The collections in the collection

One of the most revered yet enigmatic figures to emerge in the wake of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache left behind a handful of unsentimental yet compassionate films that continue to be rediscovered and embraced by new generations of cinephiles. With a string of early shorts, he developed the rigorous visual style and themes—the bewildering complexities of romance and the obliviousness of awkward young men chasing it—that led to his magnum opus THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, an epic, cuttingly intimate record of post–May ’68 disillusionment as glimpsed via a rocky ménage à trois. Though he completed only one other feature—the similarly personal, Bressonian coming-of-age gem MY LITTLE LOVES—and another fascinating cycle of shorts exploring the relationships between language, image, performance, and meaning, Eustache’s small but influential body of work constitutes a vital trove of self-inquiry, structural exploration, and humanistic yearning.

Among the greatest filmmakers working today, Chinese master Jia Zhang-Ke is the foremost cinematic chronicler of the vast changes that have transformed his country over the last half century in its transition from communism to a globalized, increasingly market-based society. Beginning his career as an underground filmmaker working without state approval, he first attracted attention for his mid-length student film XIAO SHAN GOING HOME, which led to his revelatory feature debut XIAO WU—the first installment in his Hometown Trilogy, followed by PLATFORM and UNKNOWN PLEASURES, all set in his home province of Shanxi. While he transitioned to state-sanctioned filmmaking with 2004’s THE WORLD, his subsequent films—including modern masterworks like STILL LIFE and ASH IS PUREST WHITE—remain deeply critical of China’s modernization and the disillusionment it has wrought among the country’s youth. Employing rigorously composed long takes, unblinking naturalism, and audacious narrative structures, Jia captures the ironies, ennui, and often surreal metamorphoses of a country suspended between the past and an ever-accelerating future.

In 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made—but not everyone can be a winner. In his first-ever television series, legendary director Wong Kar Wai (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) orchestrates a sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers riding the wave of market reform in the wake of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s historic reopening. At the center is the daring self-made trader Ah Bao (Hu Ge), whose increasingly risky business maneuvers intertwine his fate with those of three women, each with her own ambitions. Luxuriating in Shanghai's food, fashion, and language, Wong delivers an exuberant love letter to his birthplace. A massively popular hit in China, BLOSSOMS SHANGHAI is an intoxicating epic tinged with Wong’s signature romanticism.

Regarded as one of Japan’s three most important golden-age filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu), Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society. Though he’d already directed dozens of movies by the midthirties, he would later say that he didn’t consider his career to have truly begun until 1936, with the release of the companion films OSAKA ELEGY and SISTERS OF THE GION, about women trapped both professionally and romantically. It wasn’t until 1952, however, that he broke through internationally with THE LIFE OF OHARU, a poignant tale of a woman’s downward spiral in an unforgiving society that paved the road to half a decade of major artistic and financial successes, including the masterful ghost story UGETSU and the gut-wrenching drama SANSHO THE BAILIFF, both showcasing the extraordinarily sophisticated compositions and long, elegant camera movements that would become his trademark.

With their blend of earthiness and dreamlike surrealism, the films of Federico Fellini dominated mid-twentieth-century art-house cinema. Though he began his career as a screenwriter for the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini, Fellini quickly developed his own personal, poetic style in early triumphs like LA STRADA—starring his wife and muse Giulietta Masina—and in increasingly phantasmagorical masterpieces like 8½, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, and AMARCORD. Larger than life, these internationally acclaimed works translated their creator’s memories, fantasies, and obsessions into teeming, carnivalesque images so inimitable they demanded the creation of a new adjective—“Felliniesque”—to do them justice.

Crime dramas, comedies, romances, tragedies, fantasies, documentaries, and, of course, coming-of-age stories—director Louis Malle did it all. This most unpredictable and eclectic of filmmakers enriched cinema over a nearly forty-year career that took him from the peripheries of the French New Wave (ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO, THE FIRE WITHIN) to the vanguard of American moviemaking (MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ). While his intellectually curious nature led him to pursue myriad paths—including a fascinating parallel career as a master of the nonfiction form—it’s his deeply personal films about the terrors and confusions of childhood, such as MURMUR OF THE HEART and AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS, that stand as perhaps his most indelible achievements.

