Jean-Luc Godard
1967 • 87 minutes • 2.35:1 • France
Spine: #482 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
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.
François Truffaut
1959 • 99 minutes • 2.35:1 • France
Spine: #5 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
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.
Robert M. Young
1977 • 96 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #609 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus
Vivid and spare where other films about illegal immigration might sentimentalize, Young’s take is equal parts intimate character study and gripping road movie, a political work that never loses sight of the complex man at its center.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1974 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • Germany
Spine: #198 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, already the director of almost twenty films by the age of twenty-nine, paid homage to his cinematic hero, Douglas Sirk, with this updated version of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows.
Federico Fellini
1973 • 123 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #4 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the fascist period. The Academy Award–winning Amarcord remains one of cinema’s enduring treasures.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1970 • 80 minutes • 1.33:1 • Germany
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Fassbinder’s experimental noir is a subversive, self-reflexive gangster movie full of unexpected asides and stylistic flourishes, and featuring an audaciously bonkers final shot and memorable turns from many of the director’s rotating gallery of players.
Roger Vadim
1956 • 92 minutes • 2.35:1 • France
Spine: #77 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
Brigitte Bardot stars as Juliette, an 18-year-old orphan whose unbridled appetite for pleasure shakes up all of St. Tropez; her sweet but naïve husband Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) endures beatings, insults, and mambo in his attempts to tame her wild ways.
Andrei Tarkovsky
1969 • 185 minutes • 2.35:1 • Soviet Union
Spine: #34 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
Immediately suppressed by the Soviets in 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale of Russia’s greatest icon painter.
Jane Campion
1990 • 158 minutes • 1.78:1 • New Zealand
Spine: #301 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
With An Angel at My Table, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brings to the screen the harrowing true-life story of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. Angel beautifully captures the color and power of the New Zealand landscape.
Hiroshi Teshigahara
1984 • 72 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #425 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus, iTunes
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.
Andrzej Wajda
1958 • 103 minutes • 1.66:1 • Poland
Spine: #285 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
On the last day of World War II, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment, we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar.
Jean Vigo
1934 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope.
Spencer G. Bennet
1959 • 72 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #366 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
When a nuclear-powered submarine, the Tiger Shark, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances near the Arctic Circle, its fearless crew finds itself besieged by electrical storms, an Unidentified Floating Saucer, and lots of hairy tentacles.
Robert Bresson
1966 • 95 minutes • 1.66:1 • France
Spine: #297 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel, but all with motivations beyond his understanding—a profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema.
Louis Malle
1987 • 105 minutes • 1.66:1 • France
Spine: #330 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Based on events from writer-director Louis Malle’s own childhood, Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France.
Yasujiro Ozu
1962 • 113 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #446 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus
Yasujiro Ozu’s final film was also his final masterpiece, the gently heartbreaking story of a man’s dignified resignation to both life’s ever-shifting currents and society’s gradual modernization.
Michelangelo Antonioni
1960 • 145 minutes • 1.77:1 • Italy
Spine: #98 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
A girl mysteriously disappears on a yachting trip. While her lover and her best friend search for her across Italy, they begin an affair. Antonioni’s penetrating study of the idle upper class offers stinging observations on spiritual isolation and the many meanings of love.
Gabriel Axel
1987 • 104 minutes • 1.66:1 • Denmark
Spine: #665 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus
At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema.
Akira Kurosawa
1960 • 150 minutes • 2.35:1 • Japan
Spine: #319 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing The Bad Sleep Well. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect.
Eric Rohmer
1963 • 23 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #343 Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In the first of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales,” a law student (Barbet Schroeder) with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself full of sugar cookies and pastries daily in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery.
Grigori Chukhrai
1959 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • Soviet Union
Spine: #148 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
A milestone in Russian cinema, Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier follows Alyosha as he journeys home once he is granted a visit with his mother after single-handedly fending off two enemy tanks.
Keisuke Kinoshita
1958 • 98 minutes • 2.35:1 • Japan
Spine: #645 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in brilliant color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work from Japan’s cinematic golden age, directed by the dynamic Keisuke Kinoshita.
Gillo Pontecorvo
1966 • 121 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #249 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.
Albert Maysles and David Maysles
2006 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #361 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
The filmmakers of Grey Gardens went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, The Beales of Grey Gardens, a tribute both to these indomitable women, Big and Little Edie Beale, and to the landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them counterculture icons.
Claude Chabrol
1958 • 99 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #580 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus
The remarkable and stark Le beau Serge heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades.