Directed by Henry King • 1925 • United States
Starring Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joye

One of the silent era’s most popular and moving melodramas, the beautifully mounted original screen version of Olive Higgins Prouty’s oft-filmed novel was adapted by Frances Marion and produced by Sam...

Directed by David Chase • 2012 • United States
Starring John Magaro, James Gandolfini, Bella Heathcote

The feature-film debut from David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” is a uniquely unsentimental, open-ended coming-of-age story set in the counterculture explosion of midcentury America. In 196...

Directed by Joseph Cates • 1965 • United States
Starring Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray

Norah Drain (Juliet Prowse), a Manhattan disco hostess, is being terrorized by a stalker and obscene phone caller. NYPD Lieutenant Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes a personal interest in her case, finding...

Directed by Robert Bresson • 1974 • France
Starring Luc Simon, Laura Duke Condominas, Humbert Balsan

Robert Bresson’s almost abstract rendering of the Arthurian legend—the tale of the titular knight’s quest for the Holy Grail and his love affair with Guinevere—approaches the realm of pure cinema...

Directed by William A. Wellman • 1937 • United States
Starring Fredric March, Carole Lombard, Charles Winninger

He’s an unscrupulous newspaperman eager to exploit the story of a young woman’s death by radium poisoning. She knows she’s not really dying but can’t pass up a free trip to New York wi...

Directed by Robert Bresson • 1971 • France, Italy
Starring Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer

FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER is Robert Bresson’s great forgotten masterpiece, a stark yet haunting ode to romantic idealism and the capriciousness of love. Adapted from Fyodor ...

Directed by Clement Virgo • 1995 • Canada
Starring Maurice Dean Wint, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson

Jamaican Canadian director Clement Virgo’s landmark debut—the first Canadian dramatic feature made by an entirely Black crew—is a searing, poetic portrait of marginalized souls fighting to overc...

Directed by Hasse Ekman • 1950 • Sweden
Starring Eva Henning, Ulf Palme, Anders Ek

One of the most acclaimed Swedish films of all time (heralded as a masterpiece by no less than Ingmar Bergman), this moody, masterfully crafted psychological mystery unfolds in a tantalizing series of CITIZEN KANE...

Directed by Mehboob Khan • 1957 • India
Starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar

In many ways the mother of the Bollywood epic, this landmark of Indian cinema is a breathtaking blend of melodrama, musical, Soviet-style socialist realism, and nationalist mythmaking centered around Radha (super...

Directed by Liv Ullmann • 2000 • Sweden
Starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson

Scripted by Ingmar Bergman with the fearlessness of an artist taking stock of his life and masterfully directed one of his greatest collaborators, the actor Liv Ullmann, FAITHLESS is a wrenching, in...

Directed by Susan Sontag • 1969 • Sweden
Starring Lars Ekborg, Gösta Ekman, Adriana Asti

Essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy, a project that began wh...

Directed by Héctor Babenco • 1985 • United States, Brazil
Starring William Hurt, Raúl Juliá, Sônia Braga

Featuring indelible performances from Raul Julia and an Academy Award–winning William Hurt, KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN is a work of radical compassion that boldly expands notions of love, gende...

Directed by James Bidgood • 1971 • United States
Starring Don Brooks, Bobby Kendall, Charles Ludlam

Working over the course of eight years in his downtown Manhattan loft, artist James Bidgood crafted this luxuriant queer fantasia, a crimson-saturated idyll of camp excess and erotic spectacle. Wh...

Directed by St. Clair Bourne • 1983 • United States, United Kingdom

In a vital career forged in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, activist documentarian St. Clair Bourne chronicled overlooked Black American cultural histories with an incisive, illuminating eye. In THE BLACK AND THE GREEN, B...

Directed by Marva Nabili • 1977 • Iran
Starring Flora Shabaviz

The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL chronicles the resistance of a young woman (Flora Shabavis) to her forced marriage, a defiance quickly misinterpreted by her fa...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1999 • United States
Starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder

Virtually unseen for years only to reemerge as a lost gem of American independent cinema, this surprising, ineffably tender romantic comedy from master director Charles Burnett (KILLER OF S...

Directed by Claire Denis • 1990 • France, West Germany
Starring Isaach De Bankolé, Alex Descas, Solveig Dommartin

Inspired by the writings of anticolonialist philosopher Frantz Fanon, Claire Denis’s thrillingly intense second feature is a moody exploration of immigrant alienation. Two young men ...

Directed by Robina Rose • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Jordan, Anne Rees-Mogg, Mitch D

A gorgeously photographed work of surreal, somnambulant cinema, Robina Rose’s singular snapshot of London’s early 1980s art scene casts a hypnotic spell all its own. Over the course of a single nightshift, a...

Directed by Uli Edel • 1981 • West Germany
Starring Natja Brunckhorst, Thomas Haustein, Jens Kuphal

Adapted from actor and musician Christiane Felscherinow’s harrowing account of her teenage years, CHRISTIANE F. depicts the impact of West Berlin’s 1970s heroin epidemic on one of its youngest and...

Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim

A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an ...

Directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura • 1956 • Japan
Starring Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Eitaro Ozawa

Exquisitely lensed in gorgeous color by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this sublimely subversive melodrama employs ravishing mise-en-scène to lend layers of subtextual meaning to the story of...

Directed by Shinji Somai • 1993 • Japan
Starring Tomoko Tabata, Junko Sakurada, Kiichi Nakai

When her parents split and her father (Kiichi Nakai) moves out of their family home, Renko (Tomoko Tabata), a bright and energetic sixth-grade girl, is left alone with her mother, Nazuna (Junko Sakurada)...

Directed by Michael Imperioli • 2009 • United States
Starring Steve Schirripa, Sharon Angela, Emory Cohen

The directorial debut from “Sopranos” star Michael Imperioli is an intense, emotionally raw portrait of lost souls attempting to fill the spiritual voids at the center of their lives. Over t...

Directed by Christophe Honoré • 2004 • France, Portugal, Spain
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes

Sex, death, and forbidden desires merge in Christophe Honoré’s daring, controversial adaptation of the novel by transgressive eroticist Georges Bataille. Amid the sun-splashed r...