Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

In David Lean’s visually enchanting Summertime, Katharine Hepburn plays a lonely American spinster whose dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome—but married—Italian man while vacationing in Venice.

A grown-up superhero fantasy come to vivid, bloody life, Paul Verhoeven’s special effects-laden cult phenomenon features a resurrected hero (Peter Weller) in a new, supercharged cyborg body, struggling to reclaim his memory and avenge his own death.

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s highly influential High and Low, a compelling race-against-time thriller and a penetrating portrait of contemporary Japanese society.

Prince Ahmad, cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place and the heart of a princess in Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, an eye-popping special-effects pioneer and one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made.

When young Domenico ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company in Ermanno Olmi’s tender coming-of-age story.

In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.

Les Blank documents acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s ambitious and troubled production of Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle.

Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart. The Soviet cinema classic The Cranes Are Flying won the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

A mysterious rumination on identity, this film remains one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s most beloved. Through gorgeous reflections and colors, the director reveals an enigmatic bond uniting two women.

Twelve-year-old Anaïs is fat; her sister, Elena, is a teenage beauty. Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a bold, controversial dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality.

Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, Au revoir les enfants is a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss between two boys living in Nazi-occupied France.

Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of the journey from basic training to the front lines of D-Day seamlessly interweaves archival war footage and a fictional narrative.

Lodge Kerrigan’s raw, ravaging Clean, Shaven is a headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schizophrenic as he tries to track down his daughter after he is released from an institution.

With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Makavejev’s cult staple Sweet Movie is a full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching.

Widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive is a visually arresting, bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life.

A psychologist and cosmonaut embarks on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness in Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliantly original science-fiction epic.

A young provincial in search of adventure stumbles into the subterranean world of sadomasochism when he is implicated in a burglary of a Paris apartment in Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse.

Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extemist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution.

Jazzy, free-form, and sexy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle) helped launch the French New Wave and ensured cinema would never be the same.

Peter Lorre stars as serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s harrowing masterwork M, a suspenseful panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.