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12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet , may be the most radical courtroom drama in cinema history. A behind-closed-doors look at the American legal system as riveting as it is spare, the iconic adaptation of Reginald Rose's teleplay stars Henry Fonda as the dissenting member on a jury of white men ready to pass judgment on a Puerto Rican teenager charged with murdering his father. The result is a saga of epic proportions that plays out..
For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images - most of them stark landscapes inhabited ..
In this beautifully shot, psychologically complex western, Van Heflin is a mild-mannered cattle rancher who takes on the task of shepherding a captured outlaw (played with cucumber-cool charisma by Glenn Ford) to the train that will deliver him to prison. This apparently simple mission turns into a nerve-racking cat-and-mouse game that will test each man's particular brand of honor. Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3:10 to Yuma is a ..
Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, was unavailable for years and much sought after. Set in the early 1960s, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the Taiwan. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual but inexorable fall of..
A Face in the Crowd chronicles the rise and fall of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a boisterous entertainer discovered in an Arkansas drunk tank by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a local radio producer with ambitions of her own. His charisma and cunning soon shoot him to the heights of television stardom and political demagoguery, forcing Marcia to grapple with the manipulative, reactionary monster she has created. Directed ..
Lorraine Hansberry’s immortal A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. Two years later, the production came to the screen, directed by Daniel Petrie. The original stars - including Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee - reprise their roles as members of an African American family living in a cramped Chicago apartment, in this deeply resonant tale of dreams deferred. The Youngers await a life-insurance ..
In this devastatingly witty Hollywood classic from JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ (Cleopatra), backstage is where the real drama plays out. One night, Margo Channing (Now, Voyager’s BETTE DAVIS) entertains a surprise dressing-room visitor: her most adoring fan, the shy, wide-eyed Eve Harrington (The Magnificent Ambersons’ ANNE BAXTER). But as Eve becomes a fixture in Margo’s life, the Broadway legend soon realizes that her supposed admirer intend..
This heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s American mores by Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind) follows the blossoming love between a well-off suburban widow (Magnificent Obsession’s Jane Wyman) and her handsome and earthy younger gardener (Rock Hudson). After their romance prompts the scorn of her selfish children and snooty country club friends, she must decide whether to pursue her own happiness or carry on a lonely, hemmed-i..
Collection of short films and documentaries directed by Martin Scorsese. The films ar: Italian American (1974) American Boy (1978) The Big Shave (1967) It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964) What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963)..
Otto Preminger directs this classic drama starring James Stewart and George C. Scott. Small-town lawyer Paul Biegler (Stewart) courts controversy when he agrees to defend army lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) who is facing charges of murder. It is alleged that Manion killed a bartender whom he believed to have raped his wife (Lee Remick), and the evidence assembled by the hard-headed big city prosecutor Claude Dancer (Scott) se..
Hiroshi Teshigahara directs this documentary about the work of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí...
A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his ..
Badlands announced the arrival of a major talent: Terrence Malick. His impressionistic take on the notorious Charles Starkweather killing spree of the late 1950s uses a serial-killer narrative as a springboard for an oblique teenage romance, lovingly and idiosyncratically enacted by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The film introduced many of the elements that would earn Malick his passionate following: the enigmatic approach to narrative..
The nightmare of war is seen through the eyes of one of its most tragic casualties—a child soldier— in this harrowing vision of innocence lost from CARY JOJI FUKUNAGA (True Detective). Based on the acclaimed novel by Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation unfolds in an unnamed, civil war-torn West African country, where the young Agu (ABRAHAM ATTAH, in a haunting debut performance) witnesses carnage in his village before becoming the capt..
Director Claire Denis' intensely physical study of tensions within a platoon of legionnaires stationed in North Africa. Fearing for his position within the group, Sergeant-Major Galoup (Denis Lavant) is growing increasingly jealous of the popular new recruit Sentain (Grégoire Colin) and decides to bring about his downfall. Eventually, when the platoon have left on a series of exercises, Galoup manages to provoke Sentain into a direct co..
Hal Ashby directs this comedy drama starring Peter Sellers, Melvyn Douglas and Shirley MacLaine. When simple gardener Chance (Sellers) is forced to move to the city after the death of his employer, he falls in with the high-powered political types who mistake his endless prattle about gardening for allegorical wisdom...
OUSMANE SEMBÈNE (Xala, Faat Kiné) was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century— but his name deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple..
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was a cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America..
One of the preeminent works of the Hong Kong New Wave, Boat People is a shattering look at the circumstances that drove hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to flee their homeland in the wake of the Vietnam War, told through images of haunting, unforgettable power. Three years after the Communist takeover, a Japanese photojournalist (Passion’s GEORGE LAM) travels to Vietnam to document the country’s seemingly triumphant rebirth...
Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D.A. Pennebaker. The legendary documentarian finds Dylan in England during his 1965 tour, which would be his last as an acoustic performer. In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists, Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musi..
Wes Anderson first illustrated his lovingly detailed, slightly surreal cinematic vision (with co-writer Owen Wilson) in this visually witty and warm portrait of three young misfits. Best friends Anthony (Luke Wilson), Dignan (Owen Wilson), and Bob (Robert Musgrave) stage a wildly complex, mildly success-ful robbery of a small bookstore, then go "on the lam." During their adventures, Anthony falls in love with a South American housekeepe..
With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, SIDNEY POITIER (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvellously mischievous HARRY BELAFONTE (Carmen Jones) star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulo..
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films, presents. Burroughs: The Movie - Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet, filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend. That changed when Aaron Brookner, the late director's nephew, discovered a print of it in 2011 and ..
The first of the horror films producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures redefined the genre by leaving its most frightening terrors to its audience's imagination. Simone Simon stars as a Serbian emigre in Manhattan who believes that, because of an ancient curse, any physical intimacy with the man she loves (Kent Smith) will turn her into a feline predator. Lewton, a consummate producer-auteur who oversaw every aspect of his projects, fo..
The expanses of the American Northwest take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a woman (Michelle ..
Classic romantic comedy directed by Stanley Donen. Reggie Lambert (Audrey Hepburn) returns home after a skiing trip to discover that her husband has died.At the funeral she finds out from CIA agent Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau) that he was involved in the theft of a quarter of a million dollars during World War Two.The charming Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) offers his help, but as the number of dead bodies increases, so do Peter..
The most cherished film by CHARLIE CHAPLIN (Modern Times) is also his ultimate Little Tramp chronicle. The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical VIRGINIA CHERRILL) and mistakes him for a millionaire. Though this Depression- era smash was made after the advent o..
Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Paulette Goddard). With its barrage of unforgettable gags and sly commentary on class struggle during the Great Depression, Modern Times—though made almost a decade into the talkie era and containing moments of sound (even song!)—is a timeless showcase of Chapl..
In his notorious masterpiece The Great Dictator, CHARLIE CHAPLIN (City Lights, Modern Times) offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin (in his first pure talkie) brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomanian” dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring JACK OAKIE (Thieves’ Highway, Lover Come Back) and PAULETTE GODDAR..
LIMITED EDITION BOOKLET (FIRST PRINT RUN) - IF LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS (BOOKLET) ARE REQUIRED PLEASE CHECK WITH CUSTOMER SERVICES THAT THIS IS STILL AVAILABLE BEFORE ORDERINGThis film about a woman’s artistic and romantic yearning by SATYAJIT RAY (The Music Room) is set in late nineteenth-century, pre-independence India. It takes place in the gracious home of a liberal-minded, workaholic newspaper editor and his lonely, stifled wife,..
Long unavailable, this deeply felt coming-of-age drama by Olivier Assayas has until now been a missing link in one of contemporary cinema's richest bodies of work. Drawing from his own youthful experiences, Assayas revisits the outskirts of Paris in the early 1970s, telling the story of teenage lovers Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virgine Ledoyen), whose rebellions against family and society threaten to tear them apart. The vi..
