When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.
That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)
Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.
‘Aftersun’ (2022)
Memory pieces about childhood are nearly always touched by nostalgia, however bittersweet, but Charlotte Wells’s gorgeous, semi-autobiographical debut feature is graced instead by perspective. The memory in “Aftersun” encapsulates a few days in 1999 at a downscale Turkish resort, where an 11-year-old (Frankie Corio) went on her last vacation with her 30-something father (Paul Mescal), who did a credible job at the time of masking his personal anguish in order to make her happy. The MiniDV camera footage the girl captured of the trip tells a different story about him, and the film seizes on it subtly and beautifully. A.O. Scott admired Wells for directing with “the unaffected precision of a lyric poet.”
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‘Logan’ (2017)
Superhero franchises like the MCU and the DCEU have developed such a predictable template that each new entry can feel at least partially like a paint-by-numbers exercise. Though it extends from the popular “X-Men” series featuring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, James Mangold’s “Logan” has the somber tone and feel of an old-school Western, emphasizing the exhaustion of an aging, battered hero dragged reluctantly to another mission. Having retired to Mexico to look after a sick Professor X, Jackman’s Logan is tasked with protecting a vulnerable young girl (Dafne Keen) whose powers (and history) overlap mysteriously with his own. Manohla Dargis called the film “a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth.”
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‘Now, Voyager’ (1942)
Though “Now, Voyager” is categorized as one of several “women’s weepies” in Bette Davis’s career, the term seems wholly inadequate in describing the complexity and elegance of this melodrama, though it is adequate in describing the tears it extracts. A Boston spinster who lives with her wealthy, domineering mother, Charlotte (Davis) embarks on an emotional journey after a stint at a sanitarium boosts her confidence and brings her to a South American cruise, where she falls in love for the first time. But that’s not nearly the end of the ups and downs and twists and turns that await her — and us. Theodore Strauss wrote that Davis charts her character’s “progress to emotional maturity with the decision and accuracy of an assured actress.”
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‘Heretic’ (2024)
There’s a thin line between the Hugh Grant who played the debonair charmer in rom-coms like “Notting Hill” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the one who deploys those same ingratiating qualities to sinister effect in “Heretic.” The two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) who turn up at his doorstep in snowy Colorado are not supposed to enter without another woman present, but Grant’s Mr. Reed easily coerces them, setting up a terrifying ordeal that doubles as a surprisingly provocative debate over spiritual values. Of Grant’s performance, Manohla Dargis wrote “the pleasure he exudes as an irredeemable fiend is plenty seductive.”
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‘The Host’ (2007)
Part of a wave of Korean films that hit festivals and art houses in the early-to-mid aughts, “The Host” was a breakthrough film for Bong Joon Ho, whose facility for mixing horror, black comedy and family drama would win him the Oscar for best picture years later for “Parasite.” Bong kicks off the action with an audacious daytime effects sequence, as a sea monster created by pollutants rises out of the Han River and terrorizes the populace, including a ne’er-do-well food vendor (Song Kang Ho) whose daughter goes missing. As a craftsman, Bong stages big set pieces with a commercial bravado that suggests Steven Spielberg, but the serio-comic family dynamic at the heart of “The Host” feels entirely his own. Manohla Dargis called it “a loopy, feverishly imaginative genre hybrid.”
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‘Portrait of a Lady On Fire’ (2019)
Channeling the windswept romantic tragedy of Jane Campion’s “The Piano” and countless fiction about doomed or forbidden love, Céline Sciamma’s beautiful period piece is about women carving out their own timeless terrain. Commissioned to paint the official wedding portrait of Héloise (Adéle Haenel), a petulant young woman residing on a Brittany island in the 18th century, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) strikes up a relationship with her that thrives in an isolated place where the rules of society don’t apply. In the most recent Sight & Sound film poll, “Portrait of a Lady On Fire” placed higher than any new entry in the past decade, and A.O. Scott was among its admirers, calling it “a subtle and thrilling love story.”
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‘Flow’ (2024)
The little Latvian animated film that could, Gints Zilbalodis’s low-budget odyssey, crafted entirely on an open-source software called Blender, won the Oscar over nominees from Hollywood animation goliaths like Pixar and DreamWorks. Over a wordless, mesmerizing 84 minutes, “Flow” follows a scrawny, intrepid cat that scrambles for survival during an cataclysmic flood that seems to have wiped out the human population. When the cat makes its way onto a boat, it befriends a quirky group of other survivors, including a yellow Labrador, a lemur, a capybara and a secretary bird that’s lost its flock. Calum Marsh wrote that Zilbalodis’s commitment to having his characters act like real animals “makes the emotion that much more powerful.”
