Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

William Golding’s classic fable, about a swarm of young boys who, without adult supervision, devolve into chaos after crash landing on a remote island during wartime, becomes an unforgettable work of cinematic horror by Peter Brook.

In Kaneto Shindo’s chilling folktale, a mother and her daughter-in-law eke out a desperate existence in the lonely marshes of war-torn medieval Japan. When a neighbor returns from the skirmishes, lust, jealousy, and rage—and a horrifying fate at the hands of an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask—ensue.

An inept Czech peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and tragedy fuse in this scathing exploration of one cowardly man’s complicity in the horrors of a totalitarian regime.

Giulietta Masina plays a betrayed wife whose inability to come to terms with reality leads her along a hallucinatory journey of self-discovery in Fellini’s first color feature, a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories.

Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio.

Elegiac and atmospheric, Shakespeare Wallah put Merchant Ivory Productions on the international movie map. The film was inspired by in the real-life adventures of a traveling family theater group in India during the final days of English colonial rule.

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.

Branded to Kill, the wildly perverse story of the yakuza’s rice-sniffing “No. 3 Killer,” is Seijun Suzuki at his delirious best.

In 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the first and only Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey would launch the careers of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few.

While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses—then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. A landmark American documentary.

A woman strikes up a correspondence with a suave, charismatic smooth talker who could be the man of her dreams—or a wicked con artist. Based on a true story, Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers is a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love.

Starring Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal, Bombay Talkie is Merchant Ivory’s affectionate, bemused view of Bollywood—India’s huge dream factory. Cameraman Subrata Mitra’s ravishing photography has never been surpassed in any other of James Ivory’s films.

A psychologist and cosmonaut embarks on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness in Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliantly original science-fiction epic.

Widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive is a visually arresting, bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life.

A stylish paean to female destructiveness, De Palma’s first foray into horror voyeurism is a stunning amalgam of split-screen effects, bloody birthday cakes, and a chilling score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.

In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.

With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Makavejev’s cult staple Sweet Movie is a full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching.

Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of the journey from basic training to the front lines of D-Day seamlessly interweaves archival war footage and a fictional narrative.

In Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cría cuervos . . ., Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin).

In Albert and David Maysles’s 1976 cult classic, Grey Gardens, meet Big and Little Edie Beale—high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.—thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion.