Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Terence Stamp is Willie, a gangster’s henchman turned “supergrass” (informer) trying to live in peaceful hiding in a Spanish village. Sun-dappled bliss turns to nerve-racking suspense, however, when two hit men—played by John Hurt and Tim Roth—come a-calling to bring Willie back for execution.

A graphic portrayal of insatiable sexual desire, In the Realm of the Senses, set in 1936 and based on a true incident, depicts a man and a woman consumed by a transcendent, destructive love while living in an era of ever escalating imperialism and governmental control.

Set in a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, Empire of Passion details the downfall of a married woman and her lover after they murder her husband and dump his body in a well. With eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution.

The mesmerizing, utterly unclassifiable science films of Jean Painlevé (1902-89) have to be seen to be believed: delightful, surrealist-influenced dream works that are also serious science. This anthology features twenty-three of Painlevé’s shorts.

In this acclaimed adaptation of the novel by legendary Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, John Huston brings to life a world of vivid, poetic American eccentricity. Brad Dourif, in an impassioned performance, is Hazel Motes, who, fresh out of the army, attempts to open the Church Without Christ.

World-weary and living hand to mouth, Coyle works on the sidelines of the seedy Boston underworld. In one of the best performances of his legendary career, Robert Mitchum plays small-time gunrunner Eddie “Fingers” Coyle in Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

With the three films in this set, Shoehi Imamura, one of the leading figures of the Japanese new wave, truly emerged as an auteur, bringing to his national cinema an anthropological eye and a heretofore unseen taste for the irreverent.

In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Upper West Side restaurant, and the two proceed into a confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between.

A surreal fever dream, or perhaps a nightmare, Last Year at Marienbad, written by the radical master of the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman who may or may not have met a year ago.

The most breathtakingly candid series of interviews that the famously reclusive director ever took part in, Bergman Island features legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman sitting down just four years before his death with Swedish documentarian Marie Nyreröd in his home on Fårö Island.

Brad Pitt is a man who is born in his eighties and ages backward and Cate Blanchett is the woman he is destined to love forever in David Fincher’s monumental, Academy Award–winning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a powerful testament to life and death, love and loss.

The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Howards End is a luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England.

Roman Polanski followed up Knife in the Water with this controversial, chilling tale of psychosis. Catherine Deneuve is Carol, a fragile, frigid young beauty cracking up in her London flat when left alone by her vacationing sister. Repulsion is one of cinema’s most shocking psychological thrillers.

Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.

Like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave, this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism features Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated.

In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, language, war: in a word, everything.

Whether seen as an exacting character portrait or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

The Last Days of Disco is a clever, comic return to the nighttime party scene in early Eighties Manhattan from director Whit Stillman, brimming with his trademark dry humor.

These astonishingly choreographed, brilliantly acted, and socially progressive “teleplays” constituted an artistic high for the medium, bringing Broadway-quality drama to all of America. These award-winning programs feature such stars as Paul Newman and Mickey Rooney.

In this nightmarish urban odyssey, inner-city police detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna), is following the murder of an elderly Jewish candy-shop owner, which leads him down a path of obscure encounters and clues, as well as a profound reckoning with his own self and identity.