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‘Speed’ (1994)
Though it might be described as “Die Hard” on wheels, “Speed” set a new benchmark for high-concept action filmmaking, following through on the juicy premise of a hijacking in which a Los Angeles city bus can’t drive below 50 m.p.h. or a bomb onboard will detonate. In a star-making role, Sandra Bullock plays a passenger who reluctantly gets behind the wheel after the driver is shot and she has off-the-charts chemistry with Keanu Reeves, who turns up as a SWAT bomb disposal officer who tries to steer her in the right direction. It’s probably best not to think about the collateral damage of this bus smashing through stalled L.A. thoroughfares and pedestrian walkways and just enjoy the ride. As Janet Maslin wrote, “this film’s sole objective is to keep moving, preferably at a pace that keeps the viewer from asking questions.”
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‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ (1992)
Booed at Cannes and mostly derided by critics who’d lost patience with “Twin Peaks” as it ended its two-season run on network television, David Lynch’s prequel about the tragic final days of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) has since been embraced as a vital precursor to explicit, structurally audacious Lynch thrillers like “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive.” Where the series could only hint at the darkness that swallowed Palmer, a high school student in an idyllic mountain town, “Fire Walk With Me” explores her toxic love triangle, her disturbed father (Ray Wise), her struggles with drug addiction and other evils lurking in the shadows. Unlike other prequels, the film doesn’t content itself with filling in the back story, but attempts to reinvent the “Twin Peaks” franchise on a new, forward-thinking set of terms.
‘The Iron Claw’ (2023)
Though the title of Sean Durkin’s biopic about Von Erich family of wrestlers refers to a signature finishing move the patriarch (Holt McCallany) passed along to his sons (played here by Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, among others), it could just as easily describe his domineering toxicity or the cold hand of fate. The cascading tragedies that faced the real Von Erichs as they rose to prominence in the Reagan-era ’80s are so awful that Durkin dials back on them a little while still capturing the scene and the tender brotherly love that transcend all that loss. Manohla Dargis found “pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection.”
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‘Moonage Daydream’ (2022)
After fashioning home movie footage and other visually striking odd-and-ends into the superb documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” the director Brett Morgen once again rejects the cookie-cutter storytelling of most music biopics for “Moonage Daydream,” a sumptuous impression of David Bowie’s career. Without the benefit of talking heads to offer biographical details, Morgen instead draws on archival footage to convey Bowie’s unique power as a chameleonic glam-rock icon and conceptual artist. It’s more experiential than informational, and all the better for it. As A.O. Scott put it, Bowie “is not so much the subject of the film as its animating spirit.”
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‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2017)
Made with piercing tenderness, insight and sun-kissed sensuality, Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age film is a showcase for Timothée Chalamet, who channels the intense emotion and vulnerability of first love. In the idyllic climes of rural Northern Italy during the summer of 1983, Chalamet’s 17-year-old loner mostly sticks to books and music, but when his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an archaeology professor, brings in a 24-year-old grad student (Armie Hammer) to stay with the family, the two young men develop feelings for each other. Praising his typically luxuriant style — to say nothing of a soundtrack that gives Psychedelic Furs’s “Love My Way” a crucial supporting role — Manohla Dargis wrote, “You don’t just watch Luca Guadagnino’s movies, you swoon into them.”
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‘Support the Girls’ (2018)
An ensemble comedy about the women working at a downscale Hooters-like “breastaurant” called Double Whammies may sound like lowbrow juvenilia, but Andrew Bujalski’s rambunctious slice-of-life happens to be one of the great modern American films about labor. Set over the course of one chaotic day, “Support the Girls” is anchored by a terrific Regina Hall performance as a manager putting out several fires at once, from a cable outage and an office robbery to the various personal catastrophes that beset her waitressing staff. Manohla Dargis praised Bujalski for creating “modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.”
