Directed by John Carpenter • 1976 • United States
Starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer

John Carpenter’s lean, mean second feature puts a gritty exploitation spin on Howard Hawks’s classic western RIO BRAVO, transposing the story to a soon-to-be-closed LA police station where a gr...

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1972 • Soviet Union
Starring Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Yuri Yarvet

Ground control has been receiving mysterious transmissions from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station. When cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin is dispatched to i...

Directed by John Coney • 1974 • United States
Starring Sun Ra, Barbara Deloney, Raymond Johnson

Avant-jazz mystic Sun Ra brought his pioneering Afrofuturist vision to the screen with this film version of his concept album. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic whirl of science fiction, sharp social comment...

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 Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed ...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1981 • Canada
Starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside

With SCANNERS, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabb...

Directed by Peter Weir • 1977 • Australia
Starring Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, Gulpilil

Richard Chamberlain stars as Australian lawyer David Burton, who takes on the defense of a group of aborigines accused of killing one of their own. He suspects the victim has been killed for violatin...

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1979 • Soviet Union
Starring Alisa Freindlikh, Aleksandr Kaidnovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired gui...

Directed by Kenji Misumi and Robert Houston • 1980 • Japan, United States
Starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Oki

The legendary midnight-movie sensation that firmly embedded samurai mythology within American pop-culture consciousness, this English-dubbed reedit of the first two fil...

Directed by Al Reinert • 1989 • United States

In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Al Reinert’s documentary FOR...

Directed by Tony Maylam • 1977 • United Kingdom

British documentary film-maker and producer Tony Maylam invigorated the sports documentary genre with WHITE ROCK, an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging account of the XII Olympic Winter Games Innsbruck 1976. He did so by placing music front and cen...