Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1971 • United States
Starring Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales

A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, a...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 2014 • France, Germany, Switzerland
Starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz

This multilayered, immensely entertaining drama from the great contemporary French director Olivier Assayas is a singular look at the intersection of high art and popu...

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg • 1998 • Denmark
Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen

The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with THE CELEBRATION, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the...

Directed by Bruno Dumont • 1997 • France
Starring David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel

With his stunning debut feature, the risk-taking auteur Bruno Dumont immediately established his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast on the cutting edge of French cinema. Blending unflinching realism with mo...

Directed by Alain Resnais • 1961 • France
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD has been puzzling appreciative viewers for de...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 1996 • France
Starring Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard

Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in...

Directed by John M. Stahl • 1945 • United States
Starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain

Novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) seems to have found the perfect woman in Ellen (Gene Tierney), a beautiful socialite who initiates a whirlwind romance and steers him into marriage before he...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1972 • United States
Starring Joe Keyes Jr., Rhetta Hughes, Avon Long

Melvin Van Peebles’s film version of his own Tony Award–nominated Broadway musical is a bold blend of theater and nervy, New Wave–inflected cinematic invention. A cast of Black stage and screen...

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick • 1957 • United States
Starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison

In the swift, cynical SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster stars as the vicious Broadway gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis as Sidney ...

Directed by Stanley Kwan • 1987 • Hong Kong
Starring Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man Chi-leung

Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung display the androgynous magnetism that made them icons as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering...

Directed by Gordon Parks • 1971 • United States
Starring Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn, Charles Cioffi

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a n...

Directed by Mira Nair • 1991 • United States, Uganda
Starring Denzel Washington, Sarita Choudhury, Roshan Seth

The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South come together in Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA, a luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot. Yea...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1970 • United States
Starring Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parsons, Howard Caine

Melvin Van Peebles puts a spin on Franz Kafka’s THE METAMORPHOSIS in this provocative racial satire. Bigoted white insurance salesman Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) has it made: he’s ...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1991 • France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Japan
Starring Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlan...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1967 • United States
Starring Harry Baird, Nicole Berger, Hal Brav

Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the langu...

Criterion Collection Edition #1002

When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs o...

Directed by Lodge Kerrigan • 1994 • United States
Starring Peter Greene, Robert Albert, Megan Owen

Lodge Kerrigan began his succession of utterly unique, visually and aurally dazzling character studies with the raw, ravaging CLEAN, SHAVEN. A compelling headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schi...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1995 • United States
Starring Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen

With DEAD MAN, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, ...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstr...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Frank Borzage • 1937 • United States

Suffused with intoxicating romanticism, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT is a sublime paean to love from Frank Borzage, classic Hollywood’s supreme poet of carnal and spiritual desire. On the run through Europe from her wealthy, cruelly possessive husband...

Directed by Johnnie To • 2004 • Hong Kong
Starring Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, Cherrie Ying

One of the most personal films by the prolific Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To is a thrilling love letter to both the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and the art and philosophy of judo. Amid the neon-drenched nightclubs ...

Criterion Collection Edition #711

Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, John, Paul, George, and Ringo began working on a project that would bring their revolutionary talent to the big screen. A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, in which ...