Directed by Howard Hawks • 1939 • United States
Starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth

Electrified by crackling dialogue and visual craftsmanship of the great Howard Hawks, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS stars Jean Arthur as a traveling entertainer who gets more than she bargained for during a ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 2024 • Japan
Starring Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira

A gonzo revenge thriller, a darkly comic anticapitalist critique, and a dizzying plunge into the alienated abyss of the internet, CLOUD is among the most audacious genre experiments to date from ma...

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar • 2001 • Spain, United States, France
Starring Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan

A remote manor; hushed, candlelit atmosphere; and shivery, supernatural menace. With his first English-language feature, Chilean Spanish writer-director-composer ...

Directed by Andrzej Żuławski • 1981 • France, West Germany
Starring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent

Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to fin...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1988 • United States
Starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster

The ultimate Reagan-era rebuttal, John Carpenter’s subversive science-fiction satire follows a drifter (pro-wrestling legend Roddy Piper) who discovers that America is being controlled by yuppie alien...

Directed by Howard Hawks • 1948 • United States
Starring John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan

No matter what genre he worked in, Howard Hawks played by his own rules, and never was this more evident than in his first western, the rowdy and whip-smart RED RIVER. In it, John Wayne found on...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1994 • United States
Starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow

Imagine a novel so overwhelmingly hypnotic, so tremendously horrifying that it paralyzes its audience with fear and turns its most sensible readers insane. When Sutter Cane, the author of this dis...

Directed by John Woo • 1992 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Teresa Mo

Violence as poetry, rendered by a master—brilliant and passionate, John Woo’s HARD BOILED tells the story of jaded detective “Tequila” Yuen (played with controlled fury by Chow Yun-fat). Woo’s dizzying ...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1987 • United States
Starring Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong

When a Catholic priest (Donald Pleasence) asks a physics professor (Victor Wong) and his research students to come to an old abandoned church, they don’t expect to find a large glass canister of...

Directed by Fritz Lang • United States • 1953
Starring Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern

Noir master Fritz Lang brings his hard-hitting style to this gripping thriller based on a short story by LAURA writer Vera Caspary. When LA switchboard operator Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is given the...

Directed by Jonathan Demme • 2008 • United States
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin

When Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she brings a long history of personal demons, family conflict, and tragedy ...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1981 • United States
Starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Isaac Hayes

It’s the year 1997 and the dystopian hellscape of Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison. When the U.S. president’s plane is hijacked and crash lands on the island, it’s up to ha...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1975 • Canada
Starring Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry

Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has spent much of his career mining our fears about sex, technology, and corporeal existence, but this breakout feature is perhaps the most shocking of all his body-horror ...

Directed by David Fincher • 2010 • United States
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake

Hailed as one of the great films of the twenty-first century thus far, David Fincher’s brilliant and unsettling look at the rise of the social-media era goes behind the scenes of early-2...

Directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza • 2007 • Spain
Starring Manuela Velasco, Ferrán Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano

Perhaps the scariest found-footage horror film of all time, this unrelentingly intense Spanish shocker begins as TV reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman ar...

Directed by William Friedkin • 2006 • United States, Germany
Starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Lynn Collins

Director William Friedkin received some of the best reviews of his later career for this searing psychological thriller, a relentless plunge into nightmare delusion adapted by playwri...

Criterion Collection Edition #539

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of “Scooby-Doo” as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip abou...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 1997 • Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, s...

Directed by John Woo • 1989 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh

Hong Kong’s preeminent director, John Woo, transforms genres from both the East and the West to create this explosive and masterful action film. Featuring Hong Kong’s greatest star, Chow Yun-fat, as a killer with...

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 John Carpenter • 1983 • United States
Starring Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul

A high-school nerd’s (Keith Gordon) possessive and possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury unleashes its jealousy in a diabolical killing rampage in this sleek horror joyride from genre master John Carpe...

Directed by Neil Marshall • 2005 • United Kingdom
Starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid

Brilliantly exploiting our innate fears of the dark and the unknown to maximum nerve-shredding effect, this intense journey into the void is among the most frightening horror films of the twen...

Directed by Alan J. Pakula • 1976 • United States
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jack Warden

At once a taut, deeply engrossing political thriller and one of the most fascinating films ever made about the inner workings of the press, the final installment in director Alan J. Pakula’s Pa...

Criterion Collection Edition #810

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper—Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance—becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who can supply an alibi for him is a seductive neighbor (Gloria ...