“Closely Watched Trains” (dir. Jiří Menzel, 1966)

In a 2023 video for Criterion Collection’s “Criterion Closet” series, in which filmmakers choose titles from the home video distributor’s archive to take home with them, Aster’s first film was “Closely Watched Trains.” Jiří Menzel’s Czechoslovak Oscar winning film, which focuses on a young man working as a train dispatcher during World Wair II, was also chosen by Aster as a selection for a Film at Lincon Center series he curated. 

According to the director, the film and his own “Beau is Afraid” have a lot in common; namely, they’re both about “a man who really needs to come.”   

“Daisies” (dir. Věra Chytilová, 1966)

Aster has an evident soft spot for Czech cinema from the ’60s; another choice of his during his Criterion Closet interview was “Daisies”: a 1966 film from Věra Chytilová satirizing class, authoritarianism, and the patriarchy.  

“Amazing ending,” Aster said about the surrealist film, which focuses on two women named Marie engaging in bizarre pranks. “Makes you sick.” 

“Invention For Destruction” (dir. Karel Zeman, 1958)

Another Czech film Aster selected in his Criterion Closet video is “Invention for Destruction”: a 1958 sci-fi adventure film from Karel Zeman famous for combining live-action actors with various animated forms. Aster named the film as a major influence on the partly animated sequence from his own “Beau is Afraid.” 

“The Seventh Continent,” “Benny’s Video,” and “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance,” (dir. Michael Haneke, 1989-1994)

Aster is a massive fan of the works of Austrian auter Michael Haneke, and one of his selections from his Criterion Closet interview was the set collecting his first three movies: “The Seventh Continent,” “Benny’s Video,” and “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.” Collected by Criterion as the director’s “trilogy,” the three movies are unrelated in plot but explore similar themes of societal discomfort and emotional repression. 

Talking about each film in the trilogy specifically, Aster referred to “The Seventh Continent” as “one of the the most perfect films ever made and very upsetting;” “Benny’s Video” as a “great film about Nazi youth;” and “71 Fragments” as a “great trial run” for his later films like “Code Unknown.”  

“Cure” (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

Aster didn’t speak extensively about “Cure,” Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s classic psychological thriller film, during his Criterion Closet interview, but he evidently holds the movie in high regard. “There’s an argument to be made” that the film “is the greatest movie ever made,” according to the director. 

“Mr. Klein” (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976)

Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein” is a Kafkaesque French film about the Holocaust, following a Gentile art dealer (Alain Delon) who gets confused with a Jewish man of the same name and is targeted by the Nazi’s anti-semitic campaign. 

In his Criterion Closet video, Aster called the film “really brilliant,” and one that “gets the closest to Kafka. As a nightmare of persecution, it’s really untoppable.” 

“And Life Goes On” (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

Abbas Kiarostami’s “And Life Goes On” is considered the second film in the Iranian auter’s unofficial “Koker trilogy,” a series of films set in the titular small village; the other two are “Where Is the Friend’s Home?” and “Through the Olive Trees.” 

Aster selected the entire trilogy for his Criterion Closet video, but particularly praised “And Life Goes On,” a documentary-style film that blends fiction and reality to recount Kiarostami’s personal journey to check on the fates of the cast from his previous film following the 1990 Iran earthquake. “It’s really beyond the beyond,” Aster said about the film. “Just so beautiful and touching.”  

“La Poison” (dir. Sacha Guitry, 1951)

French director Sacha Guitry’s vicious dark comedy follows a deeply unhappy couple as they simultaneously fantasize about the ways in which they’ll murder each other. In his Criterion Closet video, Aster referred to the film’s opening, which sees Guitry come up to every member of his crew and tell him why he loves them, as the greatest opening credits in film history. 

“The New World” (dir. Terrance Malick, 2005)

Colin Farrell and Q’orianka Kilcher led the cast of this epic Terrance Malick historical feature about the founding of the original Jamestown settlement, and the film is gorgeous that it left Aster speechless in his Criterion Closet interview. “I can’t find the words, but this movie is immense to me,” he said. “I never use the word ‘transcendent,’ but watching this film was a trancsendant experience.” 

“Walkabout” (dir. Nicholas Roeg, 1971)

Nicholas Roeg’s survival drama “Walkabout” focuses on two schoolchildren stranded in the Australian outback after their father attempts to murder them, and their journey home with the help of an older aboroginal teenager. Aster selected the film in his Criterion Closet video, praising the opening sequence as “the best” in film history, and as something he goes “back to over and over again.”  

