Alfred Hitchcock
1935 • 86 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #56 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets
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.
Steven Soderbergh
2010 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #617 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
After the death in 2004 of American theater actor and monologist Spalding Gray, director Steven Soderbergh pieced together a narrative of Gray’s life to create the documentary And Everything Is Going Fine.
Jim Jarmusch
1986 • 107 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
Spine: #166 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout film Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in the American landscape
Robert Downey Sr. emerged as one of the most irreverent filmmakers of the New York underground of the sixties, taking no prisoners in his rough-and-tumble treatises on politics, race, and consumer culture.
Jean Grémillon
France
Edition: DVD
Though little known outside of France, Jean Grémillon is a consummate filmmaker from his country’s golden age.
Norman Mailer
United States
Edition: DVD
Norman Mailer is remembered for many things—his novels, his essays, his articles, his activism, his ego. One largely forgotten chapter of his life, however, is his late-sixties, headlong, kamikaze-style plunge into making experimental films.
Steven Soderbergh
1997 • 79 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #618 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
One of the great raconteurs of stage and screen, Spalding Gray, came together with one of cinema’s boldest image-makers, Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, for Gray’s Anatomy, a spellbinding adaptation of Gray’s 1993 monologue of the same name.
Hal Ashby
1971 • 91 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #608 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
With the idiosyncratic American fable Harold and Maude, countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era.
Aki Kaurismäki
2011 • 93 minutes • 1.85:1 • Finland
Spine: #619 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
In this warmhearted comic yarn from Aki Kaurismäki, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a kindly bohemian who shines shoes for a living, in the French harbor city Le Havre.
Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
1996 • 94 minutes • 1.66:1 • Belgium
Spine: #620 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
This is the breakthrough feature from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who would go on to become a force in world filmmaking. La promesse is a brilliantly economical and observant tale of a boy’s troubled moral awakening.
Whit Stillman
1998 • 113 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
Spine: #485 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The Last Days of Disco, from director Whit Stillman, is a cleverly comic look at the early 1980s Manhattan party scene from the vantage point of the late nineties.
Paul Fejos
1928 • 69 minutes • 1.19:1 • United States
Spine: #623 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The early Hollywood gem Lonesome is the creation of a little-known but audacious and one-of-a-kind auteur, Paul Fejos (a filmmaker/explorer/anthropologist/doctor!), who bridged the gap between the silent and sound eras.
Whit Stillman
1990 • 99 minutes • 1.66:1 • United States
Spine: #326 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit Metropolitan, by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man’s romantic misadventures while trying to fit in to New York City’s debutante society.
Franc Roddam
1979 • 120 minutes • 1.85:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #624 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The Who’s classic rock opera Quadrophenia was the basis for this invigorating coming-of-age movie and depiction of the defiant, drug-fueled London of the early 1960s.
Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
1999 • 93 minutes • 1.66:1 • Belgium
Spine: #621 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The Belgian filmmaking team of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne turned heads with Rosetta, an intense vérité drama that closely follows a poor young woman struggling to hold on to a job to support herself and her alcoholic mother.
Wes Anderson
2001 • 110 minutes • 2.35:1 • United States
Spine: #157 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Wes Anderson’s hilarious, touching, and brilliantly stylized study of melancholy and redemption centers around a dysfunctional family of geniuses.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Japan
Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The Samurai Trilogy, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring the inimitable Toshiro Mifune, was one of Japan’s most successful exports of the 1950s, a rousing, emotionally gripping tale of combat and self-discovery.
Danny Boyle
1994 • 93 minutes • 1.85:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #616 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
In Shallow Grave, three self-involved Edinburgh roommates take in a brooding boarder, and when he dies of an overdose, leaving a suitcase full of money, the trio embark on a series of very bad decisions, with extraordinarily grim consequences for all.
Ingmar Bergman
1951 • 96 minutes • 1.37:1 • Sweden
Spine: #613 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery.
Ingmar Bergman
1953 • 97 minutes • 1.37:1 • Sweden
Spine: #614 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Inspired by the earthy eroticism of Harriet Andersson, in the first of her many roles for him, Ingmar Bergman had a major international breakthrough with this sensual and ultimately ravaging tale of young love.
Charles Chaplin
72 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #615 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Charlie Chaplin’s comedic masterwork—which charts a prospector’s search for fortune in the Klondike and his discovery of romance (with the beautiful Georgia Hale)—forever cemented the iconic status of Chaplin and his Little Tramp character.
Andrew Haigh
2011 • 97 minutes • 1.85:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #622 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Rarely has a film been as honest about sexuality—in both depiction and discussion—as this tale of a one-night-stand that develops into a weekend-long idyll for two very different young men (exciting newcomers Tom Cullen and Chris New) in Midlands England.