Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
1938 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #85 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a “proper lady” in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.
Ingmar Bergman
1957 • 92 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Spine: #139 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death.
Peter Brook
1963 • 90 minutes • 1.37:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #43 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding’s legendary novel about the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center.
Marcel Camus
1959 • 107 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #48 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
Marcel Carné
1939 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
In this compelling story of obsessive sexuality and murder, the working-class François (Jean Gabin) resorts to killing in order to free the woman he loves from the controlling influence of another man.
Henry Cass
1950 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
Told by his doctor he has no more than a few months to live, drab British workingman George Bird (Alec Guinness) decides to spend his savings on lodging at a seaside resort. Once there, however, he finds his identity caught between upstairs and downstairs, the guests and the “help.”
René Clément
1952 • 86 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #318 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted, René Clément’s mythical and heartbreakingly real Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play.
René Clément
1956 • 117 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
Based on Émile Zola’s L’assommoir, Gervaise is an uncompromising depiction of a laundress’s struggles with an alcoholic husband while running her own business. The film was nominated for an Oscar and earned Maria Schell best actress honors at the Venice Film Festival.
Jean Cocteau
1946 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #6 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.
Federico Fellini
1963 • 138 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #140 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets
One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto e mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.
Federico Fellini
1954 • 108 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #219 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Federico Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naive girl sold into the employ of a brutal strongman in a traveling circus, in this poetic fable of love and cruelty, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada
1950 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #81 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
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).
Milos Forman
1965 • 82 minutes • 1.33:1 • Czechoslovakia
Spine: #144 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
A tender and humorous look at a young woman’s journey from the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, Loves of a Blonde immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and earned Milos Forman the first of his Academy Award nominations.
Alfred Hitchcock
1935 • 86 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #56 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, iTunes
A heart-racing spy story by Alfred Hitchcock, The 39 Steps follows Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) as he stumbles upon a conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish moors.
Akira Kurosawa
1950 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #138 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Akira Kurosawa
1952 • 143 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #221 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
An aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer decides to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days. Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, Ikiru offers a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives.
Akira Kurosawa
1958 • 139 minutes • 2.35:1 • Japan
Spine: #116 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
A general and a princess must dodge enemy clans while smuggling the royal treasure out of hostile territory with two bumbling, conniving peasants at their sides; it’s a spirited adventure that only Akira Kurosawa could create.
Akira Kurosawa
1957 • 109 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #190 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood reimagines Macbeth in feudal Japan. Starring Kurosawa’s longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune and the legendary Isuzu Yamada as his ruthless wife, the film tells of a valiant warrior’s savage rise to power and his ignominious fall.
David Lean
1945 • 86 minutes • 1.37:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #76 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes
After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) enter into a muted but passionate, ultimately doomed, love affair.
Anatole Litvak
1936 • 91 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
In this sumptuous tragic romance from Anatole Litvak, Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux star as the doomed adulterous lovers Archduke Rudolf, heir to the Austrian throne, and the young and innocent baron’s daughter Marie Vetsera.
Laurence Olivier
1955 • 158 minutes • 1.66:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #213 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
In Richard III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare’s masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life
Yasujiro Ozu
1959 • 119 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all, in Yasujiro Ozu’s color collaboration with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.
Roman Polanski
1962 • 94 minutes • 1.33:1 • Poland
Spine: #215 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller, still one of the greatest feature debuts in film history.
Gillo Pontecorvo
1959 • 112 minutes • 1.66:1 • Italy
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus
Before he left his mark on cinema forever with the revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo directed this uncompromising World War II drama about a young Jewish woman (Susan Strasberg) in a Nazi concentration camp.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1943 • 163 minutes • 1.37:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #173 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, iTunes
Considered by many to be the finest British film ever made, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a stirring masterpiece like no other.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1951 • 127 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #317 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets
A poet dreams of three women—a mechanical performing doll, a bejeweled siren, and the consumptive daughter of a famous composer—all of whom break his heart in different ways. Powell and Pressburger create a phantasmagoric marriage of cinema and opera in this one-of-a-kind classic.