Roman Polanski orchestrates a mental menage a trois in this slyly absurd tale of paranoia from the director's golden 1960s period. Donald Pleasance and Francoise Dorleac star as a withdrawn couple whose isolated house is invaded by a rude, burly American gangster on the run, played by Lionel Stander. The three engage in role-playing games of sexual and emotional humiliation. Cul-de-sac is an evocative, claustrophobic, and morbidly funny..
Maureen O'Hara stars in this classic musical drama directed by Dorothy Arzner. Aspiring ballerina Judy O'Brien (O'Hara) dreams of being a star but as she repeatedly clashes with fellow dancer Bubbles (Lucille Ball), she wonders if she will ever truly make it...
This affectionate farce from Francois Truffaut about the joys and strife of moviemaking is one of his most beloved films. Truffaut himself appears as the harried director of a frivolous melodrama, the shooting of which is plagued by the whims of a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Leaud), an ageing but still forceful Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a British ingenue haunted by personal scandal (Jacqueline Bisset). An irrelevant paean to..
With Dead Man, his first period piece, JIM JARMUSCH (Down by Law) imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Edward Scissorhands’s JOHNNY DEPP) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in ..
Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death. A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy (Bjorn Andrese..
Film noir hits the mean streets of 1990s Los Angeles in this stylish and subversive underworld odyssey from veteran actor-director BILL DUKE (The Killing Floor). LAURENCE FISHBURNE (The Matrix) stars as Russell Stevens/John Hull, a police officer who goes undercover as the partner of a dangerously ambitious cocaine trafficker (The Fly’s JEFF GOLDBLUM) in order to infiltrate and bring down a powerful Latin American drug ring operating in..
Albert Brooks writes, directs and stars in this 1990s romantic fantasy comedy.After he is killed in a car accident on his 39th birthday, successful advertising executive Daniel Miller (Brooks) finds himself in Judgment City, a shopping mall-style heaven where he must defend his life's worth in order to graduate to paradise.While he awaits judgment, Daniel falls in love with recently deceased Julia (Meryl Streep) but fears losing her..
Donna Deitch’s swooning and sensual first narrative feature, Desert Hearts, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely independently, on a shoestring budget, by a woman. In this 1959-set film, adaptated from a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) arrives in Reno to file for divorce but winds up catching the eye of someone new, the free-spiri..
Master filmmaker SATYAJIT RAY (The Apu Trilogy) explores the conflict between fanaticism and free will in Devi (The Goddess), issuing a subversively modern challenge to religious orthodoxy and patriarchal power structures. In the waning days of mid-nineteenth-century India’s feudal system, after his son (Apur Sansar’s SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE) leaves for Kolkata to complete his studies, a wealthy rural landowner (The Music Room’s CHHABI BISW..
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 fragile wife and the willful mistress of the sadistic headmaster of a boys’ boarding school - who hatch a daring revenge plot. With its unprecedented narrative twists and terrifying images, Diabolique is a heart-grabbing benchmark of horror filmmaking, ..
This playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by KIRSTEN JOHNSON (Cameraperson) is a valentine to the director’s beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately da..
Director JIM JARMUSCH followed up his brilliant breakout Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in America. When fate lands three hapless men—an unemployed disc jockey (Short Cuts’ TOM WAITS), a small-time pimp (Fishing with John’s JOHN LURIE), and a strong- willed Italian tourist (Life Is Beautiful’s ROBERTO BENIGNI)—in a Louisiana prison, a singular adventure begins. Described by Jarmusch a..
Unfolding in a series of eight mythic vignettes, this late work by Akira Kurosawa was inspired by the beloved director's own nighttime visions, along with stories from Japanese folklore. In a visually sumptuous journey through the master's imagination, tales of childlike wonder give way to apocalyptic apparitions: a young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts the ghosts of the war dead; a power plant meltdown sm..
