In her greatest role, immortal icon of Chinese silent cinema Ruan Lingyu is magnetic—and astonishingly modern—as a prostitute who sacrifices everything to give her son a better life. The screening will be accompanied by a live piano performance by Donald Sosin.

D.W. Griffith’s wildly entertaining, pop-historical epic stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish as orphaned sisters swept up in the eye of the French Revolution as they suffer at the hands of the decadent aristocracy, cross paths with Robespierre and Danton, and face the guillotine. The screening will be accompanied with a live piano performance by Donald Sosin and will not include an intermission.

Part bucolic idyll, part city symphony, F.W. Murnau’s luminous silent masterwork is a virtuosic display of visual storytelling and a testament to an artistry that was all but lost with the onset of the talkie era. The screening of Sunrise will be accompanied by a live piano performance by Donald Sosin. Preceded by Stacey Steers’s Edge of Alchemy.

Victor Sjöström’s psycho-erotic tour de force features Lillian Gish in her final—and greatest—silent performance, as a woman going mad in a desert wasteland of leering men and a relentlessly howling wind. The screening of The Wind will be accompanied by a live piano performance by Donald Sosin. Preceded by Stacey Steers’s Night Hunter.

Evelyn Preer stars as an educated black woman dedicated to saving a school for impoverished youth in this remarkable work—one of Oscar Micheaux’s earliest surviving films—that displays the director’s sophisticated use of fractured narratives: numerous subplots, unexpected twists, and flashbacks that become films within the film. The screening will be accompanied by a live piano performance by Donald Sosin.

Love blossoms between a suburban widow (Jane Wyman) and her considerably younger gardener (Rock Hudson) in Douglas Sirk’s sharp indictment of hypocrisy in 1950s America, which served as an inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven. Preceded by Mark Rappaport’s The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk.

A brief encounter stretches into a decades-long affair for adulterous lovers played by Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer in this dreamily romantic, Production Code–defying tearjerker—the second (of three) Universal adaptations of Fannie Hurst’s novel.

Nicholas Ray’s blazing domestic horror show is a terrifying vision of the all-American family under siege from within starring James Mason as a suburban schoolteacher transformed into a megalomaniacal monster by a new “miracle” drug.

Katharine Hepburn plays a high-flying, thrill-chasing aviatrix entangled in an illicit affair with a married politician (Colin Clive) in this fascinating, proto-feminist pre-Code romance from trailblazing auteur Dorothy Arzner.

Vincente Minnelli’s star-studded melodrama features Richard Widmark as a dedicated psychiatrist, Charles Boyer as the philandering doctor whose fires he is tasked with putting out, and Gloria Grahame and Lauren Bacall as the psychiatrist’s wife and possible love interest, respectively.

A young opera singer (Ingrid Bergman) haunted by her aunt’s murder marries a handsome pianist (Charles Boyer) and settles down in her relative’s long-abandoned London mansion, where footsteps echo in the attic, gaslights dim, and secrets come to light…

Ida Lupino’s bitter anti–family values smackdown stars Claire Trevor as a tough-as-nails stage—er, make that court—mother who will stop at nothing to mold her tennis prodigy daughter into a national champion.

Douglas Sirk’s final Hollywood film—and perhaps his crowning achievement—is one of the all-time great weepies and a brilliant, devastating critique of racial and class division in America. Preceded by Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation.

Frame for frame one of the most gorgeous movies ever made, Max Ophüls’s sublime tear-wringer sees Joan Fontaine’s “unknown woman” recount to Louis Jourdan’s dissolute pianist a lifetime of unrequited love, brief encounters, and romantic regret in early-20th-century Vienna.

In Charlie Chaplin’s last American film—for which he synthesized a lifetime’s worth of memories, experiences, and wisdom into a miraculously moving, bittersweet summation of his art and worldview—Chaplin plays a washed-up clown whose final gift to the world is to give a suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom) a new lease on life.

Command of color and composition transforms Douglas Sirk’s most outré melodrama—about a devil-may-care playboy (Rock Hudson) seeking redemption after he blinds a widow (Jane Wyman)—into a luminous, metaphysical exploration of fate and spirituality. Preceded by Matthias Müller’s Home Stories.

You’re going to need tissues for this one… The most heart-piercingly human tale of the 1930s (and the inspiration for Ozu’s Tokyo Story) is an unsparing look at aging and the gulf between parents and children, directed by the ever-empathetic Leo McCarey.

The mother of all mother-daughter melodramas and the apotheosis of Joan Crawford: she delivers a ferocious, Oscar-winning performance as the titular tiger mom desperate to win the love of her monstrously bratty little girl. New 4K restoration.

Bette Davis’s tremulous, saucer-eyed intensity sells every ounce of this glorious excursion into wish-fulfillment fantasy in which she goes from dowdy spinster aunt to the glamorous other woman in the life of an unhappily married man (Paul Henreid).

Based on the same novel that would later yield Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, this startlingly pre-Code study of masochistic desire from John M. Stahl—the Ozu of classical Hollywood melodrama—achieves overwhelming heartbreak through elegant restraint.

Coming together at a police station, conflicted teenage outcasts Jim Stark (James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood), and Plato (Sal Mineo) face down their nagging parents and live up to the challenge of the local hotshots by playing chicken at a seaside cliff in Ray’s unforgettable look at nonconformity, which remains the standard for youth angst on film.

In Vincente Minnelli’s chronicle of small-town hypocrisy, Frank Sinatra gives one of his most textured portrayals as an embittered ex-GI who returns to his Midwestern hometown to write the next chapter of his life.

As the rough-around-the-edges millworker’s daughter determined to give her daughter a better life, Barbara Stanwyck created one of the most indelible—and heartbreaking—heroines of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

A reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s wry, tender romance-cum-social-commentary about the unlikely love between a Moroccan immigrant and a much-older German widow has endured as one of the director’s most popular films.

Two years before Vertigo, this fascinating, archly Gothic Argentine drama mined near-identical themes of erotic obsession and necrophilic desire via the story of a tormented man making over a look-alike woman in the image of his dead wife.

Set to a swelling Rachmaninoff score, David Lean’s Noël Coward adaptation, starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, is one of the most achingly romantic films ever made, as well as a piercing dissection of the psychology of an extramarital affair.

The longtime leading light of Egyptian cinema, Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with this bombshell psychosexual tale of tale of lust, jealousy, madness, and murder, which blends gritty neorealism with deep-dish noir-melodrama.

Based on a “true story” from the 1950s, Ripstein’s breakout third feature takes the patriarchal melodrama to its literal and bizarre extreme, blending the hysterics of masculinity-in-crisis dramas with startling violence and Buñuelian black humor.

Wrongly accused of having an affair, a wife and mother is cast out of her family in this deliciously overwrought, subversively Sirkian tearjerker from Italian melodrama maestro Raffaello Matarazzo.

This soul-shattering classic of Indian cinema combines searing imagery, joltingly expressionistic sound design, and an extraordinary central performance from Supriya Choudhury as a relentlessly self-sacrificing daughter supporting her ungrateful family.

This Palme d’Or–winning landmark of Soviet cinema—a shattering tale of young lovers wrenched apart by World War II—explodes off the screen with dazzling black-and-white cinematography.

Exquisitely heartbreaking, Mikio Naruse’s obsessive masterpiece stars the luminous Hideko Takamine as a young woman weathering changing fortunes and a futile love affair in postwar Japan.

One of the unquestionable masterpieces of Korean cinema, the emotional roller coaster The Housemaid tells the story of a bizarre ménage a trois that is formed between a music teacher, his wife, and their increasingly assertive housemaid.

Filipino cinema’s watershed work—and the first to screen at the Cannes Film Festival—is a wildly perverse mother-daughter saga, a revenge tragedy of ancient Greek proportions, and a gut-punching study of social injustice.

