The best movies on the Criterion Channel right now

John Ford’s Stagecoach was the 1939 Western epic that would truly cement the director as the go-to maestro of frontier cinema, and it’s an enduring film that continues to receive bountiful amounts of critical acclaim. Starring an ensemble cast made up of John Carradine, Claire Trevor, and the mighty duke himself, John Wayne, our story follows a group of travelers that board the titular buggy to get from Arizona to New Mexico. The riders all come from different walks of life, and each have their own aspirations, beliefs, and reasons for reaching the one shared destination amongst the bunch. A culturally significant picture that imbued the typical Western with a much heftier backbone of drama and social commentary, Stagecoach is a triumph like no other.

Before Disney’s animated interpretation of the 1757 Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale, French filmmaker Jean Cocteau would take a stab at the classic story. In this mesmerizing 1946 iteration, Belle (Josette Day) is one of four siblings. Her father (Marcel André) has his wealth commandeered by the government to pay off his mighty debts, and the disparate patriarch has no money to secure lodging on his journey home. Instead, he takes refuge in a mysterious chateau, where he soon awakens the castle’s master, a horrific beast (Jean Marais) that wants to kill Belle’s father for stealing one of his sacred roses for Belle. A bargain is struck between man and beast for Belle to be transported to the monster’s castle to be his captive instead. Featuring jaw-dropping production design, costuming, and fantastical trick photography, Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece continues to stand the test of time.

Life imitates art in Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½, a sprawling surrealist comedy about a film director, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) in the throes of an artistic crisis. Suffering from writer’s block on the cusp of his latest film production, Guido’s mind devolves from intense, philosophical ramblings about his new masterpiece into childhood memories — specifically, his adolescent years spent in a Catholic school and his experiences with a local prostitute. But the more the director wishes to escape into his personal recollections, the more the industry movers and shakers want him to hone his role as a director, socialite, husband, and lover. 8½ has an undeniable undertone of autobiography, a recurrent device that Fellini would continue to explore over the years, a theme perhaps best realized in his 1973 film, Amarcord.

Writer/director Wong-Kar-Wai is perhaps most famously known for films like The Grandmaster and In the Mood for Love, but 1994’s Chungking Express helped to truly engrain the auteur as an international visionary. Our story is split in two, each side depicting the tribulations of Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Cop 663 (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), police officers with love troubles. Cop 223 is dumped by his girlfriend but vows he will give her one month to return. In the meantime, he takes to buying cans of pineapple with a May 1 expiration date (the day the month will pass) and pining for a local drug-smuggler (Brigitte Lin). Cop 663, after a breakup of his own, begins frequenting a train-line snack station. His flight attendant ex-lover goes to meet him there, but Faye (Faye Wong), a shop employee, informs her that it’s his day off. She gives Faye a key to 663’s apartment, which Faye uses to break into the officer’s home, where she takes to cleaning and decorating. Oh, and she’s falling for 663. Worlds collide, stories weave, and characters cross paths in this unconventional but utterly mesmerizing film that was really nothing more than an exercise for Wong-Kar-Wai. The director whipped the story together and shot the film in less than two months, while he was taking a break from editing his historical epic, Ashes of Time.

Irène Jacob mesmerizes as the titular Véronique, and her double, Weronika, in the deeply layered The Double Life of Véronique. Our story takes place in both Poland and France and first centers on Weronika, a choir singer, as she comes into her own as a successful soprano. At the height of a solo performance, key events occur, which introduce us to Véronique, a French music teacher living in Paris — a sad woman who begins falling in love with a puppeteer, Alexandre (Phillipe Volter). To say more of the story would be doing it a disservice. It’s one to be experienced without the details. We will say that director and co-writer, Krzysztof Kieślowski, crafts a masterful duality of performances, settings, and themes, with recurrent motifs in both Sławomir Idziak’s painterly cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s profound score.

Ingmar Bergman is another industry name that most are familiar with, whether you’ve seen one of his films or not. For those who haven’t, Persona is a great place to start. The bulk of the narrative was conceived in hospital by Bergman over several weeks, while the writer/director was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. Our story focuses on Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), a stage actress that has stopped moving and speaking, and her live-in nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). In an effort to pull Elisabet from her fugue state, the duo retreat to an idyllic seaside cabin where Alma tends to the actress. As the film progresses, Alma’s psychological state starts to crumble as the worlds of both women begin colliding in unforeseen ways. Featuring top-notch performances from both Ullmann and Andersson, Persona would go on to influence countless filmmakers. Bergman’s dualistic themes of psychosis, sexuality, and identity can be traced to epics as recent as Robert Eggers’ seaside horror film, The Lighthouse. In fact, this is a fitting comparison, as Persona is often recognized as a kind of experimental horror film.