Charts: Lists
This page shows you the list charts. By default, the movies are ordered by how many times they have been marked as a favorite. However, you can also sort by other information, such as the total number of times it has been marked as a dislike.
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Criterion Collection Themes - Italian Neorealism
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. The neorealist movement began in Italy at the end of World War II as an urgent response to the political turmoil and desperate economic conditions afflicting the country. Directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took up cameras to focus on lower-class characters and their concerns, using nonprofessional actors, outdoor shooting, (necessarily) very small budgets, and a realist aesthetic. The best-known examples remain De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a critical and popular phenomenon that opened the world’s eyes to this movement, and such key earlier works as Rossellini’s Open City, the first major neorealist production. Other classics of neorealism include De Sica’s Umberto D. and Visconti’s La terra trema, but the tendrils of the movement reach back to De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us and forward to Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis, as well as to some filmmakers who did their apprenticeships in this school, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini—and far beyond. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Japanese New Wave
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. A group of loosely connected daredevil filmmakers, commonly known as the Japanese New Wave, brought about the creative revitalization of Japanese cinema in the 1960s—even if the term itself was borrowed from the concurrent movement happening in France. Tired of the traditional forms of classical Japanese cinema, directors like Shohei Imamura (a lapsed Ozu acolyte), Nagisa Oshima (a former studio filmmaker whose films had finally proved too controversial), Seijun Suzuki (a bad-boy rebel increasingly uninterested in adhering to narrative logic), and Hiroshi Teshigahara (a flower artist, potter, and calligrapher as well as a filmmaker), created challenging works—both thematically, dealing with such hitherto taboo themes as sexual violence, racism, political radicalism, and the devastating aftermath of World War II, and, in some cases, formally, employing unorthodox editing strategies, shock effects, and confrontational imagery. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Made During WWII
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. World War II naturally created many constraints for filmmakers in the countries involved in it. Nevertheless, despite censorship, propaganda demands, battle devastation, and diminished resources, filmmakers on both sides of the conflict were able to make films—even, in some cases, personal statements. As the titles listed below show, some of the world’s great directors did some of the finest work during difficult times. Clouzot even brought Le corbeau to fruition in Nazi-occupied France. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Melodrama
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. One aim of art has always been to evoke intense feelings; for melodramatic cinema, that is its unabashed and overt raison d’etre. With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer. Various national cinemas have made contributions to the genre—from Japan, we have Mikio Naruse’s dramas of steadfast women trapped in quiet domestic anguish; from France, Max Ophuls’s luxurious tragic romances; from Italy, Luchino Visconti’s opulent tales of amour fou and Raffaello Matarazzo’s contorted, epic expressions of thwarted desire. Historically, the Hollywood work of the German émigré Douglas Sirk has been considered the expressionistic epitome of the movie melodrama; his All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, and Written on the Wind used the form to comment on 1950s America with a sophisticated mix of irony and forthright emotion. In the ’70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a fan of Hollywood melodrama, provocatively remade All That Heaven Allows as the heartbreaking interracial romance Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. -
Criterion Collection Themes - New American Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. In the midsixties, U.S. theater attendance was declining. Bloated epics, mindless star vehicles, and juvenile musicals had become standard Hollywood fare, and the public was no longer interested. Then came the shock to the system of Bonnie and Clyde, and a renaissance was under way; radical new filmmakers, influenced by the foreign art cinema that was in vogue as well as the avant-garde and documentary techniques, rose to prominence, both within and outside of the studio system. Audiences hungry for something different, engaged, political, and raw were buying tickets (at least at first). Astonishing success stories like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, John Cassavetes’ Faces, and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces ushered in a new era in which the auteur was king and unlikely movie stars played rough-around-the-edges antiheroes, giving birth to the daring careers of such artists as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Ellen Burstyn, Brian De Palma, Shelley Duvall, Monte Hellman, Terrence Malick, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Gena Rowlands, and Sissy Spacek. Unfortunately, this period of experimentation wouldn’t last forever, as the bottom-line, blockbuster mentality would creep back in, leaving ambitious auteurs adrift. But the films that did get made during that time (a selection of which you can see below) remain emblems of a fertile period in American cinema. -
