The Oscar-winning director of THE SHAPE OF WATER and PAN’S LABYRINTH sat down with MYTHBUSTERS’ Adam Savage to talk about the cinematic inspirations that fuel his flights of phantasmagoria—and to introduce some of his favorite films.
The Oscar-winning director of THE SHAPE OF WATER on a lifetime of moviegoing
Directed by Jean Renoir • 1931 • France
Jean Renoir's ruthless love triangle tale, his second sound film, is a true precursor to his brilliantly bitter The Rules of the Game, displaying all of the filmmaker's visual genius and fully imbued with his profound humanity. Michel Simon cuts a tragic f...
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer • 1932 • France, West Germany
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the ...
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1934 • United Kingdom
An ordinary British couple vacationing in Switzerland suddenly find themselves embroiled in a case of international intrigue when their daughter is kidnapped by spies plotting a political assassination. This fleet and gripping film is the firs...
Directed by Jean Cocteau • 1946 • France
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 perform...
Directed by Georges Franju • 1960 • France
At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter's disfigured countenance--at a horrifying price. Eyes Without a Face, directed ...
Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1961 • Spain
Banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican, Luis Buñuel's irreverent vision of life as a beggar's banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece. In it, novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle an...
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1965 • Japan
After more than a decade of sober political dramas and socially minded period pieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories. Featuring colorfully surreal sets and ...
Directed by Víctor Erice • 1973 • Spain
Criterion is proud to present Víctor Erice's spellbinding THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El espíritu de la colmena), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country's devastating civil...
Directed by Felipe Cazals • 1976 • Mexico
One of Mexico's most highly regarded works of political cinema, CANOA: A SHAMEFUL MEMORY reimagines a real-life incident that had occurred just eight years before its release, when a group of urban university employees on a hiking trip were viciously att...
