Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece Grand Illusion, hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp.

In Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), sixteenth-century villagers hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This gripping three-hour ride is one of the most beloved movie epics of all time.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s most quick-witted and devilish comic thriller, a young woman finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery and high adventure while traveling across Europe by train. The Lady Vanishes remains one of the master filmmaker’s purest delights.

Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the Fascist period. His most personal film, the Academy Award–winning Amarcord is one of cinema’s enduring treasures.

François Truffaut sensitively re-creates the trials of his own difficult childhood in The 400 Blows, the film that marked his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs and signaled the beginning of the French New Wave.

Beauty and the Beast is a landmark feat of cinematic fantasy in which master filmmaker Jean Cocteau conjures spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death that have never been equaled.

A Night to Remember depicts the final hours of the Titanic in an unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord’s book of the same name. This disc features screen-specific commentary by Titanic experts Don Lynch and Ken Marschall.

Chow Yun-fat stars as a killer with a conscience in John Woo’s exquisite dissection of morals in a corrupt society. Replete with balletic, slow-motion gun battles on the streets of Hong Kong, The Killer mixes genres from both the East and the West.

Chow Yun-fat is jaded detective “Tequila” Yuen in John Woo’s dizzying odyssey through the world of Hong Kong Triads, undercover agents, and frenzied police raids; the brilliant, passionate Hard Boiled is violence as poetry, rendered by a master.

A young sister and brother are abandoned in the harsh Australian outback and must learn to cope in the natural world, without their usual comforts, in this hypnotic masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg.

Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.

Following the ill-fated American comeback tour of an aging heavy-metal group, Rob Reiner’s cult phenomenon (and first “rockumentary”) This Is Spinal Tap has joined the ranks of the greatest comedies ever made.

Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter matches wits with Jodie Foster’s heroic FBI agent Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s taut psychological thriller.

Hiroshi Inagaki’s Academy Award-winning historical saga follows legendary seventeenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) from unruly youth to enlightened warrior amid the turmoil of a devastating civil war.

In the second installment of Hiroshi Inagaki’s acclaimed “Samurai Trilogy,” Musashi (Toshiro Mifune) defeats a samurai armed with a chain and sickle and is later attacked by eighty samurai disciples—orchestrated by the sinister Kojiro—while the two women who love him watch helplessly.

The “Samurai Trilogy” comes to a gripping conclusion as Musashi (Toshiro Mifune) reunites tragically with the women who love him and battles for samurai supremacy in a climactic confrontation with his lifelong nemesis.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to 1944 Fascist Italy, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time.

A former prostitute relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit into mainstream society—but in the hallucinatory pulp territory of writer/director/producer Sam Fuller, perverse secrets simmer beneath a seemingly wholesome facade.

Seeking a Pulitzer Prize, a reporter has himself committed to a mental hospital to investigate a murder; as he closes in on the killer, madness closes in on him. Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor masterfully charts the uneasy terrain between sanity and dementia.

Director Alex Cox balances a bleak evocation of star-crossed love with surreal humor and genuine tenderness in this portrait of the brief, intense attachment of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.