This feverishly perverse saga of amor loco—something like the necro-noir of Laura crossed with the tranced-out style of Last Year at Marienbad—is packed with enough outré flourishes to satisfy a card-carrying Dadaist.

Among the most devastating of master director Kenji Mizoguchi’s portraits of fallen women, this finely wrought, small-gesture melodrama stars the infinitely touching Kinuyo Tanaka as a once-proud concubine whose tragic fate is governed by the callous whims of men.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s shattering working-class tragedy stars Anna Magnani as a coarse ex-streetwalker who tries to start a new, better life in Rome for the sake of her teenage son (Ettore Garofolo)—but struggles to keep him from falling into a life of crime.

A love-’em-and-leave-’em lumberjack’s reckless ways come back to haunt him in this scalding, proto-feminist indictment of male chauvinism from Teuvo Tulio, the iconoclastic master of the hot-blooded Finnish melodrama.

The oft-cited crowning achievement of classic Chinese cinema, Fei Mu’s mesmerizing portrait of female desire and subjectivity ranks alongside Brief Encounter and the works of Mikio Naruse.

Fellini’s vision of the world as a whirling, bittersweet carnival begins with this indelible, tragicomic fable starring Anthony Quinn as a brutish circus strongman and a soulful Giulietta Masina as the sensitive spirit being crushed by him.

A radiant Catherine Deneuve plays the lovestruck mademoiselle at the center of Jacques Demy’s enchanting, macaron-colored cine-opera sung entirely to the lilting, light-as-meringue melodies of Michel Legrand.

Riffing on classic melodramas like All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, Pedro Almodóvar conjures a colorful universe of unforgettable women in this generous, openhearted tribute to female friendship and resilience.

Lars von Trier established his reputation as one of the most exciting—and provocative—filmmakers on the planet with this megaton meditation on faith, sexuality, and redemption featuring a revelatory Emily Watson as a troubled, zealously religious young woman whose husband is left paralyzed after an accident.

In this stirring, pro-adultery drama—the rare literary adaptation to surpass its source material—four days of passion fuel a lifelong romantic infatuation for an Italian-American housewife (Meryl Streep) and a National Geographic photographer (Clint Eastwood, who also masterfully directed).

Ang Lee’s cultural phenomenon—about two hired hands (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) whose summer tending sheep in isolated Wyoming foothills sparks a physical relationship that pervades the rest of their lives—was a monumental challenge to social norms.

A hallucinatory parable of pent-up passions run amok that unspools like a demented cautionary tale from a lost civilization, Guy Maddin’s visionary Careful follows the residents of the mythic mountain village of Tolzbad as they struggle to keep their desires and resentments in check.

DIY renegade George Kuchar’s debased scuzz opera is a deliriously overheated homage to/send-up of Golden Age histrionics—think a 1940s Otto Preminger film writ in filth and sleaze. Preceded by George Kuchar’s Hold Me While I’m Naked.

In Todd Haynes’s celebrated reimagining of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, a prosperous suburban couple (Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid) suffer a painful fall from the heights of social grace.

One of the greatest films of the 1990s, Terence Davies’s sublime memory piece is a poignant, richly textured evocation of childhood’s end aglow with Dream Factory nostalgia.

Ex–enfant terrible Leos Carax takes the ingredients of melodrama—family secrets, persecuted innocents, forbidden love, betrayal—and scrambles them into an audacious postmodern opera of artistic angst in which a writer gets sucked into a through-the-looking-glass rabbit hole of underclass grime and incest when he encounters an Eastern European war refugee claiming to be his long-lost sister.

Melodrama master Stanley Kwan weaves an entrancingly strange and sensual tale of ghosts, opium, and erotic death as the spirit of a 1930s courtesan returns from hell to search for her long-lost lover in 1980s Hong Kong.

Lee Chang-dong’s stunning saga of grief and catharsis is built around a mesmerizing central performance from Jeon Do-yeon (Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival) as a woman searching for reconciliation in the wake of a life-shattering tragedy.