Chilling, unblinking confrontations with the void of modern existence, the films of Michael Haneke dare viewers to reckon with the links between media, violence, capitalism, and inequality in an increasingly sterile, alienated world. With his first three theatrical features—THE SEVENTH CONTINENT, BENNY’S VIDEO, and 71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANGE—Haneke offered a disturbing vision of an Austrian society so emotionally numb it could only be roused by the shock of sudden violence. His harrowing dissections of contemporary malaise reached new heights of controversy and acclaim with much-debated international sensations like the dread-inducing home-invasion thriller FUNNY GAMES and the startling psycho-erotic drama THE PIANO TEACHER, which firmly established him as one of contemporary cinema’s most daring and provocative artists.

In this new program, critic Imogen Sara Smith introduces one of Japanese cinema’s classical masters—a virtuoso of melodrama who specialized in portraying the personal and social struggles of women with supreme sensitivity. In a career that spanned four decades, he directed nearly ninety films, including silent dramas like APART FROM YOU, EVERY-NIGHT DREAMS, and STREET WITHOUT END, in which he poignantly etched the experiences of working women carrying on in the face of everyday disappointments and compromises in an often cruelly sexist society. Continuing to explore these themes throughout his career, Naruse’s artistry reached its zenith in the 1950s, when, working with renowned leads like Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara, he directed a string of devastating melodramas—including LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS, FLOATING CLOUDS, FLOWING, and WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS—that elevated the genre to heartrending new heights, abetted by a feeling for delicate, rhythmic editing that could build with subtle but shattering emotional force.

The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are just as searing. The first serious phase of the director’s career came during the postwar era with DRUNKEN ANGEL and STRAY DOG, striking noirs that marked the beginning of his long-running collaboration with explosive leading man Toshiro Mifune. In the early 1950s, Kurosawa achieved worldwide fame with RASHOMON, a landmark in nonlinear storytelling that ignited international interest in Japanese cinema. In the years that followed, the auteur carried on a fruitful dialogue with the West, drawing on everything from Shakespeare to Dashiell Hammett and perfecting cinematic techniques that would prove influential to such disparate filmmakers as George Lucas and Sam Peckinpah. Kurosawa closed out his career with a string of late masterworks, including RAN and DREAMS, epic ruminations on human nature that make visionary use of color.

One of the most innovative and enigmatic directors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette approached filmmaking as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure of the imagination, crafting sprawling, immersive works that unfold as labyrinths, games, and puzzles to be deciphered. Blurring the boundaries between narrative and improvisation, fiction and reality, his films invite audiences to witness not just a story, but the very process of storytelling itself. Whether turning the streets of Paris into a playground in open-air fantasias like CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and LE PONT DU NORD or exploring mysterious interior states in mesmerizing dramas like L’AMOUR FOU and LA BELLE NOISEUSE, Rivette evokes a world both grounded and dreamlike, where every visual choice seems to unlock a door to deeper layers of meaning.

Yasujiro Ozu was Japanese cinema’s great poet of everyday life, and, 120 years after his birth, he remains one of the most significant film artists who ever lived. From the late 1920s to the early ’60s, Ozu explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional values, especially as played out in relations between the generations. Though he is best known for his 1953 masterpiece TOKYO STORY, Ozu began his career in the silent era in a looser mode, with comedies like I WAS BORN, BUT . . . and gangster movies like DRAGNET GIRL. He then gradually mastered the domestic drama during the war years and afterward, employing both humor, as in GOOD MORNING, and distilled drama, as in LATE SPRING, before the final blossoming of his art in such late color triumphs as AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON. With its instantly recognizable hallmarks—static shots, often from the vantage point of someone sitting low on a tatami mat; patient pacing; moments of transcendence represented by the isolated beauty of everyday objects—Ozu’s rigorous style has influenced filmmakers as various as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, and Paul Schrader.

In a string of visionary films that challenged the audience’s perceptions of time and space, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky created a cinematic language all his own, one in which weighty philosophical themes found expression in images of haunting, spectral beauty. Ranging from the transcendent medieval drama ANDREI RUBLEV to meditative sci-fi epics like SOLARIS and STALKER, his enormously influential masterpieces are consistent in their astonishing ambition and profound insights into spirituality and metaphysical experience.

The seasons may change, but the follies of the heart are constant in this ineffably lovely quartet of films by Eric Rohmer, one of cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of the pangs and perils of romance. Set throughout France, Tales of the Four Seasons is a cycle to stand alongside the director’s two earlier acclaimed film series, Six Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs. By turns comic and melancholic, breezy and richly philosophical, these bittersweet tales of love, longing, and the inevitable misunderstandings that shape human relationships probe the most complex of emotions with the utmost grace.

Once every decade, “Sight and Sound” magazine has polled film critics from around the world and issued a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Ever since the first poll in 1952, the “Sight and Sound” list has played a central role in film culture, sending movie lovers on obsessive viewing quests to watch them all, as well as catalyzing debates around the assumptions and biases that shape the canon. With over 1,600 critics contributing ballots, 2022’s edition is the most expansive yet, resulting in a list that includes old favorites like TOKYO STORY, THE RULES OF THE GAME, and SEVEN SAMURAI and new entries such as WANDA and CHUNGKING EXPRESS—as well as a new champion in the number-one spot, now occupied by Chantal Akerman’s singular masterpiece JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. Drawing from Janus Films’s library of essential art-house classics, we’re pleased to be able to present so many of the poll’s selections—you won’t find as many of the consensus greats on any other streaming service.

A singular, iconoclastic artist, Robert Bresson left behind an astonishing body of work, defined by the search for what he called “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” In a long, visionary career that began in the 1940s and ended in the 1980s, he continually refined the strict precision of his famously ascetic style—abolishing psychology, professional actors, and ornate camera work, and instead concentrating on the exactingly choreographed movements of his “models” (as he called his performers) and the anguished solitude of his martyred characters. In indelible visions of suffering and salvation like PICKPOCKET, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, and MOUCHETTE, he stripped cinema to its essence to reveal nothing less than the very soul of his subjects.

The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh’s films inhabit a register of tragicomic despair that, thanks to their unwavering compassion, never slips into miserabilism. From his early slice-of-life portraits of Thatcher-era Britain (MEANTIME, HIGH HOPES) to his award-winning international triumphs (NAKED, SECRETS & LIES), Leigh plumbs the darkest depths of the human condition without ever losing hope.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he drew from Marxism and Catholicism; and he lived a thoroughly modern, openly gay life while looking to the distant past for inspiration and comfort—was matched by the multifariousness of his artistic output as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around public intellectual. Outside Italy, though, he remains best known for his restless and subversive body of film work. After scripting the sly sexual satire IL BELL’ANTONIO, he soon moved to directing, applying Catholic iconography to gutter-level tales of street life like MAMMA ROMA, which gave Anna Magnani one of her greatest roles as a middle-aged sex worker. From there, the outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the Orson Welles–starring short LA RICOTTA and the stark reimagining of the Christ story THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW to the shocking savagery of PORCILE and the extravagantly bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (THE DECAMERON, THE CANTERBURY TALES, ARABIAN NIGHTS). Though Pasolini’s career was cut tragically short by his brutal, still-unsolved murder, he remains—one hundred years after his birth—one of the most revered and controversial artists of the twentieth century.

Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’s feeling for rhythm and movement to early dance films like DANCE IN THE SUN and BULLFIGHT and to kinetic city symphonies like BRIDGES-GO-ROUND and the Academy Award–nominated documentary SKYSCRAPER. Though she directed only a handful of features—including the controversial beatnik bombshell THE CONNECTION and the nonfiction queer-cinema classic PORTRAIT OF JASON—they stand as taboo-busting landmarks of the American underground that pointed the way toward a radical counter-cinema.