John Ford
1939 • 96 minutes • 1.37:1 • United States
Spine: #516 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
This is where it all started. John Ford’s smash hit and enduring masterpiece Stagecoach revolutionized the western, elevating it from B movie to the A-list.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1947 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #93 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1948 • 133 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #44 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes
The Red Shoes, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Technicolor feasts ever concocted for the screen.
Carol Reed
1949 • 104 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #64 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Collector’s Sets
Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime—and thus begins this legendary tale of love, deception, and murder.
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.
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.
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.
Federico Fellini
1973 • 123 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #4 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the fascist period. The Academy Award–winning Amarcord remains one of cinema’s enduring treasures.
Terrence Malick
1978 • 94 minutes • 1.77:1 • United States
Spine: #409 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
A timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor, Terrence Malick’s glorious period tragedy Days of Heaven features Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros.
Volker Schlöndorff
1979 • 163 minutes • 1.66:1 • Germany
Spine: #234 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
The Tin Drum, is Volker Schlöndorff’s visionary adaptation of Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s acclaimed novel, characterized by surreal imagery, arresting eroticism, and clear-eyed satire.
Robert Epstein
1984 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #557 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus, iTunes
The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it’s a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk’s message of hope and equality to a wider audience.
Bernardo Bertolucci
1987 • 160 minutes • 2.00:1 • China
Spine: #422 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, about the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated.
James Ivory
1992 • 142 minutes • 2.35:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #488 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, Hulu Plus
The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Howards End is a luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England.
Mike Leigh
1999 • 160 minutes • 1.78:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #558 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in director Mike Leigh’s extraordinary dramatization of the staging of the duo’s legendary 1885 comic opera The Mikado. Topsy-Turvy is an unexpected period delight from one of contemporary cinema’s great artists.
Steven Soderbergh
2000 • 147 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
Spine: #151 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
With an innovative color-coded cinematic treatment to distinguish his interwoven stories, Steven Soderbergh embroils viewers in the lives of a newly appointed drug czar and his family, a West Coast kingpin’s wife, a key informant, and police officers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
David Fincher
2008 • 165 minutes • 2.40:1 • United States
Spine: #476 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray
Brad Pitt is a man who is born in his eighties and ages backward and Cate Blanchett is the woman he is destined to love forever in David Fincher’s monumental, Academy Award–winning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a powerful testament to life and death, love and loss.