrigan • 1994 • United States
Starring Peter Greene, Robert Albert, Megan Owen

Lodge Kerrigan began his succession of utterly unique, visually and aurally dazzling character studies with the raw, ravaging CLEAN, SHAVEN. A compelling headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schi...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1995 • United States
Starring Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen

With DEAD MAN, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, ...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstr...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Frank Borzage • 1937 • United States

Suffused with intoxicating romanticism, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT is a sublime paean to love from Frank Borzage, classic Hollywood’s supreme poet of carnal and spiritual desire. On the run through Europe from her wealthy, cruelly possessive husband...

Directed by Johnnie To • 2004 • Hong Kong
Starring Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, Cherrie Ying

One of the most personal films by the prolific Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To is a thrilling love letter to both the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and the art and philosophy of judo. Amid the neon-drenched nightclubs ...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay • 1999 • United Kingdom
Starring Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews, William Eadie

In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, RATCAT...

Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1970 • United States
Starring Stephen Sondheim, Elaine Stritch, Donna McKechnie

This legendary, long-unavailable documentary from Direct Cinema pioneer D. A. Pennebaker captures the behind-the-scenes drama that went into the making of a classic Broadway recording. ...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1954 • Italy
Starring Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart

With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in ...

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...

Criterion Collection Edition #63

Directed by Herk Harvey • 1962 • United States
Starring Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger

A young woman (Candace Hilligoss) in a small Kansas town survives a drag race accident, then agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En r...

Criterion Collection Edition #35

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1955 • France
Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse

Before PSYCHO, PEEPING TOM, and REPULSION, there was DIABOLIQUE. This thriller from Henri-Georges Clouzot, which shocked audiences in Europe and the U.S., is ...

Criterion Collection Edition #584

Directed by Kaneto Shindo • 1968 • Japan
Starring Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Sato

In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. Whe...