This is the definitive counterculture blockbuster. Former clean-cut teen star Dennis Hopper's down-and-dirty directorial debut, Easy Rider heralded the arrival of a new voice in film, one pitched angrily against the mainstream. After Easy Rider's cross-country journey-with its radical, new wave-style editing, outsider-rock soundtrack, revelatory performance by a young soundtrack, revelatory performance by a young Jack Nicholson, and exp..
Paul Bartel directs and stars in this dark comedy about a couple eager to start up their own business. Paul and Mary Bland (Bartel and Mary Woronov) want to open their own restaurant but lack the necessary funds to do so. When Paul returns home one day he finds Mary fighting off a would-be swinger who has mistakenly entered the Bland's apartment. Angry and impulsive, Paul kills the imposter and, in a flash of panic, strips him of his wa..
David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey remains one of American cinema’s darkest dreams. DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration, wit..
“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins this spellbinding feature debut by KASI LEMMONS (Harriet), an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothic atmosphere. In 1960s Louisiana, a young girl (Friday Night Lights’ JURNEE SMOLLETT) sees her well-to-do family unravel in the wake of the infidelities of her charming father (Pulp Fiction’s SAMUEL L. JACKSON)— setting in motion a s..
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F for Fake, a free-form documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully re-engages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous line between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneou..
Sidney Lumet directs this dramatic tale of potential nuclear war. When a computer system that is designed to prevent nuclear attacks experiences a malfunction that results in a warhead being accidentally set to destroy Moscow, the Russian capital fails to see how this could be a mistake and declares war on New York in retaliation. The cast includes Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Larry Hagman...
Fantastic Mr. Fox is the story of a clever, quick, nimble, and exceptionally well- dressed wild animal. A compulsive chicken thief turned newspaper reporter, Mr. Fox settles down with his family at a new foxhole in a beautiful tree directly adjacent to three enormous poultry farms—owned by three ferociously vicious farmers: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. Mr. Fox simply cannot resist. This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel fr..
Cult 1980s comedy directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judge Reinhold.Based on the real events recounted in Cameron Crowe's novel, the film follows a group of high school students in southern California who are looking for love and fun in their teenage years. 15-year-old Stacy Hamilton (Leigh) is desperate for boys to see her as a woman but when she lies about her age to date an older man, she is..
Dark cult comedy starring Divine, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce. Dawn Davenport (Divine) is furious at her parents' refusal to buy her new shoes. In retaliation, Dawn walks out of the house, hitchhikes her way out of town and engages in sexual relations with the driver. When she discovers she is pregnant, neither the father or her parents want anything to do with her and so she results to a life of stripping and prostitution to g..
Out of StockA dropout from upper-class America picks up work along the way on oil rigs when his life isn't spent in a squalid succession of bars, motels, and other points of interest...
An intoxicating, time-bending experience bathed in the golden glow of oil lamps and wreathed in an opium haze, this gorgeous period reverie by HOU HSIAO-HSIEN (The Assassin) traces the romantic intrigue, jealousies, and tensions swirling around four late-nineteenth-century Shanghai “flower houses,” where the courtesans live confined to a gilded cage, ensconced in opulent splendour but forced to work to buy back their freedom. Among the ..
In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy's challenge of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Al Reinert's documentary For All Mankind is the story of the twenty-four men who travelled to the moon, told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences. Fifty years after the first moon landin..
"Gilda, are you decent?" Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, "Me?" in one of the great star entrances in movie history. Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor (Cover Girl), features a sultry Hayworth in her most iconic role, as the much-lusted-after wife of a criminal kingpin (George Macready), as well as the former flame of his bitter henchman (Glenn Ford), and she drives them both mad with desire and jealousy. An ever-shi..
A photographer and her girlfriend are roommates. She is stuck with small-change shooting jobs and dreams of success. When her roommate decides to get married and leave, she feels hurt and has to learn how to deal with living alone...
IN 1954, AN ENORMOUS BEAST CLAWED ITS WAY OUT OF THE SEA, destroying everything in its path—and changing movies forever. The arresting original Godzilla soon gave rise to an entire monster movie genre (kaiju eiga), but the King of the Monsters continued to reign supreme: in fourteen fiercely entertaining sequels over the next two decades, Godzilla defended its throne against a host of other formidable creatures, transforming from a ter..
