Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Shot on location with a cast of nonprofessional actors, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece follows an elderly pensioner as he struggles to fulfill the most fundamental human needs—food, shelter, companionship—during Italy’s postwar economic boom.

Philip Kaufman achieves a delicate, erotic balance with his screen version of Milan Kundera’s “unfilmable” novel about a womanizing surgeon (Daniel Day-Lewis), his free-spirited mistress (Lena Olin), and his childlike wife (Juliette Binoche).

In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.

John Huston’s ambitious tackling of Malcolm Lowry’s towering, “unadaptable” novel Under the Volcano follows the final day in the life of self-destructive British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force), on the eve of World War II.

In this pitch-black comedy from Preston Sturges, Rex Harrison stars as a world-famous symphony conductor consumed with the suspicion that his wife is having an affair. Unfaithfully Yours is a brilliantly performed mixture of razor-sharp dialogue and uproarious slapstick.

With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result is nearly unclassifiable. Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.

A young man begins an obsessive search for his girlfriend after she mysteriously disappears during their sunny vacation getaway. The Vanishing unfolds with intense precision, culminating in a genuinely chilling finale that has unnerved audiences around the world.

A beautiful ingenue joins a tawdry music hall troupe and quickly becomes its feature attraction in Federico Fellini’s stunning debut film (directed in collaboration with neorealist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada).

A thief, murderer, and charming lady-killer, Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) is on the run from the police. Director Shohei Imamura turns this fact-based story of his seventy-eight-day killing spree into a cold, perverse, and diabolically funny tale of the primitive coexisting with the modern.

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. This is one of David Cronenberg’s most provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking sex and violence.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden.

Novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism. Luis Buñuel’s irreverent vision of life as a beggar’s banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece.

W. C. Fields’s prolific career placed him at the forefront of slapstick comedy. Gathered here are six gems that feature the comic genius at his peak.

Four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route—a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Nicolas Roeg’s mystical masterpiece chronicles the physical, spiritual, and emotional journey of a sister and brother abandoned in the harsh Australian outback as they join an Aborigine boy on his tribal initiation into manhood.

A hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions, Alex Cox’s Walker tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker (Ed Harris), who abandoned a series of careers in law, politics, journalism, and medicine to become a soldier of fortune and dictator of Nicaragua.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse’s finest hour—a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo’s very modern postwar Ginza district, and entertains businessmen after work.

Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German shepherd, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people. White Dog is Samuel Fuller’s throat-grabbing exposé on American racism.

The style and themes which made Federico Fellini world famous are already apparent in this charming comedy (his first solo directorial effort), featuring such long-time collaborators as his wife, actress Giulietta Masina, and composer Nino Rota.

Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is forced to face his past in the film that catapulted Ingmar Bergman to the forefront of world cinema.