Criterion Collection Themes - New German Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Written and signed by two dozen German filmmakers pledging themselves to “the new German feature film,” the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto boldly announced the arrival of New German Cinema, with young, innovative, and politically radical directors taking up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry. In the late sixties and early seventies, filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg set out to create smaller, more independent and artistically challenging films to investigate the state of contemporary Germany (Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katherine Blum), as well as to grapple with the ghosts of the past, from the Weimar era (Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz) and the Nazis (Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum) to their aftermath (Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”). Like other countries’ new waves, New German Cinema, which ended in the mid-eighties, embraced politically akin but artistically disparate directors with diverse interests, working methods, and spheres of influence, from the avant-garde (Kluge’s Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed) to major international productions (Fassbinder’s Querelle). -
Criterion Collection Themes - New York Stories
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Take a time-traveling tour of New York, starting with the waterfront dives of the late twenties (The Docks of New York), the Upper East Side during the depressed thirties (My Man Godfrey), and the Lower East Side in the noirish forties (The Naked City). Then there are the jazzy fifties beatniks (Shadows) and the artsy sixties Central Park dwellers (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One), melancholy midtown memories in the seventies (News from Home), and sweltering Bed-Stuy tension in the eighties (Do the Right Thing). Finally, the dying debutante society of the nineties (Metropolitan) gives way to a nostalgic, picture-book image of Manhattan circa 2001 (The Royal Tenenbaums). There are eight million stories in the Naked City. Here are some of them. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Noir and Neonoir
Favs/dislikes: 9:0. Some call it a genre, others a movement, or even a fashion statement, but however one defines noir, with its signature femmes fatales, wisecracking tough guys, and dramatic, high-contrast cinematography, its appeal never seems to wane. Though its origins are in German expressionism and French crime films of the thirties, film noir has always been a distinctly American film movement, influenced and shaped as it was by American pulp fiction, wartime gender politics, and postwar nuclear anxieties. And since its forties and fifties heyday, the legacy of noir has spread everywhere—from Kurosawa (High and Low) to the French new wave (Alphaville) to the proliferation of “neonoirs” in the eighties (Coup de torchon) and nineties (Insomnia). Color may have seeped into noir’s rich gray palette over the years, but some things never change: anxiety, disillusionment, panic. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Novels on the Big Screen
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. There’s a long-held and widespread feeling that a movie adaptation of a novel is never as good as the source. It’s easy to see how this became received wisdom, given the sheer difficulty of translating a plot that unfolds over hundreds of pages to a feature-length film’s running time, the immensity of the passions and mysteries that a novel can hold. The challenge for the film version is to function as its own work of art while at the same time reflecting a previously established perspective. But there have been many films that brilliantly interpret the literary universes they take on. In the movies below, the words of Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Patricia Highsmith, Victor Hugo, Flannery O’Connor, and Erich Maria Remarque, among many other authors, are transmuted into compelling and expressive visual experiences. Whether faithful adaptations (Rosemary’s Baby, Howards End, The Ice Storm) or daring reimaginings (The Idiot, Naked Lunch, The Thin Red Line), these are films that deserve to be appreciated alongside their printed progenitors. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Originals
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. The history of cinema: one hundred years of do-overs. Whether updating critically acclaimed foreign hits for Hollywood consumption (Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven), bringing the art house to the grind house (The Last House on the Left was a gorier iteration of The Virgin Spring), or reconstituting old plots as inspiration for new genres (Star Wars was based on The Hidden Fortress) or showcases for newfangled effects (The Blob was reincarnated as . . . The Blob), the remakers keep on trying—but the films will never be as good as these originals. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Oscar Winners
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. The Criterion Collection is bursting with films that have earned Hollywood’s prestigious little golden guy—though, perhaps unsurprisingly, many of them were made pretty far from Hollywood. On our shelves you’ll find eighteen best foreign-language film winners, which make up a fairly comprehensive history of art-house cinema in the U.S., from Kurosawa, Bergman, and Fellini to Tati, Costa-Gavras, and Buñuel. A handful of these trophy-winning foreign films (like Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, and Forbidden Games) even hail from the period before the competitive foreign-language film category was established—they had such cultural impact that the Academy gave them special honorary awards. Furthermore, two of the best picture winners in the collection have the very rare distinction of also being foreign films: Hamlet, which was the first movie from a country other than the U.S. to garner the prize, and The Last Emperor, which, with its nine Oscars, remains one of the most Academy-honored films of all time. Of course, Criterion also offers a selection of Oscar-embraced American films, which have won in such categories as best documentary feature (Hearts and Minds), cinematography (Days of Heaven), screenplay (Missing), visual effects (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), editing (The Naked City), and even best documentary short (Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist). Explore all the Academy-awarded Criterion films below. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Poetic Realism