“Woman in the Dunes” (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

“Woman in the Dunes,” from Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara, is a surreal film about an entomologist who gets trapped living with a strange woman in a beachside town. Aster said in his Criterion Closest video that he gained renewed appreciation for the movie after rewatching it during the COVID-19 pandemic

“It really struck me as the perfect quarantine movie,” Aster said. “And one of the great films about men and women.” 

“Bigger Than Life” (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” stars James Mason as an ill school teacher who suffers from mood swings and pill addiction after undergoing experimental treatment with the cortisone hormone. Aster, speaking about the film in his Criterion Closet video, praised Mason’s performance and called it “very funny” and “very crazy.”  

“Brand Upon the Brain!” (dir. Guy Maddin, 2006)

“Brand Upon the Brain!,” an ultra-low budget surrealist silent film from Guy Maddin about a man returning home to his estranged mother while she’s on her deathbed, was a huge inspiration for Aster while he was starting out. In his Criterion Closet video, Aster revealed that he “was just ripping him off nonstop.” 

Aster further revealed he saw the film in theaters during its original roadshow release at the Egyptian Theater with Udo Kier narrating. “It was maybe the best experience I’ve had in a movie theater.” 

“Che” (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2008)

What’s your choise for Steven Soderbergh’s best movie? Aster’s is “Che,” the director’s two part biopic of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In his Criterion Closet video, Aster referred to the movie as a “masterpiece,” and even speculated that Soderbergh’s temporary retirement from film came due to the movie not getting the attention it deserved. 

“I get it. If I made ‘Che’ and nobody paid attention, I would just say ‘fuck you’ and stop,” Aster said.  

“Secret Sunshine” (dir. Lee Chang-dong , 2007)

One of Korean auter Lee Chang-dong’s most acclaimed films, “Secret Sunshine” stars Jeon Do-yeon as a woman who moves to the town her husband grew up in following his death. Aster is a huge fan of Lee, calling him in his Criterion Closet interview “one of the great filmmakers working today,” and called “Secret Sunshine” “so special and strange.” 

“Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (dir. Paul Schrader, 1988)

Part biography of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, part adaptation of several of his most famous novels, “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” is, according to Aster, “almost certainly” the best film of director Paul Schrader’s career. 

“What he’s doing with artiface here, what he’s doing with structure, it’s just brilliant,” Aster said in his Criterion Closet video. 

“Vertigo” (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

“Hitchcock’s most personal and perverse investigation into his own obsessions  — with women (that is, with a specific type of woman — elegant and cold and always unknowable), with artifice, with control… In its way, it might be the most beautiful and disturbing movie ever made about the sickness inherent in ‘directing,'” writes Aster in his comments from the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, which he submitted a top 10 ballot too. 

“Swooningly romantic, gloriously nihilistic, and as close to a dream (ghostly and ethereal and perfectly elusive) as the movies have ever gotten.”

“Barry Lyndon” (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

“The funniest, the most stately, and at once the loveliest and most alienating of Kubrick’s films,” Aster commented in another title from his Sight & Sound ballot.

“Everything here feels perfectly judged — from the ultra-deliberate tempo of its scenes to the uncannily measured line readings to the famously immaculate slow zooms to that sudden, hilarious shift to handheld when cool heads finally cease to prevail. Also, Leon Vitali as Lord Bullingdon!”

“Raging Bull” (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1980)

“Made after Scorsese hit rock bottom, ‘Raging Bull’ sprang from what he called ‘a kamikaze way of making movies’ and it feels like one of the most nakedly confessional and least compromised American films ever made at a studio,” Aster explained of his Sight & Sound pick.

“Scorsese’s ode to the wretch is a mammoth wail of anguish and impotence, and a work of radical compassion. A portrait of an emotional illiterate that carries overwhelming emotional power.”

“Playtime” (dir. Jacques Tati, 1967)

“One of the colossal achievements in world-building, comic or otherwise, and the most generous celebration/lampooning of human civilization I know,” Aster commented of this film on his Sight & Soudn ballot.

“Shot in 70 mm — with every plane inventively utilized in any given shot — ‘Playtime’ is a grand-scaled panoramic gag machine of peerless grace and precision. Its benevolent, godlike gaze could almost be described as entomological. From set piece to dazzling set piece, the vast breadth of visual and aural detail — always organized to an inch of its life, even when the action is thrown into carnivalesque chaos — is a marvel to behold.”

“A Serious Man” (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)

“The prologue alone gets it on this list!” Aster said, also for Sight & Sound. “No movie has ever gotten at Jewishness — or Jewish anxieties, Jewish pessimism, Jewish interior design — in the way that ‘A Serious Man’ does. Profoundly funny and profoundly serious. ‘What’s going on?!'”

“Shoah” (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

“Among the catalog of unforgettable moments in ‘Shoah,’ one of the most devastating and revelatory is that in which Simon Srebnik, a survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, returns to the Polish village of his upbringing,” Aster commented on his Sight & Sound ballot.

He continued: “In one sustained, stomach-turning scene — serving as a document of a homecoming (both honestly captured and all-but-choreographed by the purpose-driven Claude Lanzmann) and a portrait of a community’s ingrained, barely concealed bigotry — a queasy answer to the question ‘how could the Holocaust have ever happened?’ gradually dawns on the spectator, as the casual antisemitism of Srebnik’s neighbours is too-easily coaxed out by Lanzmann, with Srebnik standing miserably amid the oblivious horde. Earlier in the film, when one survivor breaks down, pleading with the unflappable Lanzmann to stop the interview (‘it’s too horrible’), the master interrogator insists, ‘You have to do it.’ With Lanzmann, a ruthless, single-minded gatherer of testimonies, the moral imperative always wins out. But ‘Shoah’ is more than a necessity; it is a work of exquisite poetry.”

“Songs from the Second Floor” (dir. Roy Andersson, 2000)

“If one is to argue the supremacy of the image in cinema, Roy Andersson’s work represents a sort of dazzling apogee,” Aster said of this 2000 film, also known as also known as “Sånger från andra våningen.”

“No filmmaker has come closer to literalizing the analogy of a movie’s images being ‘like paintings,'” the writer/director continued. “Everything is built from scratch on a sound stage (even those outdoor scenes!), no detail left to accident. His humour is sublime — informed by a very Swedish pessimism (see his brilliant short ‘World of Glory’ for the grimmest example) — and his vignettes (Buñuel by way of Tati by way of Kafka in aphoristic mode) are among the great gifts in modern movies.”

“The Color of Pomegranates” (dir. Sergei Parajanov)

Given the dreamlike visual aesthetic that Aster has established for himself through two movies (and a trailer for a third), it’s hardly surprising that he’s a fan of Sergei Parajanov’s experimental classic “The Color of Pomegranates.” The film is ostensibly about the life of Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but his story is told in a nonlinear style that prioritizes striking images over plot. The end result is a film that blurs the line between cinema and poetry — and helped inspire “Midsommar.” Aster has said that he screened “The Color of Pomegranates” for his production team as inspiration for the folk horror film’s set design —CZ

“Come and See” (dir. Elem Klimov, 1985)

“‘Come and See’ is among the most vividly realized war films ever made; a work of truly lacerating power and endlessly beguiling strangeness,” Aster wrote in a 2020 essay for Film Comment. “As a travelogue of hell, a catalog of horrors, and a single-minded transference of never-to-be-resolved historical traumas, ‘Come and See’ has not, to my knowledge, been topped. If it ever should be, the result would be unendurable.”

“Defending Your Life” (dir. Albert Brooks, 1991)

“It has seemed to me for a long time that there is far too little screaming about Albert Brooks,” Aster wrote in a 2021 essay for The Criterion Collection. “His films are true marvels of wit, originality, and penetrating insight—all of them treasured in knowing circles but none quite given their due in their own time. [‘Defending Your Life’] my personal favorite among Brooks’ most generously piled beguilements, is obviously one of the great romantic comedies ever made, and about as ripe for rediscovery as they get.”

“Panique” (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1946)

“I saw this film pretty recently and was really surprised that it hasn’t been more canonized,” Aster said of Duvivier’s 1946 Parisian thriller: one of eight films included in The Criterion Channel’s “Ari Aster’s Adventures in Movegoing” series). 

“This is a really radical film. The only other film that I know that did anything like this was Clouzot’s ‘Le Courbeau,’ which I love, but I don’t think it’s the film that this is… He’s calling the French to account for how they dealt with World War II. It’s a film about mob justice and prejudice.”

“Hobson’s Choice” (dir. David Lean, 1954)

Praising the production design and acting of “Hobson’s Choice” at length, Aster told The Criterion Channel that Lean’s 1954 comedy skews cuter than his typical taste.

