TIFF Cinematheque relaunches with screenings of the Essential 100 films, with many restored or rare archival prints.
Some of the most famous films from the list play exclusive engagements over the course of the fall, screening multiple times each day.
Rainer Werner
Fassbinder
West Germany
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, achieved his greatest critical and popular success with his remake of Douglas Sirk's Rock Hudson-Jane Wyman melodrama All That Heaven Allows.
Pedro
Almodóvar
Spain/France
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has become an international household name for his vibrant, eye-poppingly colourful postmodern melodramas, crackling with the unbridled energy of his marvelous actresses.
Jean-Pierre
Jeunet
France/Germany
An international sensation on its release, French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sumptuous Amélie launched Audrey Tautou to stardom as the winsome young heroine whose rich fantasy life renders Paris a playground of the imaginati...
Andrei
Tarkovsky
Soviet Union
Masterfully using long, mobile shots to invest his stark, brooding landscapes with an almost mystical power, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky has been a direct influence on such major contemporary filmmakers as Béla Tarr, Theo Ang...
Woody
Allen
USA
Woody Allen's most popular and endearing film—and one of the few comedies to ever win the Academy Award® for Best Picture—tells the retrospective story of the relationship between Alvy Singer (Allen), a stand-up comedian carrying...
Francis Ford
Coppola
USA
Francis Ford Coppola's hallucinatory Vietnam epic is sometimes overshadowed by the legend of its own famously troubled production, but the film that emerged remains one of the most ambitious and awe-inspiring war movies ever made...
Louis & Auguste
Lumière
France
Cinema was "born" in 1895 when an audience paid to watch a screening in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café in Paris, and from very early on it began to take two divergent but fundamentally unified paths: that of reality as define...
Jean
Vigo
France
An alternately comic, tragic, fantastic and hauntingly beautiful reverie on love lost and regained, this final work from the pathbreaking French director Jean Vigo—completed shortly before his tragically premature death at 29—chr...
Michelangelo
Antonioni
Italy
The succès de scandale of the 1960 Cannes film festival, Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist masterpiece tells of the inexplicable disappearance of a wealthy young woman on a rocky island during a pleasure trip.
Gillo
Pontecorvo
Algeria
Gillo Pontecorvo's docudrama recounting of the Algerian National Liberation Front's (FLN) battle against their French colonizers in the 1950s has lost none of its cutting insight into the dynamics of imperialism and terrorism (of...
Sergei
Eisenstein
Soviet Union
Sergei Eisenstein's earth-shaking agitprop classic, taking inspiration from a real-life mutiny on a Russian naval vessel prior to the aborted 1905 revolution, sought to remake cinema as a revolutionary art form with Eisenstein's ...
Vittorio
De Sica
Italy
Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award®-winning neorealist classic employs a helplessly heart-tugging story to capture, with documentary immediacy, the poverty and desperation of postwar Italy.
D.W.
Griffith
USA
Legendary and still controversial, D.W. Griffith's Civil War epic has been celebrated for virtually inventing the modern cinema and castigated for its unabashed racism and heroization of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ridley
Scott
USA
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi neo-noir city symphony—envisioning a dystopian 2019 Los Angeles as a cacophony of decaying neons and perpetual acid rain—still feels eerily prescient today.
David
Lynch
USA
A postmodern suburban nightmare from David Lynch, the premiere cinematic excavator of the dark lusts and terrifying violence beneath Ozzie-and-Harriet small-town Americana, Blue Velvet was the director's critical and commercial b...
Lars
von Trier
Denmark/Sweden/France/Netherlands/Norway/Iceland
Lars Von Trier's raw, controversial drama was the dry run for his famed "Dogma 95" movement, yoking the signifiers of naturalism (handheld cameras, location shooting) to an almost magic realist fable of faith and redemption.
Jean-Luc
Godard
France
Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, propulsive and poetic ode to Hollywood B-films and macho fatalism is one of the key films of the modern cinema (if not the key film), jettisoning the conventional methods of "professional" filmmaking—seam...
Howard
Hawks
USA
A box-office failure upon its initial release, Howard Hawks' gaspingly funny, machine gun-paced screwball comedy has since been reclaimed as a masterpiece of the genre.
Michael
Curtiz
USA
The definitive film of Golden Age Hollywood, Casablanca is one of those rare films that exists beyond criticism.
Marcel
Carné
France
Often referred to as France's Gone With the Wind, Marcel Carné's lavish historical romance was made under the Nazi occupation, where the years-in-the-making production reportedly served as a haven for Resistance members.
Roman
Polanski
USA
As bitingly contemporary as it ever was, Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne's seamlessly retro salute to the classic private-eye film blends an impeccable recreation of the past with Watergate-era evocations of endemic ...
Jean
Rouch
France
A landmark of the cinéma-vérité movement in documentary filmmaking, Chronique d’un été is a collaboration between sociologist Edgar Morin and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who in 1960 invited a group of young Parisians to he...
Wong
Kar-wai
Hong Kong
A visually dazzling and endlessly rich fusion of offbeat romantic comedy and coolly postmodern reverie, acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express has become a signature film of millennial cinema, an announcement...
Giuseppe
Tornatore
Italy/France
The ultimate love letter to the movies, Giuseppe Tornatore's heartwarming tale follows famous filmmaker Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) as he returns to his small Sicilian hometown and reminisces about his childhood, especially his ti...
Charlie
Chaplin
USA
From its famous opening where the Little Tramp is discovered asleep in the lap of a newly erected statue, City Lights is essential Chaplin.
Fernando
Meirelles
Brazil/France
Combining the cinema of social consciousness with the dynamic visual language of music videos and advertising, Fernando Meirelles' decade-spanning epic focuses on the slum children of the Rio de Janeiro favelas, trapped in a neve...
Agnès
Varda
France
Agnès Varda's celebrated debut feature is a film of enduring depth and fascination, unfolding nearly in real time yet with the structure of a fairy tale.
Stanley
Kubrick
UK/USA
Stanley Kubrick's controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel takes place in a simultaneously authoritarian and decadent near-future London where gangs of teenage "droogs" rob, rape and kill with abandon while an iron-fist...
Bernardo
Bertolucci
Italy/France/West Germany
A gripping examination of the intersection of sex and politics, Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s acclaimed novel is an opulent palimpsest of Freud and Marx, Godard and Vogue.
Ang
Lee
Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China
Triumphantly bringing wuxia (a traditional Chinese genre focusing on the adventures of heroic martial artists) to the West, Ang Lee's swordplay epic won four Academy Awards® and became the highest-grossing foreign film ever relea...