This post is updated regularly as movies leave and enter the Kino Film Collection. *New additions are indicated with an asterisk.

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 — has its own streaming service and channel on Prime Video. For $5.99 per month, the collection includes Kino Lorber releases like The Aviator’s Wife and Barbara along with hundreds of catalog titles from acclaimed filmmakers like Jia Zhangke, Jafar Panahi, and Sergei Eisenstein. 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 15 films you need to see.

*3 Faces

Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 36m
Director: Jafar Panahi

One of the most fearless filmmakers in the world, Jafer Panahi has been under house arrest and banned from making movies since 2010 by the Iranian government. It hasn’t slowed him down. Everything he has made is worth a watch, especially the recent No Bears, but this is one of his more underrated dramas, one in which Panahi plays a variation of himself, a director traveling with an Iranian actress (Behnaz Jafari) as they try to track down a girl who may be in trouble. Poetic and political in equal measure, it’s a gem.

Barbara

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.

Battleship Potemkin

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.

The Conformist

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.

Dawson City: Frozen Time

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.

*The Force

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 32m
Director: Peter Nicks

This is one of the best documentaries ever made about policing in America. Peter Nicks follows the Oakland Police Department as it tries to fix a broken system of law enforcement, telling a fascinating micro story while also interrogating the macro history of policing in America, examining both its past and future. It’s remarkable how timely this remains eight years after it premiered at Sundance. And kinda depressing.

Nosferatu

Year: 1922
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.

The Return

Year: 2003
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.

*Sherlock, Jr.

Year: 1924
Runtime: 42m
Director: Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton was a singular talent, and this silent film might be the best representation of his remarkably skill. Keaton, who also directed, plays an unnamed projectionist who gets caught up in a mystery in the real world and then dreams of being a part of a case in the film world he adores from afar. Funny and smart, this is an essential American film.

The Scent of Green Papaya

Year: 1993
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.

Sorry We Missed You

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.

Synonyms

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.

*A Touch of Sin

Year: 2013
Runtime: 2h 9m
Director: Jia Zhangke

The great Chinese director won the award at Cannes in 2013 for Best Screenplay for this story of interconnected lives in modern China. Political and powerful, it weaves current issues from everyday life in China through its history and legends. Jia’s films all have that element, but this one seems both angrier and more lyrical than some of his work, somehow at the same time.

Trouble the Water

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.

Winter Sleep

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.

Continue watching?

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• The 30 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now

 Let’s add arthouse, world cinema, and Buster Keaton to your watchlists.