The Criterion Collection

Beauty and the Beast

Jean Cocteau

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Aleksi: “Sade understood power. Pasolini understood Sade. Together they made a horrid masterpiece. But under the surface there's profundity, humor, and passion”

RoboCop

Paul Verhoeven

Aleksi: “Verhoeven's prescient take on privatizing the state's police and security functions. Brutally funny over-the-top dark SF farce. Excellent in every way”

Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard

Aleksi: “Here Godard travels through genres like a curator going through a museum moving from one epoch to another. He achieves a lot with so little. Lotsa fun”

The Long Good Friday

John Mackenzie

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir

Aleksi: “Fey, in its various meanings.”

M

Fritz Lang

Aleksi: “One of cinema's greatest masterpieces. Period. (Personal note: Otto Wernicke's iconic Inspector Lohmann is my favorite film character of all time.)”

Oliver Twist

David Lean

Branded to Kill

Seijun Suzuki

Insomnia

Erik Skjoldbjærg

Aleksi: “An endlessly fascinating movie. Stellan Skarsgard gives a sublime performance as a man complicit in his own entrapment in a world clouded by paranoia.”

And the Ship Sails On

Federico Fellini

Aleksi: “The master meditates on art & life through a variety of eccentrics aboard an ocean liner. Don't worry about any story; just enjoy the magical moments.”

Brazil

Terry Gilliam

Aleksi: “Gilliam transposes Orwell's '1984' from a literary masterpiece into a cinematic one by wrapping his unique and powerful imagination around it. Vital.”

For All Mankind

Al Reinert

Peeping Tom

Michael Powell

Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Terry Jones

Aleksi: “It just gets better with each passing year... A sure sign of a classic.”

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Carl Th. Dreyer

Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey

Good Morning

Yasujiro Ozu

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Luis Buñuel

Aleksi: “A romp through the dreamscapes of the petty anxieties of society's masters, with pointed comic metaphors about their institutional lackeys. Trés fun.”

Coup de torchon

Bertrand Tavernier

Aleksi: “An incredible movie. Philippe Noiret is amazing as an inept cop who, when his cup runneth over at the injustice around him, executes justice too much.”

Mona Lisa

Neil Jordan

Aleksi: “Though conventional and flawed it's well done. Emotions and chrs are credible in gangster-whore-savior-romance, thus a step up from most of its peers.”

M. Hulot’s Holiday

Jacques Tati

Aleksi: “Charming, inventive and humorous, a great, idyllic prologue to Tati's more mature and brilliant "one-dimensional man" anthropological comedic studies.”

Mon oncle

Jacques Tati

Aleksi: “A dialectical comedy of cold sterile modernism encroaching on the warm human communalism of village life. It's clear which side Tati is on. Wonderful!”

Playtime

Jacques Tati

Aleksi: “That urban space encroaching the village in Mon Oncle has obliterated it. People are now processed units in an overarching system. A brilliant comedy.”

Rififi

Jules Dassin

Aleksi: “The first real caper movie, and probably still the best. Surprisingly violent, even brutal for its time. Wonderful set pieces and art direction. ”

Diary of a Chambermaid

Luis Buñuel

Withnail and I

Bruce Robinson

Aleksi: “Bittersweet funny lovehate lifeslice of two dissolute actor friends on cusp of feared adulthood go on a sodden vacation. Brilliant dialogue & acting.”

How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Bruce Robinson

Aleksi: “An absurdist satire not just on advertising, but on capitalism itself. Intelligent; funny; great acting. The broken window parable was seldom funnier.”

Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set

The Ruling Class

Peter Medak

Aleksi: “A profound, trenchant filmic metaphor depicting the ideological underpinnings of how the ruling class engages in class warfare. And very funny!”

Häxan

Benjamin Christensen

Aleksi: “Incredible art direction, like watching wood engravings from Medieval alchemical grimoires come to life. Unique, iconic, and astonishing in every way.”

Children of Paradise

Marcel Carné

Bob le flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville

Aleksi: “There's no denying Melville has the mind and talent of a born filmmaker. This was a worthy first movie. But after this he let style trump substance.”

Traffic

Steven Soderbergh

Aleksi: “A filmic, gimmicky, MFTV issue-movie. Some ok writing. Prominent feature: pushing so many of those upper-middle class shiny white suburban buttons.”

General Idi Amin Dada

Barbet Schroeder

Aleksi: “Clowns are scary. Clowns who don't know they're clowns are absurd. When such psychopathic, charismatic clowns wield power it's horrifying - and comic.”

The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson

Aleksi: “I despised Rushmore, but I liked this one quite a lot. And Life Aquatic blew me away. I must revisit Wes Anderson -- there's a major filmmaker here.”

Man Bites Dog

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde

Aleksi: “Laughs galore at the wacky antics of a charismatic serial killer and the zany film crew who become complicit in his crimes. A pointed ink-black comedy”

Down by Law

Jim Jarmusch

Aleksi: “There's something transcendent in this gorgeous movie that I can't put my finger on, but it resonates with subtle life lessons. Beautiful, even holy.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Terry Gilliam

Aleksi: “Gilliam channels Dante through Hunter S. Thompson to take us on a hysterical trip through the sick soul of America, sharing his stash with us. Awesome”

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta

My Life as a Dog

Lasse Hallström

Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah

Aleksi: “A great director at the height of his powers makes a masterpiece of supreme tension as Hoffman transforms from peaceful victim into bloodlust warrior.”

Jubilee

Derek Jarman

Aleksi: “Jarman's unique sensibility thuds highbrow sensitivity with punk aesthetics to spew a raw, messy, angry indictment against Thatcherism. Ham-handed Fun”

Night and Fog

Alain Resnais

The Honeymoon Killers

Leonard Kastle

Aleksi: “An odd, sardonic, unexpectedly powerful movie that gets darker yet surprisingly more touching as it goes. Shirley Stoler steals every movie she's in.”

The BRD Trilogy

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Aleksi: “This trilogy proves Fassbinder to be one of cinema's virtuosos. His personality imbues three very different, insightful stories about post-war Germany”

The Pornographers

Shohei Imamura

The Devil and Daniel Webster

William Dieterle

Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg

Aleksi: “Cronenberg does a great job exploring a writer's creative process, using Burroughs and his universe as the medium. Brilliant ending (if you get it).”

Le Corbeau

Henri-Georges Clouzot

Aleksi: “How ever did Clouzot, et al, get this movie made under the gaze of Vichy & the Gestapo? Balls of steel, I suppose. A great, bitter, powerful movie.”

Salvatore Giuliano

Francesco Rosi

3 Women

Robert Altman

Aleksi: “Liquid identities of solipsistic awarenesses, disconnected from anything other than their own nebulous interests in a jejune world. Genuine cinema art”

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang

Aleksi: “The State is personified as Evil. Truly vital movie for our time as we live through a modern update of the Empire of Crime. And terrific sound design!”

Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir

Aleksi: “Delightfully delirious films, Renoir exults in the joy of bringing us lavish entertainments where all of life is a stage. Overflows with joie de vivre”

The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo

John Cassavetes: Five Films

Fat Girl

Catherine Breillat

Aleksi: “Thematically interesting, with good acting by the girls; but dull. The 'shocking ending' was symbolically too obvious, and just flat-out stupid. Fail.”

Eyes Without a Face

Georges Franju

Fanny and Alexander — The Theatrical Version

Ingmar Bergman

Aleksi: “I don't get why this melodrama is so valued, but then I've never been able to sit through the whole thing. My wife, though, rates it a masterpiece.”

Short Cuts

Robert Altman