Summary: The 39 Steps is a heart-racing spy story by Alfred Hitchcock, following Richard Hannay, who stumbles into a conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish moors. A chase in which he is both the pursuer and the pursued, as well as into an expected romance with the cool Pamela.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

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Summary: "Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous thought ... Blood Simple reinvented the film noir for a new generation, marking the arrival of a filmmaking ensemble that would transform the American independent...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

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Summary: "Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, writer-director David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange North American man named Nobody who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The crowning achievement of Claude Chabrol's career is a riveting study of class dynamics and the psychology of crime, starring Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire as a pair of outsiders who form a mysterious alliance that gradually goes haywire.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are the prey, a beautiful British couple working on their relationship while on holiday in Venice; Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren are the hunters who draw them into the sinister web of their opulent, old-world palazzo. What plays out is an unsettling, sadomasochistic seduction imbued with an atmosphere of sumptuous dread.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2020

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Summary: Ben du Toit is a schoolteacher who always has considered himself a man of caring and justice, at least on the individual level. When his gardener's son is brutally beaten up by the police at a demonstration by black school children, he gradually begins to realize his own society is built on a pillar of injustice and exploitation.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Three self-involved Edinburgh roommates take in a brooding boarder. When he dies of an overdose, leaving a suitcase full of money, the trio embark on a series of very bad decisions, with extraordinarily grim consequences for all. Macabre but with a streak of offbeat humor, this stylistically influential tale of guilt and derangement is a full-throttle bit of Hitchcockian nastiness.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2012

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Summary: In a dusty, under populated California resort town, naive southern waif Pinky Rose idolizes and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate "thoroughly modern" Millie Lammoreaux. When Millie takes Pinky in as her roommate, Pinky's hero worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. This dreamlike masterpiece careens from the humorous...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: The Criterion Collection 2011

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Summary: A married couple takes an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2015

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Summary: 'Strange, what love does.' The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble...David Lynch's first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A day in the life of Ming Ding begins as a pair of hammer-wielding loan sharks come to the door of Ming's squalid apartment. Their ultimatum, delivered in Mandarin, is as simple as it is virtually impossible to fulfill, needing to give them $800 by the evening or the debt will be doubled. With the family he supports half a world away, Ming has a single rain-soaked shift at his job in which to...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Barry, Gene

Summary: Martians invade a small town in 1950s California.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Distribution 2020

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Summary: In this graphic psychodrama, a grief-stricken man and woman retreat to a cabin deep in the woods after the accidental death of their infant son, only to find terror and violence at the hands of nature and, ultimately, each other. But this most confrontational work yet from one of contemporary cinema's most controversial artists is no mere provocation. It is a visually sublime, emotionally...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2010

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: At a neon-drenched Toronto strip club, a coterie of lost and damaged souls-- including a man haunted by grief, a young woman with whom he shares an enigmatic bond, an obsessive emcee, and a smuggler of rare bird eggs-- search for redemption as they work through the traumas of their mysteriously interconnected histories in an obsessive cycle of sex, pain, jealousy, and catharsis. One of the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A full-throttle espionage thriller, starring Joel McCrea as a green Yank reporter sent to Europe to get the scoop on the imminent war. It's wall-to-wall witty repartee, head-spinning plot twists, and brilliantly mounted suspense set pieces, including an ocean plane crash climax with astonishing special effects.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A small-town police chief concealing an explosive secret. A pair of ruthless drug dealers leave a bloody trail in their wake as they make their way from Los Angeles to Arkansas. And an enigmatic woman caught in the middle.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "Perhaps no director tapped into the sense of dread and mistrust that pervaded the 1970s more effectively than Alan J. Pakula, who, in the second installment of his celebrated Paranoia Trilogy, offers a chilling vision of America in the wake of the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., with the shock of Watergate near at hand. Three years after the murder of a leading...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere