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...

  • A Kind of Loving

    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...

  • Damnation

    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...

  • Daughters of Darkness

    Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
    Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

  • Farewell, My Lovely

    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 ...

  • 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...

  • Losing Ground

    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 ...

  • 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 ...

  • Sátántangó

    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...

  • Stroszek

    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-institutionalized b...

  • The Big Sleep

    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...

  • The Last Seduction

    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...

  • The Leather Boys

    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 ...

  • The Turin Horse

    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...

  • Trouble In Mind

    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...