Directed by Alan Arkin • 1971 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia

The black-comic stage play by writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer provides the basis for Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, a surreal satire of urban alienation and the sensele...

Directed by Bigas Luna • 1992 • Spain
Starring Javier Bardem, Jordi Mollà, Penélope Cruz

The pleasures of sex and food entwine to outrageous effect in this wickedly seductive, darkly surreal romance. A teenage Penélope Cruz makes a memorable film debut as Silvia, a worker in a small-town underwe...

Directed by Joseph Sargent • 1974 • United States
Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam

One of the definitive cinematic time capsules of New York in the good-bad old days of the 1970s, this crackling urban-jungle thriller begins when a quartet of gunmen in trench coats—led by the c...

Directed by Cameron Crowe • 2001 • United States
Starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz

Cameron Crowe’s heady remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Spanish science-fiction hit OPEN YOUR EYES reunites him with JERRY MAGUIRE star Tom Cruise as a man on a mind-bending search for his soul. Young,...

Directed by John Farrow • 1948 • United States
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund

Noir fatalism and shivery supernatural menace merge in this atmospheric adaptation of a darkly existential novel by pulp master Cornell Woolrich. Edward G. Robinson stars as John Triton, a stage m...

Directed by John Farrow • 1948 • United States
Starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan

One of the finest suspense thrillers of the 1940s, THE BIG CLOCK stars Ray Milland as a hapless crime-magazine editor plunged into a web of danger when he begins being systematically framed ...

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • 1966 • United States
Starring Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page, Peter Kastner

Francis Ford Coppola’s oft-overlooked second feature is a zanily offbeat entry in the 1960s sex-comedy canon. Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner), a naive nineteen-year-old virgin li...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1988 • United States, Canada
Starring Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske

In DEAD RINGERS, David Cronenberg tells the chilling story of identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who share the sa...

Directed by Stanley Kubrick • 1987 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D’Onofrio

Director Stanley Kubrick rips the skin from the face of war to expose the dehumanizing effect of the military on the people fed into its meat grinder in this lacerating and...

Directed by Diao Yinan • 2014 • China
Starring Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-mei, Wang Xuebing

Bone-deep disillusionment and startling moments of visual invention suffuse this noir immersion into the seedy underbelly of contemporary Chinese society, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlin Film Festiva...

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 1999 • Spain
Starring Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, Marisa Paredes

This Oscar-winning melodrama, one of Pedro Almodóvar’s most beloved films, provides a dizzying, moving exploration of the meaning of motherhood. In an instant, nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) loses the t...

Directed by Paul Verhoeven • 1995 • United States, France
Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon

Unbound by musty notions of “good taste,” SHOWGIRLS goes farther than any other film of the 1990s in its orgiastic depiction of consumerism, crass spectacle, and the dark side of t...

Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1988 • United States
Starring Amy Irving, Peter Riegert, David Hyde Pierce

Joan Micklin Silver’s wonderfully affectionate spin on the romantic comedy infuses the genre with a fresh, personal perspective, following an unmarried Jewish woman’s search for fulfillme...

Directed by Roland Joffé • 1984 • United Kingdom
Starring Sam Waterston, Haing S. Ngor, John Malkovich

When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975, many thought the killing would end. Instead it started a long nightmare in which millions of Cambodians would die in the “killing fields.” This...

Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2024 • France, India, Netherlands
Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam

Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction-feature debut is a radiant ode to hope-giving connections forged amid big-city anonymity. Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, ALL WE IMAG...

Directed by Oliver Stone • 1986 • United States
Starring Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger

Director Oliver Stone drew from his own experiences for this searing antiwar epic, one of the most brutally realistic Hollywood films made about the horrors of the Vietnam War. Alongside an impress...

Directed by Jonathan Demme • 1986 • United States
Starring Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta

A straitlaced businessman meets a quirky, free-spirited woman at a downtown New York greasy spoon. Her offer of a ride back to his office results in a lunchtime motel rendezvous—just the beginni...

Directed by Sidney Lumet • 1975 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning

On a sweltering August day, novice criminals Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank in order to pay for Sonny’s lover’s gender confirmation surgery—a situation that qu...

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 2006 • Spain
Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Yohana Cobo

Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER is set in Madrid’s lively working-class neighborhoods, where three generations of women survive wind, fire, and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity, and a limitless vitality...

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg • 1971 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint

A fragile romance unfolds against the backdrop of 1970s New York in this unsparing look at heroin addiction, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Taking its t...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1962 • France, Italy, Yugoslavia
Starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime pl...

Directed by Wei Shujun • 2023 • China
Starring Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Hou Tianlai

When a woman’s body washes up on the shore in small-town China in the 1990s, the local chief of police, Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong), is tasked with leading the investigation. An obvious suspect leads to a hasty arrest, ...

Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1952 • United States
Starring Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Walter Pidgeon

Appearances are everything in Hollywood. Kirk Douglas gives a magnetic, Oscar-nominated performance as conniving producer Jonathan Shields, who turns talent, charisma and ruthlessness into fil...

Directed by Norman Jewison • 1987 • United States
Starring Cher, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Gardenia

A full moon, a New York City night, and love and music in the air . . . One of the most enchanting romantic comedies of all time assembles a flawless ensemble cast for a tender and boisterously funny ...