Criterion Collection Edition #799
Charlie Chaplin was already an international star when he decided to break out of the short-film format and make his first full-length feature. THE KID doesn't merely show Chaplin at a turning point, when he proved that he was a serious film director, it remains...
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1938 • Soviet Union
Starring Nikolai Cherkasov, Nikolai Okhlopkov, Andrei Abrikosov
Eisenstein drew on history, Russian folk narratives, and the techniques of Walt Disney to create this broadly painted epic of Russian resilience. This story of Teutonic knights van...
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1954 • Japan
Starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa
When an idealistic governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord, he is cast into exile, his wife and children left to fend for themselves and eventually wrenched apart by vicious slave traders. Under...
Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli • 1965 • Italy
Starring Stefania Sandrelli, Mario Adorf, Jean-Claude Brialy
Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of LA DOLCE VITA, I KNEW HER WELL is at once a delight...
Directed by René Clair • 1931 • France
Starring Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France
One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair’s À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old ja...
Directed by Andrzej Wajda • 1958 • Poland
Starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski
On the last day of World War II in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incen...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1955 • Sweden
Starring Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson
After fifteen films that received mostly local acclaim, the comedy SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT at last ushered in an international audience for Ingmar Bergman. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men...
Directed by Marcel Carné • 1945 • France
Starring Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur
Poetic realism reached sublime heights with CHILDREN OF PARADISE, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimon...
Directed by Laurence Olivier • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom
In RICHARD III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life. Olivier is diabolically captivat...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1957 • Sweden
Starring Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Gunnar Björnstrand
Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a g...
Directed by Jean Vigo • 1933 • France
Starring Jean Dasté, Gérard de Bédarieux, Louis Lefebvre
So effervescent and charming that one can easily forget its importance in film history, Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students is one of cinema’s great acts of...
Directed by Robert Bresson • 1959 • France
Starring Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie
This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of P...
Directed by Jane Campion • 1990 • New Zealand
Starring Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson
With AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brought to the screen the harrowing autobiography of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. Three actors in turn ...
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1964 • Italy
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and RED DESERT, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spirit...
Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1942 • United States
Starring Charles Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain
Charlie Chaplin’s comedic masterwork—which charts a prospector’s search for fortune in the Klondike and his discovery of romance (with the beautiful Georgia Hale)—forever cemented the iconic sta...
Directed by Vittorio De Sica • 1948 • Italy
Starring Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award-winning BICYCLE THIEVES, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar ...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1953 • Sweden
Starring Åke Grönberg, Harriet Andersson
Ingmar Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival of humiliation in SAWDUST AND TINSEL, one of the master’s most vivid early works and his first of many collaborations with the g...
Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard
After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) begin a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-en...
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1950 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, RASHOMON is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people give different accou...
Directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard • 1938 • United Kingdom
Starring Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller
Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a “proper lady” in a mere six months in this delightful c...
Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Maybe the New Wave's most anarchic entry, Vera Chytilovà's absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two brash young women. Believing the world to be "spoiled," they embark on a series of pranks in which nothing, food, clothes, men, war, is t...
Directed by Chris Marker • 1963 • France
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement ...
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1947 • United Kingdom
Starring Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar
This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A group of nuns—played by som...
Criterion Collection Edition #6
Jean Cocteau’s sublime adaptation of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy-tale masterpiece—in which the pure love of a beautiful girl melts the heart of a feral but gentle beast—is a landmark of motion picture fantasy, with unforgettably romantic performances by Jean...