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49th Parallel

Michael Powell
1941 • 123 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #376 Edition: DVD

A Nazi U-boat crew, headed by the ruthless Eric Portman, is stranded in Canada during the thick of World War II in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s quick-witted wartime thriller, 49th Parallel.

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8½

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.

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Amarcord

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.

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Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica
1948 • 89 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #374 Edition: DVD

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema.

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Black Narcissus

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1947 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #93 Editions: DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes

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.

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Black Orpheus

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.

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Closely Watched Trains

Jiří Menzel
1966 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • Czechoslovakia
Spine: #131 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Wry and tender, Jirí Menzel’s Academy Award-winning Closely Watched Trains is a masterpiece of human observation.

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Cries and Whispers

Ingmar Bergman
1972 • 91 minutes • 1.66:1 • Sweden
Spine: #101 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

In Ingmar Bergman’s testament to the strength of the soul, Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Cries and Whispers is full of images of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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.

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Days of Heaven

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.

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Luis Buñuel
1972 • 102 minutes • 1.66:1 • France
Spine: #102 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric Oscar winner, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

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Divorce Italian Style

Pietro Germi
1961 • 104 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
Spine: #286 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

In Pietro Germi’s hilarious and cutting satire of Sicilian male-chauvinist culture, Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) longs to marry his nubile young cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), but one obstacle stands in his way: his fatuous and fawning wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca).

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Fanny and Alexander — The Theatrical Version

Ingmar Bergman
1982 • 188 minutes • 1.66:1 • Sweden
Spine: #263 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.

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Forbidden Games

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.

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Great Expectations

David Lean
1946 • 118 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #31 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean’s Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens’s masterpiece to robust on-screen life.

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Hamlet

Laurence Olivier
1948 • 153 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #82 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet continues to be the most compelling version of Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy.

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Harlan County USA

Barbara Kopple
1976 • 103 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
Spine: #334 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs.

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Hearts and Minds

Peter Davis
1974 • 112 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #156 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

A courageous and startling film, Peter Davis’s landmark documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronts the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to documentary footage of the conflict at home and abroad.

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Howards End

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.

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The Last Emperor

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.

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Missing

Costa-Gavras
1982 • 122 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
Spine: #449 Edition: DVD

Starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, Missing is political filmmaker extraordinaire Costa-Gavras’s compelling, controversial dramatization of the search for American filmmaker and journalist Charles Horman, who mysteriously disappeared during the 1973 coup in Chile.

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Mon oncle

Jacques Tati
1958 • 116 minutes • 1.37:1 • France
Spine: #111 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Slapstick prevails when Jacques Tati’s eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in an antiseptic factory that manufactures plastic hose. Tati directs and stars in the second entry of the Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.

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The Naked City

Jules Dassin
1948 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
Spine: #380 Editions: DVD, Hulu Plus

Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin’s dazzling police procedural The Naked City was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir.

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Nights of Cabiria

Federico Fellini
1957 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • Italy
Spine: #49 Edition: DVD

Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Nights of Cabiria is the tragic story of a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome.

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Pygmalion

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
1938 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Spine: #85 Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a “proper lady” in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.

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