Criterion Collection (Firm)

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Heloise, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Heloise by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Heloise first moments of freedom. Heloise portrait soon becomes a collaborative act...

A sublime work of personal vision, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic documentary immersion in the world of Ethiopia₂s Oromo community, a place where one commodity khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the influence of the drug itself, Faya Dayi unfurls as intoxicating, trance state cinema,...

As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty, rendered with feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov₂s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, is...

Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York's 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band's incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol's...

A spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkable intimacy, Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports. Supervising a team of hundreds of technicians using more than a thousand cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious widescreen images, using cutting-edge telephoto lenses and exquisite slow motion to create lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry from the athletic drama surging all...

For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the lavish nightclubs, parties, and cafes to find Rome itself,...

"An eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter, a writer who turns the material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration -- or was it suicide? -- of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. [A] mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead"--Container....

The latest existential epic from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of cinema's most incisive investigators of the human condition, is a masterclass in moral and philosophical inquiry, featuring Merve Dizdar in a Cannes-winning performance.

The tragic story of Sid Vicious's relationship with Nancy Spungen.

A mystery man, a murder, and a wad of missing cash in his wryly offbeat breakthrough, Wayne Wang updates the ingredients of classic film noir for the streets of contemporary San Francisco's Chinatown. When their business partner disappears with the money they had planned to use for a cab license, driver Jo and his nephew Steve scour the city's back alleys, waterfronts, and Chinese restaurants to track him down. But what begins as a search for a missing...