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The 39 Steps

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.

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The 400 Blows

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.

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8½

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.

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Ashes and Diamonds

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.

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Beauty and the Beast

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.

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Black Orpheus

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.

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Brief Encounter

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.

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Essential Art House, Volume I
Edition: DVD

Indispensable cinema classics from Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film lover, this is precisely where to begin. Featuring Bergman, Kurosawa, Polanski, Brook, Cocteau, and Renoir.

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Essential Art House, Volume II
Edition: DVD

The second volume of indispensable cinema classics from Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film lover, this is precisely where to begin. Featuring Kurosawa, Truffaut, Asquith, Camus, and Powell and Pressburger.

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Essential Art House, Volume III
Edition: DVD

The third volume of indispensable cinema classics from Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film lover, this is precisely where to begin. Featuring Wajda, Clément, Kurosawa, Cass, Olivier, and Fellini.

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Essential Art House, Volume IV
Edition: DVD

The fourth volume of indispensable cinema classics from Janus and Criterion. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film lover, this is precisely where to begin. Featuring Clément, Carné, Litvak, Powell and Pressburger, Hitchcock, and Kurosawa.

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Essential Art House, Volume V
Edition: DVD

These elegant, movie-only DVD editions of the true classics of art house feature lower cost and sturdy packaging and are a practical alternative to the more elaborate Criterion Collection special editions.

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Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films
(50-DVD box set)
Edition: DVD

Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this world-renowned distribution company with Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, an expansive collectors’ box set featuring fifty classic films on DVD and a lavishly illustrated hardcover book.

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Floating Weeds

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.

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Forbidden Games

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.

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Gervaise

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.

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Grand Illusion

Jean Renoir
1937 • 114 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #1 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece Grand Illusion, hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp.

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The Hidden Fortress

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.

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Ikiru

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.

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Le jour se lève

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.

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Jules and Jim

François Truffaut
1962 • 104 minutes • 2.35:1 • France
Spine: #281 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, legendary director François Truffaut’s early masterpiece Jules and Jim charts the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession over the course of twenty-five years.

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Kapò

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.

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Knife in the Water

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.

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Last Holiday

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.”

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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.

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Lord of the Flies

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.

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Loves of a Blonde

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.

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Mayerling

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.

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Pygmalion

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.

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Rashomon

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.

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Richard III

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

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