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

Copies Available at Woodmere

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

Copies Available at Woodmere

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: Dixon Steele is an alcoholic screenwriter who has some success but is now in the midst of a long dry spell. One of his neighbors is Laurel Gray, a would-be actress and a smart cookie. Steele is a bitter, angry man who succeeds in insulting everyone he sees while drinking at noon in his usual hangout. Dix has taken a job adapting a trashy novel for the screen--but he doesn't want to read the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Columbia Pictures Industries 2003

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

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: An undercover cop gets so deep in his assumed identity that he starts to act like the criminals he's trying to capture.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

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 sly, merciless thriller where a best-selling author and therapist wants to help a client by making restitution for the money he owes to a gambler. After she meets the attractive cardsharp, her own compulsions take hold as he lures her into his world of high-stakes deception. Starring Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna, this film is a rich character study told with the cold calculation of a...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

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

Summary: "A ripped-from-the-headlines social-problem picture about inmates' rights that was inspired by a recent spate of uprisings in American prisons ... shot on location at Folsom State Prison, with real inmates and guards as extras"--Container.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft, a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation draws the attention of her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a diabolically clinical mind. An unorthodox love story and a truly unsettling thriller."--Container.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

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

Copies Available at Woodmere

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