Criterion Collection Edition #800

One of the most beloved American films of all time, THE GRADUATE earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon & Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) ha...

Directed by David Lynch • 2006 • United States
Starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux

“Strange, what love does.” The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble . . . David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditatio...

Directed by David Lynch • 1997 • United States
Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinemati...

Directed by Jessica Beshir • 2021 • Ethiopia, United States, Qatar

A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once p...

Directed by Paul Schrader • 1990 • United States
Starring Christopher Walken, Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson

Two couples are drawn into a dark psychosexual vortex in Paul Schrader’s stylish take on the erotic thriller. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are a British couple hoping to repa...

Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Lesotho, South Africa
Starring Mary Twala, Makhaola Ndebele, Jerry Mofokeng

With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcen...

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti

Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’AVVENTURA concerns the enigmatic di...

Directed by Atom Egoyan • 1994 • Canada
Starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Elias Koteas

Atom Egoyan’s acclaimed commercial breakthrough is both a seductive, hypnotic thriller and a shattering meditation on loss and grief. At the eponymous strip club, Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a deeply depr...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 1997 • Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, s...

Directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou • 2004 • United States
Starring Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu, Wang-Thye Lee

The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s raw, vérité TAKE OUT, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggli...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne

This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1962 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André Labarthe

VIVRE SA VIE (a.k.a. MY LIFE TO LIVE) was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna ...

Criterion Collection Edition #408

There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for “Cahiers du cinèma.” With its lack of polish,...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin • 1972 • France, Italy
Starring Jane Fonda, Yves Montand

In 1972, newly radicalized Hollywood star Jane Fonda joined forces with cinematic innovator Jean-Luc Godard and collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin in an unholy artistic alliance that resulted i...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1963 • France
Starring Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet

Before his convention-shattering debut, BREATHLESS, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in F...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert

With MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Joseph Gerhard

In 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, langu...

Criterion Collection Edition #896

Directed by Agnieska Smoczyńska • 2015 • Poland
Starring Kinga Preis, Michalina Olszańska, Marta Mazurek

This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore ...

Directed by David Lynch • 1992 • United States

In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets, but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, foll...

Criterion Collection Edition #978

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1977 • France
Starring Valérie Mairesse, Thérèse Liotard, Ali Raffi

In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme len...

Directed by Márta Mészáros • 1975 • Hungary
Starring Katalin Berek, Gyöngyvér Vígh, László Szabó

Trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win t...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1984 • United States
Starring Philip Baker Hall

Sequestered in his home, a disgraced President Richard Milhous Nixon arms himself with a bottle of scotch and a gun to record memoirs that no one will hear. He is surrounded by the silent portraits of Lincoln, Eisenhower...

Directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri • 2020 • Nigeria
Starring Jude Akuwudike, Temi Ami-Williams, Tomiwa Edun

This revelatory, award-winning debut feature from codirec­tors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nig...