Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

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.

Auto-factory foreman Nino (Alberto Sordi) takes his proper, modern wife and daughters from industrial Milan to rural Sicily to visit his family and get back in touch with his roots in Alberto Lattuada’s devastatingly funny character study—equal parts culture-clash farce and existential nightmare.

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.

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.

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.

Hiroshi Inagaki’s acclaimed “Samurai Trilogy” is a sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune), set against the turmoil of a devastating civil war.

A unique, enthralling cinematic experience, Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí, less a documentary than a visual poem, takes viewers on a tour of Gaudí’s truly spectacular architecture.

Suburban Connecticut, 1973. Two wayward families try to navigate a Thanksgiving break simmering with unspoken resentments, sexual experimentation, and cultural confusion. Ang Lee adapts Rick Moody’s acclaimed novel into one of the finest films of the nineties.

Upper-class geometry professor Juan and his wealthy, married mistress, Maria José, driving back from a late-night rendezvous, accidentally hit a cyclist, and run. Juan Antonio Bardem’s charged melodrama Death of a Cyclist was a direct attack on 1950s Spanish society under Franco’s rule.

Swift, brutal, and black-hearted, Allen Baron’s New York City noir Blast of Silence is a sensational surprise, a low-budget, carefully crafted portrait of a hit man on assignment in Manhattan during Christmastime.

A deeply felt and luxuriously filmed fairy tale for grown-ups, The Lovers presents Jeanne Moreau as a restless bourgeois wife whose eye wanders from both her husband and her lover to an attractive passing stranger.

Unsparing in its portrait of the inner turmoil of a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself, The Fire Within is one of Louis Malle’s darkest and most personal films.

Jeremy Irons gives a tour-de-force performance as identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who descend into a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness in David Cronenberg’s chilling tale.