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.

  1. Criterion Collection Themes - Great Soundtracks's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Great Soundtracks

    Favs/dislikes: 4:0. Try to think of Charade without that perfectly swoony Henry Mancini title song. Imagine Easy Rider roaring down the highway without Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” kicking it into high gear, or Dazed and Confused fading out to anything other than Foghat’s “Slow Ride”—or a zitherless The Third Man. Many movies are inextricable from their flawlessly selected soundtracks. Similarly, certain songs don’t seem to have reason to exist without the images they’ve been set to: Jeannette’s unfathomably giddy “Por que te vas” is forever tied to Ana Torrent’s bedroom dance in Cría cuervos . . . , and anyone who’s seen Chungking Express is unlikely to hear the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” without dreaming of Faye Wong bopping along. Below, explore a potpourri of Criterion pop and jazz, in films featuring music from David Bowie, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis, John Lurie, Nico, the Rolling Stones, Annie Ross, Tom Waits, and more.
  2. Criterion Collection Themes - Italian Neorealism's icon

    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.
  3. Criterion Collection Themes - Novels on the Big Screen's icon

    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.
  4. Criterion Collection Themes - Road Trips's icon

    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.
  5. Criterion Collection Themes - Suspense's icon

    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.
  6. Criterion Collection Themes - Technicolor's icon

    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.
  7. Criterion Channel Expiring December 2023's icon

    Criterion Channel Expiring December 2023

    Favs/dislikes: 3:0.
  8. Criterion Channel Expiring January 2024's icon

    Criterion Channel Expiring January 2024

    Favs/dislikes: 3:0.
  9. Criterion Channel Expiring November 2023's icon

    Criterion Channel Expiring November 2023

    Favs/dislikes: 3:0.
  10. Criterion Collection Themes - First Films's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - First Films

    Favs/dislikes: 3:0. It takes some master movie artists years to hone their craft, working through ideas and aesthetics until they achieve their consummate creative statement. But cinema history is also dotted with thunderous works of art that announced their makers’ brilliance right out of the gate. There’s no dearth of dazzling debuts in the Criterion Collection, from the New Wave launchers Breathless and The 400 Blows, by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, respectively, to the still career-defining early masterworks of Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive), Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket), and Maurice Pialat (L’enfance nue). Here’s a great way to savor the beginnings of some of the pillars of cinema.
  11. Criterion Collection Themes - New German Cinema's icon

    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).
  12. Criterion Collection Themes - New York Stories's icon

    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.
  13. Criterion Collection Themes - Oscar Winners's icon

    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.
  14. Criterion Collection Themes - Scary Movies's icon

    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.
  15. Criterion Collection Themes - Silent Cinema's icon

    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!
  16. Criterion Channel: 80s Horror's icon

    Criterion Channel: 80s Horror

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Criterion Channel's October 2022 lineup: 80s Horror
  17. Criterion Channel Expiring October 2023's icon

    Criterion Channel Expiring October 2023

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0.
  18. Criterion Collection iTunes / Amazon Instant Exclusives's icon

    Criterion Collection iTunes / Amazon Instant Exclusives

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Films that that have not appeared in the collection as a feature or as an extra for another feature. These also are not available streaming on the Criterion Collection Hulu Channel. Note: Currently iTunes and Amazon Instant have the exact same exclusive offerings.
  19. Criterion Collection Themes - Amour Fou's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Amour Fou

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. At Criterion, we’re as fond of a good romance as anybody. But it’s the twisted, obsessive ones that really set our hearts ablaze. Love will make you do the damnedest things—just take it from the adulterous, ultimately murderous couple in Oshima’s Empire of Passion; the runaway lonely-hearts lovers in The Honeymoon Killers; the snakeskin-jacketed Marlon Brando and unleashed Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; or Alida Valli’s countess, operatically mad for Farley Granger’s tight-trousered lieutenant in Senso. These are heedless, self-destructive affairs to remember.
  20. Criterion Collection Themes - Animals!'s icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Animals!

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Predators, prey, objects of study, companions: The lives of the other creatures with which we share the planet are so interwoven with our own that it’s only natural they would put in appearances in our cinema from time to time. Some of the animals in the Criterion menagerie are documentary subjects (Koko: A Talking Gorilla); others operate almost purely as metaphor (Au hasard Balthazar). All reward visitors.
  21. Criterion Collection Themes - Compare and Contrast's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Compare and Contrast

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. For some of our releases, one take is not enough. A number of Criterion titles feature as supplements some kind of alternate version of the main event, whether it’s a different cut (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil includes the infamous, unreleased, studio-edited “Love Conquers All” version of the film); an iteration in a different language for foreign audiences (as with our editions of Visconti’s Senso and The Leopard, in which you can see and hear their American stars delivering their lines in English); an original short that was the basis for the feature (Bottle Rocket); earlier or later versions of the same story by entirely different filmmakers (the mammoth 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz comes with the ninety-minute 1931 adaptation of the source novel); the original book or novella in its entirety (The Earrings of Madame de . . .’s source novel, Madame de, by Louise de Vilmorin, in the release booklet); or a radio adaptation (My Man Godfrey, The 39 Steps).
  22. Criterion Collection Themes - Food on Film's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Food on Film

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. http://www.criterion.com/explore/101-food-on-film
  23. Criterion Collection Themes - Great Performances's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Great Performances

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. When you’re talking about great performances in the collection, acting is naturally the first thing that comes to mind. But there are plenty of other kinds of shows on our shelves deserving of the spotlight, whether concerts by rock icons (the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix), modern dance by the regal Martha Graham, or Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, as staged and captured in all its beauty by none other than Ingmar Bergman. We are proud to present a selection of spellbinding music and dance, Criterion-style. Please hold your applause until the intermission.
  24. Criterion Collection Themes - Independent American Cinema's icon

    Criterion Collection Themes - Independent American Cinema

    Favs/dislikes: 2:0. In a national cinema dominated by behemoth Hollywood studios, independently produced films have always made for refreshing alternatives. There’s a great, diverse history of autonomous moviemaking in the United States, by artists whose intensely personal visions and ideas would have been unlikely to see a green light from, say, MGM or Universal. This selection of American films from the collection—narrative, documentary, experimental—got made without studio financing, whether by choice or necessity. The titles below come from raw, rough, and ready directors of nearly every period, including the silent era (Body and Soul, directed by African-American pioneer Oscar Micheaux), World War II (Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land), the radical sixties (the fiercely idiosyncratic films of John Cassavetes and William Greaves), and the indie waves of the eighties (Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant’s daring early works) and nineties (the debuts of Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson). Whether exposés on disenfranchised subcultures, character studies heavy or hilarious, or microbudgeted horror flicks, these are some of the most uncompromised films ever made.
  25. Criterion Collection Themes - Made During WWII's icon

    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.
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