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‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)
Still shocking and endlessly imitated after half a century, Martin Scorsese’s vision of urban alienation and psychosis burrows into the troubled conscience of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a New York cabbie whose sick fixations eventually lead to bloodshed. After his pursuit of an attractive campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd) falls flat, Travis decides to take action to “wipe the scum off the streets,” focusing first on a political candidate and later on a pimp (Harvey Keitel) with an underage prostitute (Jodie Foster). Within this repugnant character, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader find intense loneliness and suffering while noting larger ironies about American violence. Vincent Canby called it “one of the most compelling portraits of a lunatic personality.”
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‘It Follows’ (2015)
The “it” in “It Follows,” an ingenious and hair-raising twist on the zombie movie, takes some explaining: The being is a slow-moving menace that can take any form and follow one person without stopping, unless that person “passes” the problem on to someone else through sexual contact. (Though if the second person is killed, it goes back to hunting the first.) Yes, there’s a metaphor here about the lethal nature of nascent sexuality, but “It Follows” mainly works as a stylistic tour de force, with the writer-director David Robert Mitchell constantly destabilizing the audience through a scanning camera and the suggestive use of offscreen space. Stephen Holden wrote that the film “abides by a principle that few horror movies have the courage to embrace: The unknown is the unknown.”
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‘We Are the Best!’ (2013)
With films from the late ’90s and early ’00s like “Show Me Love,” “Together” and “Lilya 4-ever,” the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson displayed a special sensitivity toward the experiences of wayward adolescents. Adapted from his wife Coco’s graphic novel “Never Goodnight,” Moodysson’s “We Are the Best!” was a return to form, capturing the rebellious spirit of two androgynous 13-year-old girls as they start a punk band in 1982 Stockholm. Who cares if punk is dead? Who cares if they’ve never played an instrument before? They become increasingly determined to express themselves no matter what it looks or sounds like, and the film celebrates them infectiously. A.O. Scott wrote that the film “feels less like a nostalgic period piece than like a messy, urgent bulletin from a time that is barely past.”
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‘Showing Up’ (2022)
As one of the best truly independent American filmmakers, the director Kelly Reichardt (“First Cow,” “Wendy and Lucy”) teaches as an artist-in-residence at Bard College when she’s not making movies. To that end, “Showing Up” is an inspiring statement of purpose, a low-key and perfectly proportioned comedy about a sculptor (Michelle Williams) preparing for her next exhibit at a local gallery while managing the hassles of academia as a professor. She operates with measured expectations for her art and her life, save maybe for insisting that her flighty landlord (Hong Chau) finally fix the hot water heater. Manohla Dargis called Reichardt “interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world.”
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‘The Accountant’ (2016)
If you go into “The Accountant” looking for hot bookmaking action, the film delivers more than expected. Ben Affleck, portraying an autistic accountant, untangles the financial chicanery at a robotics firm. But he also happens to be trained in martial arts and weaponry, making him a tough target for a Treasury agent (J.K. Simmons) who wants him for crimes related to his freelance work for cartels and other criminal organizations. It may seem silly to consider this John Wick-style killer with a ledger, but the film is well-cast and entertaining, with Anna Kendrick adding warmth and mild buddy chemistry as a fellow C.P.A. turned potential corporate whistle-blower.
‘Janet Planet’ (2024)
In her debut feature as a writer-director, the acclaimed playwright Annie Baker beautifully and often hilariously evokes the lives of a progressive single mother (Julianne Nicholson) and her anxious, eccentric 11-year-old daughter (Zoe Ziegler) in early ’90s rural Massachusetts. As mom burns through a series of roommates and boyfriends — the film unfolds like neat little short stories around each — her child struggles to make friends while clinging to her for companionship. Although Baker pokes fun at the touchy-feely excesses of alternative communities, “Janet Planet” celebrates the integrity of those living outside the mainstream. Alissa Wilkinson called it “so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.”
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‘Civil War’ (2024)
Throughout his career as an author, screenwriter and director, Alex Garland has frequently considered the collapse of civilization, whether it’s among idealistic young adventurers in South Asia (“The Beach”) or survivors of a zombie outbreak in England (“28 Days Later”). While his provocative “Civil War” avoids the red-state/blue-state dichotomies that currently roil the country, the film imagines a bleak future where America has collapsed into violence and a team of journalists follow a rebel faction as it pushes its way into Washington D.C. Garland intentionally makes “Civil War” an ideological Rorschach blot in order to suggest what humans are capable of doing when order breaks down. Manohla Dargis called it “a blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction.”
