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 Johnnie To • 2005 • Hong Kong
Starring Simon Yam, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Louis Koo

Superstar director Johnny To’s magnum opus breathed new life into the Hong Kong crime drama by offering a boldly deromanticized vision of a gangland underworld defined by corrosive greed. Every two years, ...

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 Jia Zhangke • 2004 • China
Starring Zhao Tao, Cheng Taishen, Jing Jue

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

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 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 ...

Directed by Felipe Cazals • 1976 • Mexico
Starring Enrique Lucero, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Rodrigo Puebla

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 ur...

Directed by Tony Richardson • 1959 • United Kingdom
Starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Mary Ure

Based on the smash-hit play by John Osborne that inaugurated Britain’s “angry young men” literary movement, this touchstone of the British New Wave features a searing performance from Richard Burt...

Directed by Marcel Carné • 1946 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Pierre Brasseur, Serge Reggiani

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shor...

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 ...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...

Criterion Collection Edition #535

Directed by Nagisa Oshima • 1983 • Japan
Starring David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tom Conti

In this captivating, skewed World War II drama from Nagisa Oshima, David Bowie regally embodies Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. Rock star R...

Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1960 • Japan
Starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan

WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse’s finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hoste...