Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1956 • United States
Starring Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, Leif Erickson

Vincente Minnelli’s masterful direction gives stirring expression to the ache of outsiderhood in this taboo-shattering adaptation of Robert Anderson’s play, one of the first major films to deal e...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1947 • United Kingdom
Starring Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar

This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A group of nuns—played by som...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1943 • United Kingdom
Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr

Considered by many to be the finest British film ever made, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a stirring masterpiece like...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1948 • United Kingdom
Starring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring

THE RED SHOES, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Tech...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1951 • France, United Kingdom, India, United States
Starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields

Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature, shot entirely on location in India, is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the fi...

Directed by Luchino Visconti • 1954 • Italy
Starring Alida Valli, Farley Granger

This lush, Technicolor tragic romance from Luchino Visconti stars Alida Valli as a nineteenth-century Italian countess who, during the Austrian occupation of her country, puts her marriage and political principle...

Directed by Victor Schertzinger • 1939 • United States
Starring Kenny Baker, Martyn Green, Sydney Granville

The legendary Gilbert and Sullivan troupe the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company joined forces with Hollywood for this 1939 Technicolor version of the beloved comic opera “The Mikado,” the first w...

Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, Kay Hammond

BLITHE SPIRIT, David Lean’s delightful film version of Noël Coward’s theater sensation (onstage, it broke London box-office records before hitting Broadway), stars Rex Harrison as a novelist wh...

Directed by David Lean • 1944 • United Kingdom
Starring Robert Newton, Celia Johnson

David Lean brings to vivid emotional life Noël Coward’s epic chronicle of a working-class family in the London suburbs over the course of two decades. Robert Newton and Celia Johnson are surpassingly affecting a...

Directed by Albert Lamorisse • 1956 • France

Albert Lamorisse's exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children's films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets o...

Criterion Collection Edition #431

Legendary producer Alexander Korda’s marvel THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, inspired by “The Arabian Nights,” is one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made, an eye-popping effects pioneer brimming with imagination and technical wizardry. When Prince Ahmad (John Ju...

Directed by Anthony Asquith • 1952 • United Kingdom
Starring Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenwood, Dame Edith Evans

Oscar Wilde’s comic jewel sparkles in Anthony Asquith’s film adaptation of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Featuring brilliantly polished performances by Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenw...

Directed by Ronald Neame • 1958 • United Kingdom
Starring Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Renee Houston

In Ronald Neame’s film of Joyce Cary’s classic novel, Alec Guinness transforms himself into one of cinema’s most indelible comic figures: the lovably scruffy painter Gulley Jimson. As the ill-behave...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1965 • Italy
Starring Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo, Mario Pisu

Cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo’s masterful use of Technicolor transforms JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, Fellini’s first color feature, into a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories. Giulietta Masina ...

Directed by Laurence Olivier • 1944 • United Kingdom
Starring Laurence Olivier, Leslie Banks, Robert Newton

Olivier mustered out of the navy to film this adaptation of Shakespeare’s history. Embroiled in World War II, Britons took courage from this tale of a king who surmounts overwhelming odds ...

Directed by David Lean • 1955 • United States, United Kingdom
Starring Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Darren McGavin

An American spinster’s dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome—but married—Italian man while vacationing in Venice. Katharine Hepburn’...

Directed by Ronald Neame • 1960 • United Kingdom
Starring Alec Guinness, John Mills

In Ronald Neame’s TUNES OF GLORY, the incomparable Alec Guinness plays Jock Sinclair—a whiskey-drinking, up-by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. A lifetime military man, Sinc...

Directed by Zoltán Korda • 1942 • United Kingdom

This Korda brothers film is the definitive version of Rudyard Kipling's classic collection of fables. Sabu stars as Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, who can communicate with all the beasts of the jungle, friend or foe, and who gradually reacclimati...

Directed by Zoltán Korda • 1938 • United Kingdom

Zoltán Korda's charged adaptation of a novel by The Four Feathers author A. E. W. Mason features Sabu in his second film role, as the teenage Prince Azim, forced into hiding when his father, the ruler of a peaceful kingdom in northwest India, is a...

Directed by Gabriel Pascal • 1945 • United Kingdom

Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains pop off the screen in vivid Technicolor in Gabriel Pascal's version of Shaw's 1901 play about love and politics in ancient Rome and Egypt. At the time the most expensive British film ever produced (complete with rea...

Directed by Zoltán Korda • 1939 • United Kingdom
Starring John Clements, Ralph Richardson, June Duprez

This Technicolor spectacular, directed by Zoltán Korda, is considered the finest of the many adaptations of A. E. W. Mason’s classic 1902 adventure novel about the British empire’s exploits in ...

Directed by Laurence Olivier • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom

In RICHARD III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life. Olivier is diabolically captivat...

Directed by Carol Reed • 1955 • United Kingdom
Starring Jonathan Ashmore, Celia Johnson, Diana Dors

Set against a rich evocation of postwar London’s East End Jewish quarter, Carol Reed’s touchingly bittersweet Technicolor fable concerns a young boy (Jonathan Ashmore) who comes into possession...