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‘Take Out’ (2004)
For his debut feature — which he co-wrote and directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, a producer on several of his subsequent projects — Sean Baker makes an asset out of limited resources while flashing the high-wire urgency and urban grind of future films like “Tangerine” and “Anora.” With the look and feel of DIY nonfiction, “Take Out” chronicles a hectic all-day shift for Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an undocumented Chinese immigrant desperate to double his usual tip money as a delivery man in order to pay down his debt to smugglers. Between the driving rain, fussy customers and one ugly twist of fate, he has his work cut out for him. The payment he owes is less than a fourth of this movie’s reported $3,000 budget.
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‘Knife in the Water’ (1963)
With his first feature, Roman Polanski immediately established himself as major emerging talent, bringing a sense of danger and Hitchcockian flair to this self-contained psychological thriller about a boating trip gone awry. While en route to a sailing excursion on a lake, a couple (Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka) nearly run over a hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) on the road and, in a conciliatory gesture, invite the inexperienced young man on board. The stranger’s presence leads to confrontation and an inevitably violent love triangle, with Polanski making the most of the tight spaces and open sea. Bosley Crowther called it “a devilish dissection of man in one of his more childish and ridiculous aspects.”
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‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ (2000)
Occupying a supercool space between the existential crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, American and Japanese gangster thrillers and his own deadpan comedies like “Stranger Than Paradise,” Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog” imagines how samurai code might apply to the modern-day mafia. Set to a thumping score by the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, the film stars Forest Whitaker as a peerless hit man whose loyalty to a midlevel gangster (John Tormey) is tested after a job goes sideways and the mob decides to turn on him. Naturally, Jarmusch’s principled urban warrior isn’t an easy man to kill. A.O. Scott wrote that Jarmusch “has composed a ruminative, bittersweet visual essay on brutality, honor and tribalism.”
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‘My Golden Days’ (2016)
A French director known for prickly, literate character pieces like “Kings and Queen” and “A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin engages in a Proustian wistfulness with “My Golden Days,” a coming-of-age film inspired, unexpectedly, by a passport hassle at the airport. In three segments and an epilogue, Desplechin traces the adolescence of Paul (played as an adult by Mathieu Amalric and a teen by Quentin Dolmaire), who remembers a turbulent relationship with his mother, his time living in the former Soviet Union and finding his first love as a poor student in Paris. References abound to cultural markers as diverse as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, George Clinton and ’80s punk music. Manohla Dargis called it “a story told through a story told through a glass darkly.”
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‘I Saw the TV Glow’ (2024)
Steeped in nostalgia, melancholy and seismic shifts in identity, the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s mesmerizing follow-up to “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” might be categorized as a horror film, but it’s much more about sustaining an uneasy ambience than about goosing the audience. Set in 1996, “I Saw the TV Glow” is about a lonely teenager, Owen (played early on by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith), who bonds with a slightly older girl (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a shared love for “The Pink Opaque,” a show that resembles “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the relationship and the show look markedly different as Owen ages and reality starts to shift. Alissa Wilkinson admires Schoenbrunn’s storytelling, “which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare.”
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‘Paris, Texas’ (1984)
The German director Wim Wenders’s longstanding interest in American music and culture was present in ’70s road movies like “Alice in the Cities” and his English-language noir “The American Friend,” but with “Paris, Texas,” his European eye makes a familiar Southern landscape seem new again. There’s a little bit of disorientation baked into the story of a grizzled loner (Harry Dean Stanton) who wanders into a Texas border town without a name, a personal history or the ability to speak. Though he slowly recovers his memory and takes drastic steps to reunite with his seven-year-old son and his long-lost wife (Nastassja Kinski), Wenders’s hero has a fundamental openness that reflects the film’s absorbing, exploratory vibe.
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‘The Lighthouse’ (2019)
After scrupulously evoking the hardships facing exiled 17th century Puritans in his debut feature, “The Witch,” director Robert Eggers brings an equally textured and visceral punch to his follow-up, “The Lighthouse,” which takes place on a God-forsaken, wind-battered island off the New England coast in the 1890s. Shot in a black and white that mimics old photographs from the period, the film squeezes into the close quarters occupied by two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) who sink into paranoia and madness as their living conditions worsen. On creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Eggers seamlessly blurs the lines between physical space and head space.”
