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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Benjamin Christensen
1922 • 87 minutes • 1.33:1 • Denmark
Spine: #134 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. Häxan is a witches’ brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Anthony Asquith
1952 • 95 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #158 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes
Oscar Wilde’s enduringly hilarious story of two young women who think themselves engaged to the same nonexistent man is given the grand Technicolor treatment. Seldom has a classic stage comedy been so engagingly transferred to the screen.
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.
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.
Alfred Hitchcock
1938 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #3 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, iTunes
In Alfred Hitchcock’s most quick-witted and devilish comic thriller, a young woman finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery and high adventure while traveling across Europe by train. The Lady Vanishes remains one of the master filmmaker’s purest delights.
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.
Fritz Lang
1931 • 110 minutes • 1.19:1 • Germany
Spine: #30 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
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.
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.
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
Jean Renoir
1939 • 106 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #216 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners.
Akira Kurosawa
1954 • 207 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #2 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
In Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), sixteenth-century villagers hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This thrilling three-hour ride is one of the most beloved movie epics of all time.
Ingmar Bergman
1957 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • Sweden
Spine: #11 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.
David Lean
1955 • 100 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #22 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
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.
Kenji Mizoguchi
1953 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Spine: #309 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, Ugetsu, a ghost story like no other, is surely the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s supreme achievement and one of the most beautiful films ever made.
Henri-Georges Clouzot
1953 • 147 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #36 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route—a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.