Essential Art House, Volume I (Beauty and the Beast / Grand Illusion / Knife in the Water / Lord of the Flies / Rashomon / Wild Strawberries)

This fall, Janus Films and the Criterion Collection introduce a new line: Essential Art House, indispensable cinema classics in simple, affordable editions. For Volume 1, we're pleased to select six of the greatest films from around the world, from directors Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Peter Brook, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Renoir.

All will be available separately, or in one box set. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film-lover, this is precisely where to begin. Titles include:

Grand Illusion
Jean Renoir's pacifist masterpiece stars Jean Gabin as a French World War I POW held by Erich Von Stroheim's German captain. One of the greatest antiwar films ever made, as well as a rousing prison-escape adventure, Grand Illusion is an exemplar of the 1930s poetic realist movement.

Beauty and the Beast
Jean Cocteau reinvented the fairy tale for the cinema with this enchanting, exquisitely realized vision of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont's fantasy romance. With all manner of unparalleled visual effects and photographic tricks, Cocteau makes the spellbinding tale of transformative love both ethereal and tangible, and his indelible images haunt the cinema like no others.

Lord of the Flies
Under the direction of Peter Brook, William Golding's classic fable, about a swarm of young boys who, without adult supervision, devolve into chaos after crash-landing on a remote island during wartime, becomes an unforgettable work of cinematic horror. Shot with almost verite camera work, Lord of the Flies takes a radical approach to Golding's metaphor, grounding it in a terrifying reality.

Wild Strawberries
Weaving a tapestry of memory and dreams, Ingmar Bergman delves into the past of aged professor Isak Borg, en route to receive an award from his alma mater for a life he no longer understands. Following directly on the heels of his international breakthrough The Seventh Seal, the alternately warm and nightmarish Wild Strawberries cemented Bergman as the leading art-house visionary of his era.

Knife in the Water
A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller, still one of the greatest feature debuts in film history. With Knife in the Water, Polanski revealed his delight in exploring sexual and class boundaries with ruthless precision.

Rashomon
The murder of a man and the rape of his wife in a forest grove--seen from four different perspectives. Toshiro Mifune explodes as the feral bandit who may or may not be guilty of these crimes in Akira Kurosawa's meditation on the nature of truth; is a classic, humane allegory that transformed narrative cinema as we know it and turned its director into an international sensation.