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‘A Tale of Winter’ (1992)
The second entry in Eric Rohmer’s impeccable “Tales of the Four Seasons” series — all of which are currently streaming on Max — “A Tale of Winter” opens with an idyllic summer fling that ends with Félicie (Charlotte Véry) inadvertently leaving her lover the wrong address to her new place. Five years later, the two have not reunited and Félicie is caring for their daughter while dating a pair of suitors, one her married boss (Michel Voletti) at a hair salon and the other a low-key librarian (Hervé Furic). Rohmer holds her fate (and her faith) in his hands, but Vincent Canby calls the seemingly inevitable climax “completely unexpected, uncomfortable, very funny and, finally, ambiguous.”
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‘Mikey & Nicky’ (1976)
Released by Paramount Pictures at a time when the auteur inmates ran the studio asylum, the writer-director Elaine May’s vital crime drama was like her version of a heightened John Cassavetes production, only with her distinctly spiky brand of dark humor. As Mikey and Nicky, respectively, she cast Cassavetes and one of his troupe members, Peter Falk, as lovable lowlifes whose friendship is tested when Mikey summons Nicky to a hotel room and asks for help getting away from a mob hit. What follows is a wild, irrational, dark-night-of-the-soul odyssey that pushes the boundaries of commercial cinema. J. Hoberman praised it as the unique buddy movie that “shows bromance from the point of view of its victims.”
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‘Dune: Part 2’ (2024)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” ended with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) joining Chani (Zendaya) and the Indigenous Fremen in their fight against the universal conspiracists who plunder the desert planet Arrakis for its precious “spice.” While the sequel continues its imposing world-building — and adds sandworm-surfing — it follows Frank Herbert’s novel closely, becoming the rare epic to question its hero’s messianic destiny, as Paul wrestles with the likelihood that his ascendance could lead to a holy war of inconceivable devastation. Manohla Dargis wrote, “The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in ‘Dune: Part Two,’ and it’s a blast.”
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‘Modern Times’ (1936)
Nearly a decade after the first “talkie,” Charlie Chaplin opted to keep his last performance as the Little Tramp silent, using sound to minimal (though exceptional) effect in his jaundiced take on the ills of the industrialized world. At once scabrously funny and disarmingly sweet, “Modern Times” follows the Tramp as he loses his job as a bolt-tightener at a factory, goes in and out of jail, and gets mistaken for a communist rabble-rouser, though he does find love with a streetwise gamine (Paulette Goddard). Noting its social commentary, Frank S. Nugent called it “a rousing, rib-tickling, gag-be-strewn jest for all that and in the best Chaplin manner.”
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‘RoboCop’ (1987)
Arriving in Hollywood after years of scandalizing art-house audiences with his Dutch thrillers, the director Paul Verhoeven (“Starship Troopers”) smuggles a bleakly satirical view of American violence and corporate chicanery under the guise of an effects-driven thriller. Peter Weller stars as Alex Murphy, a Detroit policeman who’s killed in the line of duty and then revived as a cyborg cop intended to clean up a crime-riddled city on behalf of the evil corporation that created the technology. The flickers of Alex’s humanity, however, alter his insidious programming. Our critic flinched at the violence, but admitted that “humor glimmers amid the mayhem.”
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‘Kwaidan’ (1965)
Drawn from Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese folk tales, Masaki Kobayashi’s visually arresting horror anthology tells four separate stories with no narrative overlap, which allows Kobayashi to give each its own supernatural texture. Much of the aesthetic language that would fuel the J-horror movement decades later with films like “Ringu” are present in stories like “Black Hair,” in which a samurai returns to an eerier version of the wife he divorced, and “In a Cup of Tea,” about the haunted soul of a samurai reflected in water. Bosley Crowther called it “a horror picture with an extraordinarily delicate and sensuous quality.”
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‘M’ (1931)
Widely considered the birth of the psychological thriller — and its subset, the serial killer movie — Fritz Lang’s astonishingly dark film about a child murderer who terrorizes Berlin is radical both for humanizing a monster and for warning about the dangers of mass hysteria. With the killer (Peter Lorre) eight months into his rampage and the police unable to track him down, local criminals start to take up the search themselves, in part because his exploits are affecting their business and they don’t trust the rule of law to bring him to justice. Mordaunt Hall called it “a strong cinematic work with remarkably fine acting.”
