Fifty years ago, the introduction of VHS to the consumer market revolutionized the way people watched movies, bringing classics, the latest hits, obscure cult favorites, underground bootlegs, and disreputable marginalia alike into their homes with hitherto unimaginable convenience. This ode to an...

While Charlie Kaufman is best known for cerebral, intricately constructed metafictions like ANOMALISA and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, his recent collaborations with writer Eva H.D. find him working in a different mode: impressionistic, intuitive, and vividly sensorial. Both city symphonies of a kind, t...

Through a mix of razor-sharp realism and pitch-black humor, the films of the Romanian New Wave turn everyday dilemmas into gripping moral dramas. Provocatively merging the personal and the political, leading directors like Cristi Puiu (THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU), Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 EAST O...

The exquisite ache of longing suffuses these at once melancholy and intoxicatingly romantic visions of heartbreak, unrequited love, and forbidden passion that luxuriate in the overwhelming pull toward a connection that feels all but impossible. From swooning Hollywood classics (PANDORA AND THE FL...

Don’t try this at home! Cocurated by legendary stunt artist Buddy Joe Hooker, this thrill-packed tribute to the art of stunt design—which will be celebrated at the one hundredth Academy Awards in 2028 via the long-overdue addition of a new category—celebrates the bold, ingenious visionaries whose...

With the start of a new year comes the restless, romantic wish to be reborn. In these portraits of dreamers, outsiders, and risk-takers, characters yearning for renewal seek reinvention through everything from the promise of new love (SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE) to taboo-breaking social and sexual expl...

The dark cloud of disillusionment that spread across international screens in the wake of World War II didn’t spare the land of the midnight sun, as evidenced by this selection of stylishly shadowy, ripe-for-discovery crime dramas from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Precursors to the Scandinavian c...

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of ever-fascinating Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, ...

As his unmissable television epic BLOSSOMS SHANGHAI comes to the Criterion Channel, immerse yourself in the woozy world of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, whose lush visuals, swooning soundtracks, and wistful romanticism have made him one of contemporary cinema’s defining artists. Working with key...

Though their voices have historically been marginalized, innovative Black women filmmakers have long broken barriers to tell urgent, powerful, and perceptive stories on-screen. This celebration of pioneering Black women who made an impact with their very first—and in some cases only—feature film ...

With six features—including his acclaimed latest, SENTIMENTAL VALUE—to his name, Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier has established himself as one of the most virtuosic directors working today, a humanist who brings novelistic depth and insight to his intimate portraits of people grappling with every...

An artistic renegade every bit as uncompromising, fearless, and eccentric as the outsiders, oddballs, and obsessives he makes films about, Werner Herzog is a larger-than-life legend who has risked death, hypnotized an entire cast, moved a steamship over a mountain, and eaten his own shoe, all in ...

At its peak in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Hong Kong film industry was unmatched when it came to action spectacle, offering up dazzlingly choreographed, operatically stylized thrill rides that electrified genre fans around the world. From the bullet-riddled underworld odysseys of John Woo (A BE...

Chills, shocks, scares, and shrieks await in these spine-tingling nightmares.

Few filmmakers navigate the libidinal and the lyrical quite like Spanish sensualist Bigas Luna, a provocateur with a painter’s eye, whose films are lush with eroticism, surrealist flourishes, delirium, and grotesquery. His films—including the Iberian Trilogy comprising the international sensation...

A one-of-a-kind performer, choreographer, and director, Hong Kong superstar Sammo Hung reinvented action cinema as a space of exuberant physicality and unexpected grace. Trained at the same Beijing-opera academy as Jackie Chan (with whom he costarred in films like MY LUCKY STARS), Hung deployed t...

Wim Wenders is cinema’s preeminent poet of the open road, soulfully tracing the journeys of wanderers and drifters searching for themselves. Over the course of his incredible five-decade career, Wenders has traversed the landscapes of his native Germany (ALICE IN THE CITIES, KINGS OF THE ROAD), t...

The best films about artists don’t just document their lives and practices, but are themselves acts of artistic interpretation. Eschewing conventional biography in favor of formal experimentation, these boldly conceived works mirror the creativity of their subjects through the language of film. U...

Packed with delectable feasts of divine food, glorious international locales, and uproarious comic interplay, the THE TRIP series—appearing here in both its complete original television presentation and its theatrical cuts—follows live-wire improvisational geniuses Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as ...

Gena Rowlands forever changed the face of screen acting with her raw emotional realism and immersive approach to performance, which blurred the lines between actor and character to the point of no return. Fearlessly exploring the extreme edges of human relationships and emotion in films like the ...

Gooey, splattery, fleshy nightmares of contagion and transformation, the audacious cinematic transgressions of David Cronenberg—whose latest film, THE SHROUDS, infects theaters this April—are not so much watched as experienced in a visceral, full-body wave of can’t-look-away revulsion and fascina...

A director of such distinctive, overpowering vision that he inspired his own adjective, David Lynch made films that seemed telegraphed straight from his unconscious to the screen. From the unsettling surrealist imagery of his midnight-movie classic ERASERHEAD to the harrowing suburban nightmare T...

Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-ag...

Following a nine-year absence from the screen, the King of the Monsters roared back with a vengeance in 1984 with THE RETURN OF GODZILLA, inaugurating a new era in the romping reptile’s mythology. The ferociously entertaining kaiju spectaculars of the 1980s and ’90s—which brought back familiar fa...