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot. An impossibly intimate portrait, this 1976 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, codirected by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, quickly became a cult classic ..
A startling and courageous film, PETER DAVIS’s landmark 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the foment that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to footage of the conflict and the upheaval it occasioned on the home front— Davis constructs a powerfully affecting picture of the disastrous effects of war. Explosive, persuasive..
With this trailblazing musical, writer–director–star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig (Mitchell) undergoes a traumatic personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, chara..
A sophisticated supernatural Hollywood comedy whose influence continues to be felt, Here Comes Mr. Jordan stars the eminently versatile Robert Montgomery as a working-class boxer and amateur aviator whose plane crashes in a freak accident. He finds himself in heaven but is told, by a wry angel named Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), that his death was a clerical error, and that he can return to earth by entering the body of a corrupt (and abou..
A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from ALAIN RESNAIS (Last Year at Marienbad) is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Amour’s EMMANUELLE RIVA) and a Japanese architect (Woman in the Dunes’ EIJI OKADA) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming mutual fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. With an innovative fl..
One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, His Girl Friday stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from..
George Cukor directs this classic drama starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Liberal-minded Johnny Case (Grant) wanders into a storm of trouble when he goes to meet his fiancée's wealthy family. His prospective father-in-law is not too impressed with Johnny's plan to take a holiday in the early years of his life. Johnny is nonplussed however, as all he wants is to enjoy himself and find a direction while he is still able. However,..
John Cassavetes writes, directs and stars in this comedy drama following three men whose lives are affected by the death of their friend. Husbands and fathers, Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk) and Gus (Cassavetes) attend the funeral of their friend, Stuart (David Rowlands), who died suddenly, and struggle to deal with their grief as they start to feel the pressures of their own lives. After spending two days drinking, Harry, who..
Melodrama master JOHN M. STAHL (Magnificent Obsession) brings his exquisite restraint and almost spiritually pure visual style to this devastating, enduringly relevant story of mothers and daughters. Imitation of Life explores the friendship between two struggling single mothers: one (It Happened One Night’s CLAUDETTE COLBERT) a workingclass white woman who ascends to the top of the business world, the other (Beulah’s LOUISE BEAVERS) he..
When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper - Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance - becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who can supply an alibi for him is a seductive neighbor with her own troubled past (Gloria Grahame). The emotionally charged In a Lonely Place, freely adapted from a Dorothy B. Hughes thriller, is a brilliant, turbulent mix of suspenseful..
Truman Capote’s best seller, a breakthrough narrative account of real-life crime and punishment, became an equally chilling film in the hands of writer-director RICHARD BROOKS (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Cast for their unsettling resemblances to the killers they play, ROBERT BLAKE (Lost Highway) and SCOTT WILSON (The Great Gatsby) give authentic, unshowy performances as Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who in 1959 murdered a family of four..
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Chungking Express’s TONY LEUNG CHIU-WAI) and Su Li-Zhen (Irma Vep’s MAGGIE CHEUNG MAN-YUK) move into neighbouring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, WONG KAR WAI’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting mome..
Still censored in its own country, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida), by the always provocative Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, remains one of the most controversial films of all time. A graphic portrayal of insatiable sexual desire, Oshima’s film, set in 1936 and based on a true incident, depicts a man and a woman (Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda) consumed by a transcendent, destructive love while living in an era of ever escal..
Elio Petri directs this Italian thriller starring Gian Maria Volonté as Roman police inspector Dottore who, in a twisted tale, investigates a crime he himself committed...
Opposites attract with magnetic force in this romantic road-trip delight from Frank Capra, about a spoiled runaway socialite (Claudette Colbert) and a roguish man-of- the-people reporter (Clark Gable) who is determined to get the scoop on her scandalous disappearance. The first film to accomplish the very rare feat of sweeping all five major Oscar categories (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay), I..
