Directed by David Lynch • 1977 • United States
Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Judith Anna Roberts

David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, ERASERHEAD, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick El...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1988 • France
Starring Jane Birkin, Agnès Varda, Charlotte Gainsbourg

The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a ye...

Directed by Elem Klimov • 1985 • Soviet Union

This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish)...

Criterion Collection Edition #501

New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (WINGS OF DESIRE) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in PARIS, TEXAS, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard. PARIS, TEXAS follows the mysterious...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1962 • France
Starring Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of ...

Directed by Federico Fellini • 1963 • Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Bruno Agostini, Sandra Milo

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1950 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori

A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, RASHOMON is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people give different accou...

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 Ingmar Bergman • 1957 • Sweden
Starring Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Gunnar Björnstrand

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a g...

Criterion Collection Edition #834

Directed by Joel Coen • 1984 • United States
Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya

Joel and Ethan Coen’s career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleaz...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1992 • United States
Starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward

A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry ...

Directed by Claire Denis • 1999 • France
Starring Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin

With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked ...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1961 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoko Tsukasa

The incomparable Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa’s visually stunning and darkly comic YOJIMBO. To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro turns a range war...

Directed by Jacques Deray • 1969 • France
Starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet

The bright sun of the French Riviera is deceptive in this alluring work of slow-burn suspense from thriller specialist Jacques Deray and legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. Formerly one of Euro...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima

One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1935 • United Kingdom
Starring Robert Donat, Madeline Carroll, Lucie Mannheim

A heart-racing spy story by Alfred Hitchcock, THE 39 STEPS follows Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) as he stumbles upon a conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish ...

Criterion Collection Edition #453

Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 1994 • Hong Kong
Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro

The whiplash, double-pronged CHUNGKING EXPRESS is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heartsick...

Criterion Collection Edition #5

Directed by François Truffaut • 1959 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy

François Truffaut’s first feature is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), THE 4...

Criterion Collection Edition #593

Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1967 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli

Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending ...

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski • 2022 • Poland, Italy
Starring Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz

With his first feature in seven years, legendary filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (DEEP END, MOONLIGHTING) directs one of his most free and visually inventive films yet, following t...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1999 • United States
Starring Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman

Jim Jarmusch combined his love for the ice-cool crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki with the philosophical dimensions of samurai mythology for an eccentrically postmodern take o...

Directed by Wim Wenders • 1991 • Germany, France, Australia
Starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she...

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...