Battleship Potemkin.
Illustration: Everett Collection
Everyone knows about how great the Criterion Channel is, but have you heard about the Kino Film Collection? You should. The film distributor Kino Lorber — known for its arthouse and international releases — launched its own channel on Prime Video in November. For $5.99 per month, the collection includes new Kino Lorber releases like Chile ’76 and Four Daughters along with hundreds of catalog titles from acclaimed filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Bujalski, Jia Zhangke, Jafar Panahi, and Todd Haynes. It’s a dense, diverse catalog, so we’ve picked out a few of its great films in a rotating guide to get you started. We’ll keep this list updated semi-regularly going forward to highlight more of the great movies the service has to offer. For now, here are 20 films you need to see.
Year: 2019
Runtime: 2h 11m
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles
What a fascinatingly strange movie this one is. It’s technically sci-fi in that it’s set in the near future in a village in northeastern Brazil, where, well, weird things start to happen. Honestly, this film, which some have classified in the subgenre of “Weird Western,” is almost impossible to describe. Maybe this will help: Its greatest influence is the work of John Carpenter, even using one of the master’s compositions in an unforgettable scene.
Year: 2012
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Christian Petzold
The incredible German director Christian Petzold has received universal acclaim in recent years for films like Phoenix, Transit, and Afire. Like a lot of great renowned masters currently working in the 2020s, Kino has an early film, a way to see where it all began. In this case, it’s Petzold’s second collaboration with the amazing Nina Hoss in a film that won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival.
Year: 1925
Runtime: 1h 12m
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
There are certain films, mostly from the 1910s and 1920s, that now feel so much like templates for what would unfold over the next century of filmmaking. It’s impossible to watch Eisenstein’s silent masterpiece and not consider the influence it would have over so many filmmakers that tried to follow in its massive footsteps. In the most recent Sight and Sound poll, it finished 54th, actually a drop from some previous top ten placements. Despite its arguably waning reputation, it’s still an all-timer.
Year: 2019
Runtime: 2h 17m
Director: Kantemir Balagov
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Best Director Prize at Cannes, this is a simply unforgettable drama about the abject horror that exists in this world. It unfolds after the end of World War II, and one of its first major events is the accidental smothering of a three-year-old child. This is not something to watch if you’re looking for a pick-me-up, but it is a strikingly well-made, well-acted and unforgettable drama about trauma — a subject that feels just as timely today as it did in the postwar era, given the currently violent state of the world.
Year: 1970
Runtime: 1h 53m
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
One of his first widely acknowledged masterpieces, this Bernardo Bertolucci period piece was recently restored in 4K and is now exclusively available in the Kino Film Collection. It stars the phenomenal Jean-Louis Trintignant as a man who is ordered to assassinate a professor, but things get funky when he starts an affair with the target’s wife, played by Dominique Sanda. It was nominated for the Oscar for the Best Adapted Screenplay, and really made Bertolucci a household name for cinephiles.
Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 33m
Director: Xavier Legrand
A film that’s not unlike sinking into emotional quicksand, this French drama won the Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Film, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. It’s a domestic drama about a recently divorced couple and the impact their separation is having on their increasingly violent 11-year-old son Julien. It’s a brutal emotional journey but well-made enough to be worth the trip.
Year: 2016
Runtime: 2h
Director: Bill Morrison
A documentary like no other in the 2010s, this project is the work of the great Bill Morrison, an archival non-fiction filmmaker with a sharp sense of art and history. In 1978, over 500 film reels were found in the rubble under a hockey rink in Dawson City, Canada. They captured the gold rush of the era from the 1900s to the 1920s, providing a new window into unseen history. And they were accompanied by numerous lost feature films from the era, reminding us how much of old Hollywood has simply been forever lost.
Year: 2009
Runtime: 1h 32m
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
The writer/director of The Lobster and Poor Things broke through with this 2009 drama that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, really putting its creator on the map. A truly bizarre journey, it’s the tale of two parents who have basically kept their children prisoner in their home, cutting them off from society with a bizarre series of rules and restrictions. It’s an alternately funny and truly disturbing vision that made it clear that Lanthimos was a voice to be reckoned with from the beginning.
Year: 1973
Runtime: 1h 52m
Director: Bill Gunn
For years, this was one of the more underrated horror films of its era, but a few recent re-releases and re-appraisals have given it the attention it deserves, a half-century after its release. It stars Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) as an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after being stabbed with a cursed dagger. The new creature of the night falls for a woman named Ganja (Marlene Clark), but love isn’t easy for a vampire. A bomb on its release, it was even recut as a different film and then relatively buried until Kino Lorber commissioned a restoration, bringing it back to life.
Year: 1927
Runtime: 2h 28m
Director: Fritz Lang
It’s been almost a century since the Austrian expressionist Fritz Lang changed cinema forever with this insanely ambitious silent film, a foundational piece of art when it comes to not just all film sci-fi that would follow but other genres too. A vision of the future that’s still mesmerizing, it’s the kind of film that really could be a gateway to classic silent cinema for anyone afraid to venture down that path. It’s so accessible, fascinating, and consistently riveting. And it’s another case of a film that was underappreciated in its time, deemed too long and even panned by H.G. Wells himself.
Year: 2015
Runtime: 2h 6m
Director: Jia Zhangke
Chinese director Jia Zhangke is one of the best of his generation. His last four films premiered in competition at Cannes, and the Kino Film Collection has two of them, the searing A Touch of Sin and this fascinating triptych from 2015. Zhangke tells three connected stories set in 1999, 2014, and 2025 (a more distant future when the film came out than it is today). It’s a remarkably ambitious piece of storytelling.
Year: 1929
Runtime: 1h 35m
Director: F.W. Murnau
Another silent film! And this one rules. German expressionist F.W. Murnau directed one of cinema’s definitive vampire tales over a century ago with Max Schreck’s definitive portrayal of Count Orlok, a legendary creature of the night. An unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is quite simply formative when it comes to how vampires would be represented in film and pop culture in general. And it’s still so formally daring and unforgettable on its own terms too.
Year: 2004
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
One of Russia’s best modern filmmakers broke through with his first film, a coming-of-age drama that felt both universal and specific at the same time, earning the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival (and a Golden Globe nod for Best Foreign Language Film). It starts with the return of a father after over a decade, and a fishing trip to celebrate the reunion, but things are never that easy as the journey pulls two brothers further apart. A shocking domestic drama with deeply Russian roots, it made it clear that Zvyagintsev would be a filmmaker to watch.
The Sacrifice
Year: 1986
Runtime: 2h 26m
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Anyone who calls themselves a film lover simply has to get to know Andrei Tarkovsky. Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood, Mirror, Stalker — these are among the best films ever made. In the ‘80s, Tarkovsky left Russia and made two films, including this 1986 drama, produced in Sweden. Nearing the end of his life, Tarkovsky made a film that’s basically about trying to bargain with God, a brutal final act for a master.
Year: 1994
Runtime: 1h 43m
Director: Anh Hung Tran
The Vietnamese filmmaker Anh Hung Tran returned to the scene in 2023 with the widely acclaimed The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche. See his breakthrough on The Kino Film Collection in a film that made similar waves three decades ago, winning the Camera d’Or at Cannes and getting nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Lusciously shot by the great Benoit Delhomme, it’s a film about the servant of a once-respectable family shaken by the husband’s infidelity and reckless spending, that feels so tactile and sensual that it envelops the viewer more than passively entertains them.
Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 37m
Director: Ken Loach
The British filmmaker Ken Loach makes what are often called “kitchen sink dramas,” embedding social messages into stories of everyday, realistic characters. His films don’t hide their critiques of the broken systems of his country, including this 2019 drama about a man who is trying to keep his family together against the rising financial tide. It’s not Loach’s best film, but it’s a nice gateway to a great career that deserves your attention.
Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 58m
Director: Nadav Lapid
The Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid found his most international success with this Golden Bear winner from 2019 about a man who flees his country to start a new life in Paris. Tom Mercier stars in a film that is about big issues like national identity, but also feels intimately dangerous on a character level, a piece of work that defies expectations and simple descriptions. Just watch it.
Year: 2015
Runtime: 1h 21m
Director: Jafar Panahi
The Iranian director Jafar Panahi is not only one of the best living directors, he’s a hero, a man who has been told by his government that he can’t leave his home or make films, but he finds new ways to do so. Take his 2015 Taxi, a movie in which Panahi plays a taxi driver who merely listens to his passengers. A doc/fiction hybrid, it’s a statement of not just political rebellion but passionate love for the people of his country. (Note: Panahi’s great follow-up, Three Faces, is also in the Kino Film Collection.)
Year: 2008
Runtime: 1h 35m
Director: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin
There have been a number of great projects about Hurricane Katrina and its fallout, but none have had the visceral intimacy of this 2008 documentary that’s basically home movies of a couple trying to survive the rising waters. A fascinating you-are-there look at a waterlogged nightmare becomes even richer with the director-provided context regarding how race and class impacted this national tragedy.
Year: 2014
Runtime: 3h 16m
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of international cinema’s best, and the Kino Film Collection currently hosts one of his standout dramas, a 2014 film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Set in Anatolia, it uses elements of Chekhov’s The Wife and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to tell its own character-driven story about class and power in Turkey. Don’t be thrown off by that epic running time. It’s worth every minute.