Stanley Kramer followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with this sobering investigation of American greed. Ah, who are we kidding? It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure is the most grandly hare-brained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Roone..
The debut feature by the great Andrei Tarkosky, Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo Detstvo) is a poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy's war-ravaged youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of World War II and serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky's film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of war on children.Special Features High-Definiti..
In this atomic adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, the good manners of the 1950s are blown to smithereens. Ralph Meeker stars as snarling private dick Mike Hammer, whose decision one dark, lonely night to pick up a hitchhiking woman sends him down some terrifying byways. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is a film noir masterwork as well as an essential piece of cold-war paranoia, and it features as nervy a..
Alan J. Pakula directs this thriller starring Donald Sutherland as detective John Klute. On the case of a missing scientist, Klute tails prostitute Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) of whom he suspects the scientist was a client. When he questions her, she confesses that she fears the scientist may be a perverse sadist who has been harassing her with threatening phone calls...
Renato (Ugo Tognazzi) and Albin (Michel Serrault) - a middle-aged gay couple who are the manager and star performer at a glitzy drag club in St. Tropez - agree to hide their sexual identities, along with their flamboyant personalities and home decor, when the ultraconservative parents of Renato’s son’s fiancee come for a visit. This elegant comic scenario kicks off a wild and warmhearted French farce about the importance of nonconformit..
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed FEDERICO FELLINI (81⁄2) to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist—played by a sublimely cool MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (81⁄2)—during a hectic week spent ..
A Chris Marker double bill. 'La Jetee' is a science fiction short that takes a man from the future back to his childhood in pre-apocalypse Paris. His ability to make contact with a woman he once glimpsed may be humanity's last hope. The film makes use of still pictures to tell almost the entire story. It won first prize at the 1963 Trieste Film Festival and was the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam's 'Twelve Monkeys'. Whilst 'Sans Soleil..
Beautiful, troubled Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) came to bohemian Paris to escape the suffocation of provincial life, only to wind up in a courtroom, accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her lover (Sami Frey). As the trial commences and the lawyers begin tangling over Dominique’s fate, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Oscar-nominated La verite, delves into her past, reconstructing her struggle to find a foothold in the city. What em..
In a career-defining performance, ALAIN DELON (Purple Noon) plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armour of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE (Army of Shadows), Le samouraï ..
In the hands of the renowned experimental theatre director Peter Brook, William Golding’s legendary novel on the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center. Taking an innovative documentary-like approach, Brook shot Lord of the Flies with an off-the-cuff naturalism, seeming to record a spontaneous eruption of its characters’ ids. The result is a rattling masterpiece, as provo..
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 cinematic dreamscapes. Starring PATRICIA ARQUETTE and BILL PULLMAN, the film expands the horizons of the medium, taking its audience on a journey through the unknown and the unknowable. As this postmodern noir detours into the realm of science fiction, it becomes apparent that the only ce..
Albert Brooks co-writes, directs and stars in this 1980s US comedy.Disillusioned with their current lifestyle, successful husband and wife David (Brooks) and Linda Howard (Julie Hagerty) decide to leave their home in Los Angeles, sell all of their belonging and travel around the country in a motor home.However, their nomadic lifestyle is immediately beset by problems that cause the couple to reassess their decision to give up everyt..
Sparks fly both on and off the court in this groundbreaking feature debut by writer-director GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD (The Old Guard), which elevated the coming-of-age romance by giving honest expression to the challenges female athletes face in a world that doesn’t see them as equal. SANAA LATHAN (Alien vs. Predator) and OMAR EPPS (Higher Learning) make for one of the most iconic screen couples of the 2000s as the basketball-obsessed next..
Golden-age Hollywood’s humanist master LEO MCCAREY (Make Way for Tomorrow) brings his graceful touch and relaxed naturalism to this sublime romance, one of cinema’s most intoxicating tear-wringers. IRENE DUNNE (The Awful Truth) and CHARLES BOYER (Gaslight) are chic strangers who meet and fall in love aboard an ocean liner bound for New York. Though they are both involved with other people, they make a pact to reconnect six months later ..
