The intense color palette, lush Old Hollywood orchestral score, and anachronistic flourishes inch Lynch’s undisputed ’80s masterpiece and instant cult classic into a space without signposts that gets more disorienting the longer you stay in it.

Rivette’s adaptation of Balzac’s novella, about a hot-tempered Napoleonic war hero’s maddening courtship of the titular Duchess (Jeanne Balibar), is a costume drama unlike any other, and an absorbing exploration of the selfish passions and competing agendas rumbling beneath the surface of social gentility.

Perhaps Rivette’s crowning achievement and most enduring investigation of the porous boundary between reality and fantasy, this masterpiece follows eccentric magician Celine (Juliet Berto) and curious librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) as they attempt to rescue a young girl at the center of a gothic murder mystery in an apparently haunted house. An NYFF12 selection.

An aspiring movie star (Naomi Watts) finds herself in an obscure world of trouble upon meeting an enigmatic amnesiac brunette (Laura Harring) in this unique puzzle movie steeped in the romance and artifice of a bygone Hollywood. Widely considered the masterpiece of his late career and the ultimate expression of Lynch’s deep love-hate relationship with Hollywood. An NYFF39 selection.

The first completed episode of Rivette’s planned but never finished tetralogy “Les Filles de feu” chronicles a duel between a sun goddess (Bulle Ogier) and a moon goddess (Juliet Berto) for control of a magical diamond amid an uncannily stylized Paris. No Rivette film has plunged so deliriously into dream logic, and the results are never less than entrancing. An NYFF14 selection.

Lynch’s scrappy debut feature, five years in the making, is a nonlinear odyssey in which the hapless Henry (Jack Nance) navigates an inhospitable nocturnal landscape and struggles with the anxiety of fatherhood. A literal head movie—it might be taking place within someone’s traumatized skull—Eraserhead remains one of the definitive midnight movies of all time.

Wasting no time in establishing the ideas and moods that would concern him for the rest of his career, Rivette’s feature-length debut is an economical and unnerving tone-poem of Parisian paranoia, following a young student whose group of bohemian friends fall under the shadow of a devious and powerful conspiracy.

The tenth feature by Lynch—starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, and others, written one scene at a time and shot piecemeal over three years on murky consumer-grade digital video—is filled with disparate segments and parallel worlds, a singular and immersive work that sustains and amplifies the Lynchian sensation of dread to proportions never before felt. An NYFF42 selection.

Rivette’s sublime late masterpiece is a moody and formally audacious ghost story about a clockmaker (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and a mysterious woman (Emmanuelle Béart) whose sudden appearance sets in motion a sequence of otherworldly events, suggesting that everything in his life is connected in ways that exceed the bounds of rational explanation…

In perhaps the most remarkable of Rivette’s many explorations of the intersection of life and art, rendered in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, the relationship between theater director Sebastian (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) implodes amid rehearsals for his production of Racine’s Andromaque. An NYFF6 selection.

This Palme d’Or–winning, aggressively absurd road movie is Lynch’s first all-out comedy, following Lula (Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) as they set out for California in a Ford Thunderbird, only to be detained in the Texas hellhole of Big Tuna.

Sandrine Bonnaire turns in what might be a career-best performance as the titular saint in the first part of Rivette’s materialist take on Saint Joan, training his focus on Jeanne’s religious fervor as she leads troops into battle in Domremy and Orleans to reclaim the crown of the deposed Dauphin.

Chronicling Jeanne’s imprisonment and interrogation by the British and culminating in her burning at the stake, the second part of Rivette’s epic biopic wholly involves the audience in every detail of the road to Jeanne’s saintly fate, confirming her as one of his noblest, most resilient and complex heroines in an oeuvre filled with them.