Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

Directed by Víctor Erice • 1973 • Spain
Starring Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Fernán Gómez

Criterion is proud to present Víctor Erice’s spellbinding THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (EL ESPÍRITU DE LA COLMENA), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian vi...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1957 • Sweden
Starring Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin

Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by the veteran filmmaker and actor Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1948 • United Kingdom
Starring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring

THE RED SHOES, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Tech...

Directed by Larisa Shepitko • 1977 • Soviet Union
Starring Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yakovlev

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the ...

Directed by Sergei Parajanov • 1969 • Soviet Union

A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES revives the splen...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1997 • Iran

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death. Middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, s...

Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of characte...

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1925 • Soviet Union

This incredibly influential Soviet silent film depicts a crew mutiny on the Russian Battleship Potemkin.

Directed by Robert Bresson • 1959 • France
Starring Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie

This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of P...

Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1957 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru Chiaki

A vivid, visceral “Macbeth” adaptation, THRONE OF BLOOD, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan....