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...

Directed by John Schlesinger | 113 mins | 1962
Set against the factories and watering holes of Lancashire, the fiction feature debut of "Midnight Cowboy" director Schlesinger stars the brooding Alan Bates as a young draughtsman whose affair with an office secretary (June Ritchie) results in a the...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a...

Directed by Dick Richards | 95 mins | 1975
In this handsome adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, noir icon Robert Mitchum meets one of the genre’s quintessential figures, Detective Philip Marlowe. The search for a missing girlfriend and a stolen jade necklace brings him into contact with ...

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...

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...

Directed by Kathleen Collins | 86 mins | 1982
One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, and a charming, complex tale of personal discovery that follows the marriage between a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) and her painter husband (Bill Gunn), both at a crossroads ...

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 ...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Werner Herzog | 108 mins | 1977
Herzog’s longstanding fascination with cannibal killer Ed Gein drew him to shoot his devastating film of American dreams deferred in wild, wonderful Wisconsin, where a West Berlin street musician, Stroszek—played by Bruno S., the oft-i...

Directed by Michael Winner | 99 mins | 1978
The second screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel transposes the notably labyrinthine plot to 1970s London, with a deliciously weathered Robert Mitchum reprising the iconic role he’d recently assumed in "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975): Detectiv...

Directed by John Dahl | 110 mins | 1994
Skipping town on her husband Clay (Bill Pullman), Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) sets about seducing a series of men into abetting her lethal money-making schemes. The fact that this erotic thriller played initially on TV meant that Fiorentino was ineli...

Directed by Sidney J. Furie | 107 mins | 1964
Long before he directed the Diana Ross vehicle "Lady Sings the Blues" and cult horror classic "The Entity," versatile Canadian filmmaker Furie helmed this Cockney tale of motorized delinquency and Ton-Up rocker subculture, starring Colin Campbell and ...

Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr...

Directed by Alan Rudolph | 111 mins | 1985
Alan Rudolph’s underseen noir oddity soaks in the grimy ambiance of Rain City, where Hawk (Kris Kristofferson)—a former cop, more recently a convict—is readjusting to the straight world and struggling young father Coop (Keith Carradine) is being drawn in...

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, angry, and ecstatic, ...

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 plotline is inspire...

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 (directed by a veteran of...

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 naif freshly arrived i...

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 century after the ...

Directed by John Sayles | 109 mins | 1984
New to Earth and fleeing bondage on his own planet, a mute telepath extraterrestrial known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton)—who has the outward appearance of a twentysomething African American male hits the streets of Harlem—gets a crash course in the b...