“He’s playing with caricature, but it’s so beautifully drawn and beautifully performed,” Aster explained. “Charles Laughton is great in a part that really should be just like unebarable as the tyrannical father and owner of the shoe shop. And John Mills is incredible — so wonderful — as the cobbler. And Brenda de Banzie is just amazing as Charles Laughton’s daughter, Maggie.” 

“Sansho the Bailiff” (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

“‘Sansho the Bailiff’ is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen,” Aster said of Mizoguchi’s 1954 period drama in his 2018 list of favorites for The Criterion Collection. He reiterated his appreciation for the film in the aforementioned “Adventures in Moviegoing” series.

“It’s such a huge film I find it hard to talk about,” Aster said. “Whenever I’m asked ‘What is your favorite film?’ that is the answer I most often give.” The movie is based on Mori Ōgai’s short story and centers around two children sold into slavery.

“Hiroshima Mon Amour” (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)

“It’s just like the most haunted movie,” Aster said of Alain Resnais’ 1959 French New Wave romance, admiring the director’s innovative approach to genre and narrative structure. “What he’s doing with memory is so unique. It feels like he’s inventing a language that really breaks things open for so many artists afterwards. “

“The Headless Woman” (dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2008)

“She is such a remarkable filmmaker,” Aster told The Criterion Channel of Argentine writer/director Lucrecia Martel. “I love all of her films, but this is the one I love the most. Just as an exercise in alientation and disorientation. She’s putting us in the subjectivity of this concussed woman and the way that the film gets at the perspective of a confused person is just unlike anything I’ve seen. She takes these quotidian details and makes them menacing. She makes everything menacing.” 

“Beyond the Hills” (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2012)

“He’s making these films that are Swiss watches of narrative economy,” Aster told The Criterion Channel of Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu. “He has such impeccable judgment and he understands people so well that there’s never a false note. One thing that makes this film so great is that horrible things can happen — and people do terrible things to other people in this movie — but everybody has their reasons.”

“Persona” (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Aster told The Criterion Collection in 2018 that Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” made the biggest impact on him growing up. “It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s ‘Three Women,’ is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie,” he explained. Aster looked at the nightmare logic of “Persona” while making “Hereditary.”

“Cries and Whispers” (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

“‘Cries and Whispers’ strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death and sisterhood,” Aster also said. The filmmaker screened the movie for the entire “Hereditary” crew before production started, since both films deal with themes of suffering.

“Fanny and Alexander” (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

Aster’s final Bergman selection for The Criterion Collection in 2018 was the four-time Oscar winner “Fanny and Alexander.” “His films are entertainments — they’re fun, and they’re beautiful,” Aster says of Bergman. “I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be.”

“Autumn Sonata” (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1978)

Applauding Ingmar Bergman once more in The Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Movigoing” series, Aster noted that the “Autumn Sonata” writer/director and his film’s star Ingrid Bergman frequently butted heads on the set of the 1978 drama. He recommended the behind-the-scenes documentary “The Making of Autumn Sonata” and said, “You get the sense that it’s not just personalities clashing but rather two artists who are contending pretty seriously with their own relationships with their children.” 

“Cul-de-sac” (dir. Roman Polanski, 1966)

Speaking to The Criterion Collection in 2018, Aster referred to Roman Polanski as “the master of the camera adjustment.” “‘Cul-de-sac’ is like his existential Beckett movie,” Aster said, “and it draws a lot from absurd theater.”

“Repulsion” (dir. Roman Polanski, 1965)

“I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking,” Aster told The Criterion Collection. The director also mentioned that he has learned a lot about the art of directing from Polanski movies like “Repulsion.”

“Rosemary’s Baby” (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968)

“‘Repulsion’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them,” Aster also mentioned to The Criterion Collection in 2018. The director said he tried to follow this tradition with his own genre effort, “Hereditary.”

“Macbeth” (dir. Roman Polanski, 1971)

Polanski adapted Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in 1971, and Aster has praised the way the director used the text to respond to his own life: specifically the Manson murders in 1969. Polanski’s wife at the time, Sharon Tate, was murdered in August of that year. “‘Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces,” Aster said. “And it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way.”

“Ugetsu” (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

Aster called “Ugetsu” a “beautiful, ethereal ghost story.” The director noted his love for Mizoguchi began after he heard the filmmaker was a favorite of Martin Scorsese. “His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal,” Aster said. “There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did.”

“The Life of Oharu” (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)

“The Life of Oharu” was Aster’s final Mizoguchi selection for The Criterion Collection in 2018: “He called the Academy ratio the ‘painterly ratio,’ and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame.”