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‘High and Low’ (1963)
While rarely mentioned in the same breath as cinema studies standards like “Rashomon” and “The Seven Samurai,” Akira Kurosawa’s ingenious noir thriller “High and Low” deserves a place alongside them, turning an Ed McBain novel into twisty, stylized play on police procedurals. The Kurosawa favorite Toshiro Mifune stars as a shoe company executive whose plans to buy out the business unravel when kidnappers demand ransom money for abducting his son. The one hitch? They took his chauffeur’s son instead. It usually takes years for a film to earn the superlatives the critic Howard Thompson offered in his original review: “One of the best detective thrillers ever filmed.”
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‘Black Girl’ (1966)
A landmark in African cinema, Ousmane Sembène’s exceptional debut feature tackles the legacy of colonialism through the politically loaded story of a Senegalese woman who is more or less enslaved by her white French employers. Hired off the streets of Dakar, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) travels to a town off the French Riviera for an expected nanny job, but she is never allowed to leave the apartment and spends her days doing housekeeping work instead. As her hopes for greater freedom and prosperity diminish, she rebels in startling ways. In his 50th anniversary appreciation of the film, A.O. Scott called it “powerfully of its moment and permanently contemporary.”
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‘The Red Shoes’ (1948)
A love triangle rendered with spectacular vibrancy and emotion, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” translates the dark passions of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale into a multitiered story of romantic obsession, on and off the stage. The luminous Moira Shearer stars as a dancer torn between the brilliant composer (Marius Goring) who has adapted a ballet version of “The Red Shoes” just for her and the dark impresario (Anton Walbrook) who runs the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov. Their conflict reaches a crescendo in the ballet itself, which Powell and Pressburger render in a dazzling, colorful, 17-minute set piece. Bosley Crowther called it “a visual and emotional comprehension of all the grace and rhythm and power of the ballet.”
‘Cléo From 5 to 7’ (1962)
With this fiction feature, the French new wave director Agnès Varda brought some documentary techniques to bear on a real-time portrait of Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a singer and hypochondriac, as she awaits the results of a cancer test. Against an early-evening Paris backdrop, Varda follows Cléo through a 90-minute existential crisis that is full of spontaneous encounters, most notably a meeting with a young soldier who is preparing to leave for the war in Algeria. The life-or-death stakes of the biopsy give a vivid, bracing perspective to Varda’s character study. The critic Bosley Crowther wasn’t impressed by the film’s “fleeting moods” at the time, but its critical reputation is mostly sterling.
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‘Slacker’ (1991)
One of the true watershed moments in American indie cinema, this slice-of-life picture from Richard Linklater strings together the philosophers, conspiracy theorists, cranks and other assorted Austin, Texas, oddballs into a half-funny, half-profound celebration of outsidership. There was no model then for the film’s formless roundelay of fascinating talkers, but “Slacker” resonated with art-house audiences, launched Linklater’s career and expanded the possibilities of what low-budget films could do. Vincent Canby marveled that Linklater’s nonprofessional cast is “so amazingly effective that it’s hard to believe they didn’t make up their own lunacies.”
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‘Beau Travail’ (1999)
The films of the French director Claire Denis often feel more like poetry than prose, and they count on the audience’s intuition in piecing together their elliptical passages. But when the sounds and images are as seductive as those in “Beau Travail,” her loosely inspired take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” the experience isn’t as daunting as it might seem. Moving Melville’s seafaring tale to the striking landscapes of Djibouti, the film chronicles a love triangle among French Legionnaires in training. Stephen Holden called it “the visually spellbinding equivalent of a military ballet.”
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‘Paris Is Burning’ (1991)
For this landmark L.G.B.T.Q. documentary, Jennie Livingston spent six years immersing herself in the underground ball scene in New York City, where minority, gay and transgender people come together to “vogue” in joyous drag competitions. But far beyond detailing these events, “Paris Is Burning” casts a sympathetic eye on the individual performers, whose lives are often defined by poverty, ostracism and the still-raging AIDS epidemic. Vincent Canby admired Livingston for studying her subjects “with the curiosity of a compassionate anthropologist.”
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‘Rosetta’ (1999)
In their Palme d’Or-winning breakthrough, the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, deploy a rigorous, hand-held camera technique in charting the patterns and limits of a 17-year-old Belgian (Émilie Dequenne) on a near-feral quest to make ends meet. Living with her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux) in a broken-down trailer without running water, she frantically searches for work while dangling on the precipice of disaster. The film, wrote Stephen Holden, “addresses a great subject, the Darwinian struggle to survive and its dehumanizing effects.”
