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 Jean Renoir • 1939 • France
Starring Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, THE RULES OF THE GAME (LA RÈGLE DU JEU), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend a...

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 Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima

One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...

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 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 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...

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 Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...

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 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 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 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 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 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 Kozaburo Yoshimura • 1956 • Japan
Starring Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Eitaro Ozawa

Exquisitely lensed in gorgeous color by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this sublimely subversive melodrama employs ravishing mise-en-scène to lend layers of subtextual meaning to the story of...

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 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 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 ...

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...