Directed by Mark Lewis • 1988 • Australia
Starring Tip Byrne, Glen Ingram, H. W. Kerr

Mark Lewis takes the nature documentary into new realms of the humorous, surreal, and downright bizarre with this stranger-than-fiction tale of the ultimate environmental self-own. The cane toad—Bufo marinus, a...

Directed by Lam Nai-choi • 1991 • Hong Kong
Starring Fan Siu-Wong, Gloria Yip, Yukari Oshima

The ultimate Hong Kong black-comic gorefest, this live-action adaptation of the cult manga is a blood feast of entrail-wreathed splatter and literally eye-popping ultraviolence. After he’s sentenced to a...

Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle

Claire Denis’s poetic take on the body-horror genre is an atmospheric reverie of blood and lust that lays bare the filmmaker’s core artistic concerns around power, desire, and delirium. Newlyweds Shane...

Directed by Ricky Lau • 1985 • Hong Kong
Starring Lam Ching-Ying, Ricky Hui, Chin Siu-Ho

The film that, along with producer Sammo Hung’s SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS, launched an entire hopping-vampire horror-comedy subgenre is Hong Kong cinema at its most gleefully inventive and gloriously unrestrained. T...

Directed by Stanley Kwan • 2001 • Hong Kong, China
Starring Liu Ye, Hu Jun, Huatong Li

Filmed in secret in Beijing, this tender gay romance by Stanley Kwan combines the timeless conventions of classic melodrama with a radically frank depiction of queer intimacy as it traces, over the course of y...

Directed by Leos Carax • 1984 • France
Starring Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier, Carroll Brooks

The first feature by Leos Carax (made when he was just twenty-three years old) is an intoxicating, lusciously stylized evocation of a nocturnal Paris populated by moody misfits and lost souls. Among th...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 1998 • France
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet

Having chronicled the heady abandon of adolescence in COLD WATER, renowned French auteur Olivier Assayas turned his attention to another in-between stage of life: the moment when the seemingly...

Directed by Bo Widerberg • 1967 • Sweden
Starring Pia Degermark, Thommy Berggren, Lennart Malmer

Bo Widerberg reached new heights of visual lyricism with this sublime retelling of a real-life nineteenth-century romantic tragedy. Bound by their all-consuming desire, a young circus tightrope walke...

Directed by Stanley Kwan • 1987 • Hong Kong
Starring Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man Chi-leung

Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung display the androgynous magnetism that made them icons as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay • 1999 • United Kingdom
Starring Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews, William Eadie

In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, RATCAT...

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda • 1998 • Japan
Starring Arata, Erika Oda, Susumu Terajima

If you could choose only one memory to hold on to for eternity, what would it be? That’s the question at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s revelatory international breakthrough, a bittersweet fantasia in which...

Directed by Ann Hui • 1982 • Hong Kong
Starring George Lam, Andy Lau Tak Wah, Cora Miao

One of the major films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui’s BOAT PEOPLE is a work of indelible humanity and searing political resonance. Invited to document the progress of postwar Vietnamese society, a Japan...

Directed by Ousmane Sembène • 1968 • Senegal
Starring Makuredia Guey, Yunus Ndiaye, Isseu Niang

This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by,...

Directed by Bertrand Tavernier • 1980 • France, West Germany
Starring Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton

Part human drama, part sci-fi cautionary tale, Bertrand Tavernier’s DEATH WATCH unfolds in a future where death by disease has become extremely rare. When it is discovered that...

Directed by Atom Egoyan • 1989 • Canada
Starring Michael McManus, Arsinée Khanjian, Gabrielle Rose

Haunting images and obsessive sexuality merge in this postmodern thriller about loss, love, power, and the distance that modern technology puts between us. The story of four people—an actor/gigolo ...

Directed by Jia Zhang-Ke • 2004 • China
Starring Zhao Tao, Cheng Taishen, Jing Jue

An at once intimate and expansive exploration of globalization from visionary director Jia Zhang-Ke, THE WORLD takes place in the eponymous theme park on the outskirts of Beijing, where iconic monuments from the E...

Criterion Collection Edition #985

As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of hi...

Directed by Maurice Pialat • 1991 • France
Starring Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq

Maurice Pialat’s visually stunning penultimate work is an epic, masterful dramatization of the final months in the life of the troubled painter (played by musician Jacques Dutronc in a César-win...

Directed by Joachim Trier • 2011 • Norway
Starring Anders Danielsen Lie, Malin Crépin, Aksel Thanke

Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) will soon complete his drug rehabilitation in the countryside. As part of the program, he is allowed to go into the city for a job interview. Taking advantage of the ...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1982 • West Germany
Starring Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale

Werner Herzog’s infamously arduous productions were already legendary when he outdid himself with FITZCARRALDO, a feat as utterly quixotic and improbable as its protagonist. Klaus Kinski stars as the wild-ey...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Walter Ladengast, Brigitte Mira

Based on real events, THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER tells the story of a young man imprisoned in a basement dungeon for the first seventeen years of his life, devoid of human contact, until his capto...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1972 • West Germany, Mexico, Peru
Starring Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena Roho

The first of Werner Herzog’s legendary—and notoriously tempestuous—collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski is a feverish account of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre’s...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz

Werner Herzog’s tragically absurd tour through 1970s America stars the singular Bruno S. as an ostracized, alcoholic Berlin street musician who, joined by a prostitute (Eva Mattes) and his eccentric el...