Directed by Fritz Lang • 1931 • Germany

A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. "Who Is the Murderer?" pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann... In his harrowing masterwork M, ...

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1953 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck

In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive...

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1955 • France
Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse

Before PSYCHO, PEEPING TOM, and REPULSION, there was DIABOLIQUE. This thriller from Henri-Georges Clouzot, which shocked audiences in Europe and the U.S., is the story of two women, the fragil...

Directed by René Clément • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt

Alain Delon was at his most impossibly beautiful when PURPLE NOON was released and made him an instant star. This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel “The Talented Mr. R...

Directed by Roman Polanski • 1962 • Poland
Starring Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka, Zygmunt Malanowicz

Roman Polanski’s first feature is a brilliant psychological thriller that many critics still consider among his greatest work. The story is simple, yet the implications of its characters’ emotio...

Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Jörgen Lindström

Outrageous and explosively controversial (the Venice Film Festival refused to screen it publicly, while John Waters has called it his favorite film), Mai Zetterling’s second feature is a blazing psych...

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 Costa-Gavras • 1969 • Algeria, France
Starring Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas

A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from t...

Directed by Karel Kachyňa • 1970 • Czechoslovakia

This paranoid surveillance thriller unfolds over the course of a tense, turbulent night in the life of Ludvík (Radoslav Brzobohatý), a Communist party official, and his wife Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová). Returning home from a party one evening, the pa...

Directed by Costa-Gavras • 1972 • France
Starring Yves Montand, Renato Salvatori, O. E. Hasse

Costa-Gavras puts the involvement of the United States in Latin American politics under the microscope in this arresting thriller. An urban guerrilla group, outraged at the counterinsurgency and torture...

Directed by Joseph Losey • 1976 • France
Starring Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Francine Bergé

Neglected for decades, this chilling existentialist mystery has reemerged as one of director Joseph Losey’s most virtuosic works. In perhaps the finest performance of his career, Alain Delon stars as the...

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski • 1978 • United Kingdom
Starring Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt

This entrancing psychosexual puzzle thriller from Jerzy Skolimowski features a memorably unsettling performance from Alan Bates as an enigmatic drifter who insinuates himself into the lives of an ...

Directed by Stephen Frears • 1984 • United Kingdom
Starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth

Terence Stamp is Willie, a gangster’s henchman turned “supergrass” (informer) trying to live in peaceful hiding in a remote Spanish village. Sun-dappled bliss turns to nerve-racking suspense, however, ...

Directed by George Sluizer • 1988 • Netherlands
Starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege

A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation dra...

Directed by Claude Chabrol • 1995 • France, Germany
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset

Claude Chabrol’s forty-ninth feature stands as the crowning achievement of his prolific career—a coolly riveting study of class dynamics, the psychology of crime, and the sordid se...

Directed by Michael Haneke • 1997 • Austria
Starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch

Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, FUNNY GAMES spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. ...

Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg • 1997 • Norway
Starring Stellan Skarsgård, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Bjørn Floberg

In this elegantly unsettling murder mystery, Stellan Skarsgård plays an enigmatic Swedish detective with a checkered past who arrives in a small town in northern Norway to investigate the ...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 2002 • France
Starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny

“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning DEMONLOVER, a postmodern neonoir thriller and med...

Directed by Götz Spielmann • 2008 • Austria
Starring Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Ursula Strauss

A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, REVANCHE is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section...