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Poetic realism was a cinematic style that emerged in France during the 1930s, the peak of that nation’s classic period of filmmaking. With its roots in realist literature, this movement combined working-class milieus and downbeat story lines with moody, proto-noir art direction and lighting to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, with the iconic Jean Gabin as the titular antihero, is generally regarded as the start of this melancholic, often fatalistic brand of cinema, which in part reflected the ominous atmosphere of prewar France but also lent itself to the individual sensibilities of a wide range of brilliant directors, such as Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) and Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève), and set designers like Alexandre Trauner. Poetic realism is thought to have greatly influenced such later film movements as Italian neorealism, which was equally sympathetic to the proletariat, and the French new wave, which looked to these great masters who had retained their artistic freedom while working in the French film industry. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Road Trips
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. One of cinema’s most abiding subgenres, road movies can be comedies, romances, thrillers, psychological dramas, or broader social commentaries. Tales of disillusionment or discovery, they are related to the bildungsroman, making literal the moral journeys characters undertake in that literary tradition—though modern films have often chosen to complicate that linear trajectory (some roads go in circles) or satirize the form (just ask the Leningrad Cowboys). At Criterion, we have a vast selection of movies in which the characters never really end up where they thought they would because by the time they reach their destination, they’ve become different people. Joel McCrea’s Hollywood director who finds out how the other half lives in Sullivan’s Travels may not seem to have much in common with Sandrine Bonnaire’s enigmatic drifter in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, but both are transformed by their experiences on the open road. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Samurai Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Samurai cinema, which includes both chanbara (action-oriented sword-fight films) and the historical jidai-geki film, focuses on the nationally mythologized samurai warriors of the twelfth to sixteenth century. Like the American western, the samurai film lends itself to tales of loyalty, revenge, romance, fighting prowess, and the decline of a traditional way of life. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films have arguably been the most influential both in Japan and around the world; certainly the range of his approaches—from Seven Samurai’s epic scope to Yojimbo’s acidic black humor to Ran’s poetic despair—established the genre’s creative possibilities, influencing generations of filmmakers, including George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Key works of the genre, in its more traditional form, also include Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto, the first part of his epic “Samurai Trilogy.” -
Criterion Collection Themes - Scary Movies
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. A deranged doctor performs ghastly experiments at his secluded country home. A murdered man’s body vanishes from the depths of a filthy swimming pool. A mysterious samurai spirit behind a demonic mask stalks two women isolated in a hut surrounded by tall grasses. The Criterion Collection is filled with terrifying stories to tell in the dark, from silent horror (Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 witches’ brew Häxan) to contemporary gore (Lars von Trier’s controversial gut-wrencher Antichrist). There’s much to fear in the films below, whether it’s a disembodied brain, a murderous blob, or Boris Karloff. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Silent Cinema
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Many moviegoers think the silent era ended with the advent of sound. Yet cinema history is not so simple. While Al Jolson’s first performance in 1927’s The Jazz Singer was certainly a shot heard round the world, some film artists chose to stick with the quiet old ways for a while, and some national cinemas were slower to adopt the new talking-picture technology than others. As a result—and as demonstrated by the silent films in the Criterion Collection—presound cinema extended into the thirties, for financial and cultural reasons (in Japan, for instance, silent and sound films coexisted until 1938, out of necessity and popularity) or aesthetic ones (Charlie Chaplin was still perfecting the art of silent comedy in 1936’s partly sound Modern Times). Investigate Criterion’s collection of nontalkies, which includes groundbreaking early works from such legends as Cocteau, DeMille, Dreyer, Micheaux, Ozu, Pabst, Sternberg, and more! -
Criterion Collection Themes - Stage to Screen
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. At Criterion, cinema is king, but the play is also the thing. Look at the lineup of theater legends from whose work films in the collection were adapted: Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), Noël Coward (Brief Encounter), Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths), Eugene O’Neill (The Emperor Jones), Terence Rattigan (The Browning Version), Arthur Schnitzler (La ronde), George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), August Strindberg (Miss Julie), Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Tennessee Williams (The Fugitive Kind)—and, of course, the Bard himself, whose Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III became grandiose film spectacles thanks to that towering thespian Laurence Olivier. We also have a cracking selection of films made from lesser known works, including Danton, Andrzej Wajda’s adaptation of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s 1931 play The Danton Affair injected with the fervor of the Solidarity liberation movement, and Nicolas Roeg’s radically exploded version of Terry Johnson’s Insignificance. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Suspense
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. Desperate men drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over creaking bridges and through winding mountain passages. A man who knows too much about a political murder races against time to save a woman from an assassin’s clutches. A fragile woman trapped alone in an apartment over one long weekend slowly succumbs to madness as her demons close in on her. A man pursued for a murder he didn’t commit stumbles upon a shadowy conspiracy. These nerve-racking scenarios are the bases of standout thrillers by some of cinema’s greatest suspense artists: Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear), Brian De Palma (Blow Out), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps). And those are just a few of the hair-raisers available in the Criterion Collection, which also includes titles by David Cronenberg, Fritz Lang, David Mamet, Carol Reed, and more. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Tearjerkers
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. There is a genre of classic films that, finely crafted as they are, we remember first and foremost for their ability to wring tears from us. Can one even think of Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow or Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. without immediately recalling their beyond poignant ultimate scenes? And what would Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru or Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory be without those final waterworks (the characters’ and ours)? From Ozu family sagas to Sirk melodramas, we have a large selection of titles for those looking for a little cinematic catharsis. So come and cry along with Criterion. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Technicolor
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. Candy-colored, boisterous, lush, lurid—all words that have been used to describe the various effects, moods, and sensations of Technicolor. For the first half of cinema’s first century, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation had a monopoly on color filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. Requiring three separate negatives, the Technicolor method involved filtering light through a double-prism beam splitter to produce magenta and green, which, when combined with blue and red light, accurately reproduced the full color spectrum, with often dazzlingly rich and sumptuous results. In later years, when Eastman Color developed a single-strip technique that could be used in any 35 mm camera, Technicolor lost its grip on the industry. Though three-strip Technicolor is still used today, it is an anomaly—often a sign of stylish distinction. Technicolor’s full spectrum is famously difficult to reproduce, but at Criterion we aim to get those eye-popping colors as close to their original vibrancy as possible. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Virtually Reality
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Who needs silly, circumscribed categories like “fiction” or “documentary”? From such classic examples as Robert Flaherty’s original almost-ethnography Nanook of the North and Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land—about violations of civil liberties in everyday America—to contemporary hybrids by living artists like Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) and Pedro Costa (In Vanda’s Room), these works blur the lines with panache. -
Criterion Collection Themes: Yakuza!
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. We have a killer selection of Japanese gangster films—or yakuza pictures—in the Criterion Collection, all from the genre’s heyday in the fifties and sixties. Tales of the criminal underworld marked as much by themes of honor and loyalty as by images of shocking, manic violence, they explore the codes and rituals of a society simmering right underneath “civilized” culture. Directors like Takumi Furukawa, Takashi Nomura, and especially Seijun Suzuki depict this bloody world of heists, double crosses, and rivalries with stylish excess, imitating their subjects’ freewheeling daredevilishness—Nomura’s A Colt Is My Passport and Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter stand as some of the most visually inventive Japanese films of all time. And as proven by recent films from Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike, the genre doesn’t seem to be going out of fashion. -
Criterion Filmstruck Exclusives
Favs/dislikes: 7:0. Films that were exclusive the Criterion Collection Filmstruck channel that have not appeared in the collection as a feature or as an extra for another feature -
Criterion War Films
Favs/dislikes: 11:0. The continuing cultural fascination with World War II has ensured that it’s the conflict most represented in cinema, and the Criterion Collection indeed contains more works about that massive conflagration than any other—whether harrowing dramas made right in its crosshairs (like Rome Open City) or poetic studies produced decades later (like The Thin Red Line)—seen through the eyes of filmmakers from many nations. But there are battle cries from other epochs in the collection as well, and taken together, these films embody a history of human combat, from the brother-against-brother bloodshed of the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil) to the trench warfare of the First World War (Wooden Crosses) to the jungle skirmishes of the Cuban Revolution (Che). -
Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films
Favs/dislikes: 18:0. Janus Films opened American viewers’ eyes to the pleasures of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut at the height of their artistic powers. Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this world-renowned distribution company with Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, an expansive collectors’ box set featuring fifty classic films on DVD and a lavishly illustrated hardcover book that tells the story of Janus Films through an essay by film historian Peter Cowie, a tribute from Martin Scorsese, and extensive, all-new notes on all fifty films, plus cast and credit listings and U.S. premiere information.
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