The Walter Reade Theater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is a beloved New York institution. We’ve created a short documentary on its history and programming, presented here with a lineup of films handpicked and introduced by its curators.

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1953 • Italy
Starring Anna Magnani, Odoardo Spadaro, Nada Fiorelli

THE GOLDEN COACH (LE CARROSSE D’OR) is a ravishing eighteenth-century comic fantasy about a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach, and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell...

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1964 • Italy
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and RED DESERT, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spirit...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical PERSONA, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary perf...

Directed by John Waters • 1970 • United States
Starring Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce

The gloriously grotesque second feature directed by John Waters is replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema's most memorably blasphemous moments. Made on a shoes...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1984 • United States, Germany
Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint

With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at it...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1985 • France
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss

Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnès Varda pieces together Mona’s sto...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1987 • Iran

The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of ...

Directed by Edward Yang • 1991 • Taiwan
Starring Chang Chen, Lisa Yang, Chang Kuo-hu

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, finally comes to home video in the United States. Set in the early...

Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski • 1991 • France
Starring Irène Jacob, Philippe Volter, Sandrine Dumas

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent a...

Directed by Pedro Costa • 2000 • Germany, Portugal, Switzerland

For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films' larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the inti...