“Black Narcissus” (dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Tied for sixth on Aster’s 2018 list for The Criterion Collection, Powell and Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” is set in a community of nuns high in the Himalayas that is disrupted by the arrival of a beautiful native girl and a young general. Aster has said few directors utilized spaces within a set like the directing duo.

“The Red Shoes” (dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

“I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color and about creating worlds,” Aster said. The duo’s 1948 classic “The Red Shows” is also a favorite of Aster’s filmmaking hero, Martin Scorsese.

“A Matter of Life And Death” (dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

Aster also said he looks to Powell and Pressburger films such as “A Matter of Life and Death” when he’s trying to understand how to “tell a story as exuberantly as possible.”

“I Know Where I’m Going!” (dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1954)

Aster said his “love with building sets and shooting on them” comes from the films of Powell and Pressburger. In order to film “Hereditary,” Aster built the entire Graham family home on a sound stage.

“45 Years” (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Andrew Haigh’s devastating marriage drama was the most recent film included on Aster’s list for The Criterion Collection from 2018. “I think the last shot of ’45 Years’ is one of the all-time great shots,” the filmmaker said. “I feel confident in saying that even though it just came out a few years ago.”

“Pather Panchali” (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1955)

Another Martin Scorsese favorite that Aster adores is Satyajit Ray’s landmark Apu Trilogy. The director called the movies an “important discovery” for him growing up. “This is such a fascinating trilogy about a boy who has cursed his family and brings death and destruction to everybody he loves — or at least it feels that way,” Aster explained.

“Aparajito” (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1956)

“Of course it’s about a million other things,” Aster continued of the trilogy, “and in the end it’s about everything.” The Apu Trilogy follows the coming of age of a young Bengali boy (Apurba Kumar Roy) in the early part of the 20th century.

“Apur Sansar” (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1959)

“I love ‘The Music Room’ and so many of Ray’s other films, but there is no overstating how wonderful these three are,” Aster said of the Apu Trilogy.

“A Brighter Summer Day” (dir. Edward Yang, 1991)

“‘A Brighter Summer Day’ is just an amazing gangland epic,” Aster said of Yang’s 1991 drama, which was selected as Taiwan’s official Oscar entry that year. “I don’t know how you watch it without becoming convinced that you’re watching the greatest movie ever made. It’s like ‘The Godfather’ in that way.”

“Yi Yi” (dir. Edward Yang, 2000)

Aster praised Yang’s movies for saying “just about everything you can about life without ever getting high-minded about it.” “All of the stories being told in ‘Yi Yi’ are kind of unremarkable — it’s the telling that is so remarkable,” Aster explained.

“The Piano Teacher” (dir. Michael Haneke, 2001)

Aster once called Isabelle Huppert in Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” his favorite female performance of all time. “I remember thinking, ‘I want to make movies like that,'” Aster said of seeing the movie for the first time at age 14. “The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality.”

“Naked” (dir. Mike Leigh, 1993)

David Thewis in Leigh’s “Naked” is (or at least in 2018 was) Aster’s favorite male performance of all time. “There’s nothing like it,” Aster said. “It’s a bleak film, but it’s so filled with life and passion and it’s so funny.”

“Topsy-Turvy” (dir. Mike Leigh, 1999)

“Leigh is an inspiration but not an influence,” Aster said of the director. “I go to his films just to remind myself what I want out of movies about people…I go to his films to pull myself a little bit out of genre and remember what it is that makes us care about any story in the first place — the people at the heart of it.”

“Another Year” (dir. Mike Leigh, 2010)

For The Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Moviegoing” series, Aster also recommended Leigh’s “Another Year.”

“Mike Leigh is very important to me,” the filmmaker said. “If I had to pick a favorite, which is very hard, maybe I would have selected ‘Topsy-Turvy’ or ‘Naked.’ But this one I want to talk about because it strikes me as his sneakiest… I remember being caught so off guard by it.” 

“The Age of Innocence” (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1993)

Aster is a huge fan of Scorsese and has said the director’s “The Age of Innocence” is his best work. “It’s one of the most painfully beautiful unrequited love stories ever,” Aster said. “It’s Scorsese’s Max Ophuls movie, and the best Ophuls movie that Ophuls never made.”

“8½” (dir. Federico Fellini, 1963)

Aster has said “8½” is Fellini’s most “freewheeling and untethered” work. “I watch this film before I make anything,” Aster revealed to The Criterion Collection. “It’s so alive! Even though it’s about a director experiencing a directorial version of writer’s block, it’s so inspired.”