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