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 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 Andrzej Wajda • 1958 • Poland
Starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski

A milestone of Polish cinema, this electrifying international sensation by Andrzej Wajda—the final film in his celebrated war trilogy—entwines the story of one man’s moral crisis with the f...

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 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 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 Věra Chytilová • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová, Marie Češková

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named...

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 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 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...

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...