Essential Arthouse

Essential Arthouse

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Essential Arthouse
  • Daisies
    Movie + 7 extras

    Daisies

    Movie + 7 extras

    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...

  • Richard III
    Movie + 3 extras

    Richard III

    Movie + 3 extras

    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...

  • Vagabond
    Movie + 6 extras

    Vagabond

    Movie + 6 extras

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1985 • France
    Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss

    Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnès Varda pieces together Mona’s sto...

  • Brief Encounter
    Movie + 6 extras

    Brief Encounter

    Movie + 6 extras

    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...

  • Ashes and Diamonds
    Movie + 4 extras

    Ashes and Diamonds

    Movie + 4 extras

    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...

  • The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

    Movie + 4 extras

    Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1972 • West Germany
    Starring Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake

    In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional regi...

  • The Seventh Seal
    Movie + 6 extras

    The Seventh Seal

    Movie + 6 extras

    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...

  • Hiroshima mon amour
    Movie + 11 extras

    Hiroshima mon amour

    Movie + 11 extras

    Directed by Alain Resnais • 1959 • France, Japan
    Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

    A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from Alain Resnais is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a ...

  • Zéro de conduite
    Movie + 4 extras

    Zéro de conduite

    Movie + 4 extras

    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...

  • The Gold Rush
    Movie + 6 extras

    The Gold Rush

    Movie + 6 extras

    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...

  • Rashomon
    Movie + 9 extras

    Rashomon

    Movie + 9 extras

    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...

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

    Movie + 12 extras

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
    Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

    A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...

  • Floating Clouds
    Movie + 1 extra

    Floating Clouds

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1955 • Japan
    Starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Mariko Okada

    “Short is the life of flowers, infinite their sorrows . . .” Director Mikio Naruse’s most famous film in Japan is a haunting portrait of obsessive love in a ruined world. Set amid the bombed-out landsca...

  • I Knew Her Well
    Movie + 3 extras

    I Knew Her Well

    Movie + 3 extras

    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...

  • The Battle of Algiers
    Movie + 12 extras

    The Battle of Algiers

    Movie + 12 extras

    Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy
    Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef

    One of the most influential political films in history, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the o...

  • Volver

    Movie

    Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 2006 • Spain
    Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Yohana Cobo

    Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER is set in Madrid’s lively working-class neighborhoods, where three generations of women survive wind, fire, and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity, and a limitless vitality...

  • The Crime of Monsieur Lange

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Jean Renoir • 1936 • France
    Starring René Lefèvre, Florelle, Jules Berry

    An oft-overlooked jewel from Jean Renoir, this exuberant ode to working-class solidarity is both one of the director’s most thoroughly charming works as well as one of his most sly political statements. Channeli...

  • À nous la liberté
    Movie + 5 extras

    À nous la liberté

    Movie + 5 extras

    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...

  • Black Narcissus
    Movie + 6 extras

    Black Narcissus

    Movie + 6 extras

    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...

  • Sansho the Bailiff
    Movie + 5 extras

    Sansho the Bailiff

    Movie + 5 extras

    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...

  • Close-up
    Movie + 6 extras

    Close-up

    Movie + 6 extras

    Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1990 • Iran
    Starring Hossein Sabzian, Abolfazi Ahankhah, Mahrokh Ahankhah

    Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and CLOSE-UP is his most radical, brilliant...

  • Sawdust and Tinsel
    Movie + 3 extras

    Sawdust and Tinsel

    Movie + 3 extras

    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...

  • Beauty and the Beast
    Movie + 8 extras

    Beauty and the Beast

    Movie + 8 extras

    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...

  • The Wages of Fear
    Movie + 8 extras

    The Wages of Fear

    Movie + 8 extras

    Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1953 • France
    Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck

    In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive...