The Criterion Collection

In these three films, something like social-realist farces, Kaurismäki surveys the working-class outcasts of his native Finland with detached yet disarming amusement.

John Cassavetes has been called a genius, a visionary, and the father of independent film. The five films included here represent his works made outside the Hollywood studio system, on which he was afforded complete control.

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.

Lodge Kerrigan’s raw, ravaging Clean, Shaven is a headfirst dive into the mindscape of a schizophrenic as he tries to track down his daughter after he is released from an institution.

Leigh’s depiction of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral.