Classic Cinema

Classic Cinema

Beloved favorites from cinema's Golden Age.

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Classic Cinema
  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 94 mins | 1972
    The first collaboration between Herzog and Klaus Kinski cast the notoriously unhinged actor as the even more unhinged 16th-century conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre—nicknamed “El Loco” or “The Madman”—found embarking on his final mission: a frantic search...

  • Assault on Precinct 13

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by John Carpenter | 91 mins | 1976
    As lean and brooding as its skeletal synth theme music, possessed from the first frame with an inimitable sense of ambient menace, Carpenter’s second feature is a marvel of action filmmaking economy. Its siege-on-an-LA-police-station ...

  • Fitzcarraldo

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 157 mins | 1982
    The making of Herzog’s epic film about the endeavors of Irish entrepreneur Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle is perhaps as fascinating as "Fitzcarraldo" itself, as was stunningly documented in Les Blank...

  • La Chinoise

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
    Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a...

  • No Place Like Home

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Perry Henzell | 89 mins | 2006
    Perry Henzell’s follow-up to "The Harder They Come" (1972) very nearly never saw the light of day: funding dried up before its completion, and then the footage was lost. Rediscovered by chance in 2006 and restored in 2019—nearly half a...

  • Nosferatu the Vampyre

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 107 mins | 1979
    Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism in revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski as the pestilent Count and Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slender neck that he so ...

  • Rock 'n' Roll High School

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante | 93 mins | 1979
    The moptop Ramones liberate a school from killjoy Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) in this sweetly rambunctious romp starring P.J. Soles (Halloween) as lead rebel of the student body. The innocent music-fueled anarchy (direc...

  • The Exiles

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Kent Mackenzie | 72 mins | 1961
    The result of an extended collaboration between MacKenzie and his subjects, young Native Americans living in the crumbling slums of Bunker Hill, The Exiles seems to unfold over the course of one bibulous night, by turns melancholy, an...

  • The Harder They Come

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Perry Henzell | 102 mins | 1972
    Star Jimmy Cliff holds down both the screen and the soundtrack in this rude-boy cult classic, Jamaica’s first feature film, which draws on the legend of folk hero prison escapee Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin. Cliff plays Ivan, a bumpkin nai...

  • Swoon

    Directed by Tom Kalin | 94 mins | 1992
    Tom Kalin’s coruscating debut returns to the scene of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, likewise a key inspiration for Hitchcock’s Rope, but in this telling the unspoken homosexual undercurrent of the crime is put boldly front and center. A heavily ...

  • The Man With The Golden Arm

    Directed by Otto Preminger | 119 mins | 1955
    Incendiary at the time for its depiction of drug addiction, Otto Preminger’s noir-ish expedition through the caliginous slums and backdoor casinos of ’50s Chicago was so popular that it incited an investigation into cinema censorship—and an eventual lo...