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‘Touki Bouki’ (1973)
In an African cinema largely defined by austerity and social realism, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Senegalese classic “Touki Bouki” stands out for its rule-breaking irreverence, inspired by Jean-Luc Godard. With little formal training and a minuscule budget, Mambéty liberated himself to work blackout gags and avant-garde touches into an impressionistic road movie about a cowherd (Magaye Niang) and a student (Mareme Niang) who scramble to raise money to leave Dakar for Paris. Vincent Canby praised the director for mixing “neorealism and fantasy to create a mood of unease and aimless longing.”
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‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1967)
Gillo Pontecorvo’s scrupulous depiction of insurgent and anti-terrorist tactics in the Algerian War of Independence proved so persuasive in its newsreel style that it required a disclaimer to let audiences know it was a work of fiction. Though hugely controversial in Europe for its treatment of the Algerian resistance and French torture tactics, “The Battle of Algiers” is such a cleareyed and accomplished vision of modern warfare that it has been studied by the Pentagon. Bosley Crowther called it “an uncommonly dynamic picture.”
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‘Foreign Correspondent’ (1940)
Though rarely cited among established Alfred Hitchcock classics like “North by Northwest,” “Vertigo” and “Psycho,” “Foreign Correspondent” is every bit as masterly, a subtle and generously entertaining piece of wartime intrigue made for and about fraught times. Joel McCrea plays a bored city desk reporter in New York who gets all the action he can handle as a foreign correspondent in Europe, but the assignment soon embeds him in a treacherous web of shifty diplomats and Nazi spies. The Times critic Bosley Crowther raved that the film “should be the particular favorite of a great many wonder-eyed folk.”
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‘Harlan County USA’ (1977)
This landmark labor documentary by Barbara Kopple brought cameras into coal country in 1973, covering the herculean efforts of 180 miners in southeast Kentucky to sustain a strike against the Duke Power Company. As the strike wears on, Kopple captures the rising tensions and violence between the two parties, with the company bringing in replacement workers and armed strikebreakers to intimidate their employees. More than once, even Kopple’s safety is put in serious jeopardy. The critic Richard Eder called it “a brilliantly detailed report from one side of a battle.”
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‘Hoop Dreams’ (1994)
For four years, the director Steve James and his crew followed two gifted Chicago high school basketball players as they pursued a long-shot ambition to make it to the N.B.A. and lift their families out of poverty. “Hoop Dreams” is about the impossible burden they’ve chosen to carry, one in which an errant free throw or a tweaked knee can have serious real-life consequences. The critic Caryn James called it a “fascinating, suspenseful film [that] turns the endless revision of the American dream into high drama.”
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‘In the Mood for Love’ (2001)
Few films are as ravishingly beautiful as Wong Kar-wai’s intoxicating film about Hong Kong in the early to mid-60s, starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, two screen icons at the peak of their powers. Leung and Cheung play lonely-hearts who form a special kinship because of their spouses’ neglect, but they’re reluctant to follow through on the intense romantic longing they feel for each other. Wong’s story of unrequited love in a changing city earned him the best reviews of his career, including one from the critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the film “a sweet kiss blown to a time long since over.”
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‘Persona’ (1967)
The opening minutes of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” shocked international audiences with its experimental imagery, but the remaining minutes are no less audacious in Bergman’s willingness to push his expected dramatic intensity to a new, more abstract realm. Liv Ullmann plays a famed stage actress whose mid-performance breakdown leads first to hospitalization and later to a retreat on the Baltic Sea, where her relationship with a nurse (Bibi Andersson) takes on peculiar dimensions. Bosley Crowther called it a “lovely, moody film which, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands.”
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‘Tokyo Story’ (1953)
The most revered of Yasujiro Ozu’s dramas is also one of the most accessible, a profound statement on the grief and laments of getting older and on the widening generation gaps of a newly westernized Japan. When an elderly couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) visit their adult children in Tokyo, the kids barely have time for them, but their dead son’s widow (Setsuko Hara) is a welcoming host. The critic Roger Greenspun wrote that the film “understands that a calm reticence may be the true heroism of ordinary old age.”
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