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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.