Steeped in the bohemian cool of Chicago’s 1990s Black creative scene, love jones—the smart, sexy, and stylish debut feature of writer-director THEODORE WITCHER—is a love story for anyone who has ever wondered: How do I know when I’ve found the one? LARENZ TATE (Menace II Society) and NIA LONG (The Best Man) have magnetism and chemistry to burn as the striving, artistically talented twentysomethings—he’s a poet, she’s a photographer—who ..
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 disappearance of a young woman during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily, and the search taken up by her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti, in her breakout role). Antonioni's controversial international sen..
Reckless playboy Bob Merrick (ROCK HUDSON, in his breakthrough role) crashes his speedboat, requiring emergency attention from the town’s only resuscitator—at the very moment that a beloved local doctor has a heart attack and dies waiting for the lifesaving device. Thus begins one of the most flamboyant master classes in melodrama from DOUGLAS SIRK (All That Heaven Allows), a delirious Technicolor mix of the sudsy and the spiritual in w..
Make Way for Tomorrow, by LEO McCAREY (An Affair to Remember), is one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap. BEULAH BONDI (It’s a Wonderful Life) and VICTOR MOORE (Swing Time) headline a cast of incomparable character actors, starring as an elderly couple who must move in with their grown children after the bank takes their h..
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star in this US comedy drama written and directed by Noah Baumbach. After ten years of marriage, actress Nicole Barber (Johansson) realises she has been living her life according to the ideals of her husband Charlie (Driver), a stage director, and instigates divorce proceedings. After being offered a starring role in a new TV pilot, Claire leaves New York for Los Angeles, taking their son Henry (Azhy R..
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star in this US comedy drama written and directed by Noah Baumbach. After ten years of marriage, actress Nicole Barber (Johansson) realises she has been living her life according to the ideals of her husband Charlie (Driver), a stage director, and instigates divorce proceedings. After being offered a starring role in a new TV pilot, Claire leaves New York for Los Angeles, taking their son Henry (Azhy R..
Director Jean-Luc Godard's seventh feature is a study of mid-1960s French youth.Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a young man fresh from military service who falls for aspiring pop star Madeleine (Chantal Goya), who gets him a job on the magazine where she works.But he soon becomes more interested in his left wing activities and his relationship with his two female flatmates (Marlene Jobert and Catherine-Isabelle Duport) than Madeleine...
Directors ALBERT and ALLEN HUGHES (The Book of Eli) and screenwriter TYGER WILLIAMS (The Perfect Guy) were barely into their twenties when they sent shock waves through American cinema and hip-hop culture with this fatalistic, unflinching vision of life and death on the streets of Watts, Los Angeles, in the 1990s. There, in the shadow of the riots of 1965 and 1992, young Caine (Panther’s TYRIN TURNER) is growing up under the influence o..
Addiction, nonmonogamy, and female sexual liberation: decades before such ideas were widely discussed, DOROTHY ARZNER (Dance, Girl, Dance), the only woman to work as a director in 1930s Hollywood, brought them to the screen with striking frankness, sophistication, and wit—a mature treatment that stands out even in the pre-Code era. A Star Is Born’s FREDRIC MARCH (in one of four collaborations with Arzner) and SYLVIA SIDNEY (Sabotage) tu..
One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit Metropolitan by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man’s romantic misadventures while trying to fit in New York City’s debutante society. Stillman’s deft, literate dialogue and hilariously highbrow observations earned this first film an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Beneath the wit and sophisticatio..
One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, JOHN SCHLESINGER (Billy Liar) came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an a..
Melodrama casts noirish shadows in this portrait of maternal sacrifice from the Hollywood master Michael Curtiz. Its iconic performance by Joan Crawford as Mildred, a single mother hell-bent on freeing her children from the stigma of economic hardship, solidified Crawford's career comeback and gave the actor her only Oscar. But as Mildred pulls herself up by the bootstraps, first as an unflappable waitress and eventually as the well-hee..
