Criterion Collection (Firm)
1) Saint Omer
Series
Criterion collection volume 1212
Language
Français
Appears on these lists
Description
Bringing a documentarian's sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop constructs a morally and emotionally layered courtroom drama unlike any other. When she travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman accused of murdering her infant daughter, novelist Rama finds herself shaken to the core by a case that proves to have profound resonances with her own life. Interweaving...
2) The lady Eve
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoon worthy romance that Sturges wrote, directed, and produced.
3) Nanny
Series
Criterion collection volume 1196
Language
Multiple
Description
Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant, takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy white family in New York City. Separated from her son and casually exploited by her employers, Aisha finds herself consumed by unsettling visions and a growing rage, one that could either destroy or empower her.
4) Shampoo
Language
English
Formats
Description
A day in the life of George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser and Lothario who runs around town on the eve of the 1968 presidential election trying to make heads or tails of his financial and romantic entanglements. His attempts to scrape together the money to open his own salon are continually sidetracked by the distractions presented by his lovers. The carousel of doomed relationships is an essential "70s" farce, a sharp look back at the sexual politics...
5) Drylongso
Series
Criterion collection volume 1190
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith₂s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, brash Oakland art student Pica attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship and experiencing love, heartbreak,...
Series
Criterion collection volume 428
Language
English
Description
Swift, brutal, and blackhearted, Allen Baron's New York City noir film is a sensational surprise. This low-budget, carefully crafted portrait of a hit man on assignment in Manhattan during Christmastime follows its stripped-down narrative with mechanical precision, yet also with an eye and ear for the oddball details of urban living and the imposing beauty of the city. At once visually ragged and artfully composed, and featuring rough, poetic narration...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1188
Language
English
Description
Wayne Wang's follow-up to his watershed indie Chan Is Missing is a family portrait that gracefully combines the director's signature gentle humanism and eye for poignant detail. Offering another fresh perspective on San Francisco's Chinese American community, Wang takes a bittersweet look at the generational pas de deux between an aging immigrant widow and her devoted daughter, torn between filial duty and her desires.
8) La bamba
Series
Criterion collection volume 1193
Language
English
Description
The brief but incandescent life of rock-and-roll trailblazer Ritchie Valens is immortalized in this enthralling biopic from another Mexican American icon, Luis Valdez, the father of Chicano cinema. With sweetness and swagger, Lou Diamond Phillips embodies the 1950s California teenager who, forged by his fiercely supportive mother and rebellious brother, rises from his farm-working roots to chart-topping fame in the early days of rock, until one fateful...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1071
Language
English
Formats
Description
After he dies suddenly, the hapless advertising executive Daniel Miller finds himself in Judgment City, a gleaming way station where the newly deceased must prove they lived a life of sufficient courage to advance in their journey through the universe. As the self-doubting Daniel struggles to make his case, a budding relationship with the uninhibited Julia offers him a chance to finally feel alive.
10) Dead man
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange North American man named Nobody who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.
11) Bottle rocket
Series
Criterion collection volume 450
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
After his stay in a mental hospital, Anthony reconnects with best pal Dignan, who greets his friend with a plan for them to become professional thieves working for a criminal mastermind named Mr. Henry. Step one: recruit a wheelman--Bob, a bored, wealthy 20-something living in fear of his older brother. Step two: rob a strip mall bookstore. Step three: go on the lam, which in this case means hide out at a motel in the middle of nowhere and, for Anthony...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1210
Language
English
Description
Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses with an intimate journey through...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1201
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"A classic tale is reborn through the inspired imagination of cinematic dream-weaver Guillermo del Toro, directing alongside Mark Gustafson. Realized through boundary-pushing, breathtakingly intricate stop-motion animation, this dark rendering of the fable of the puppet boy and his maker, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, daringly transfers the story to Fascist Italy, where the irrepressible Pinocchio gradually learns what it...
Series
Criterion collection volume 41
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Adaptation of Shakespeare's patriotic historical drama that celebrates the English nation and the greatness of its King. Includes medieval battle sequences with a recreation of the Battle of Agincourt.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1210
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses with an intimate journey through...
16) Mean streets
Series
Criterion collection volume 1198
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Set in the insular Little Italy neighborhood of Scorsese's youth, Mean Streets follows guilt-ridden small-time ringleader Charlie as he deals with the debts owed by his dangerously volatile best pal, Johnny Boy, and pressure from his headstrong girlfriend, Teresa..." --Container.
Series
Language
Français
Description
From two-time Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori, two immigrants to Belgium from Cameroon and Benin, respectively whose siblinglike bond is the only resource they can depend on in their struggle for survival on the margins of European society. The pair work as performers in a cheap trattoria, dealing drugs on the side, while balancing the demands of an indifferent bureaucracy....
Series
Criterion collection volume 1153
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Frank Capra adapted a hit stage play for this marvelous screwball meeting of the madcap and the macabre. On Halloween, newly married drama critic Mortimer Brewster returns home to Brooklyn, where his adorably dotty aunts greet him with love, sweetness ... and a grisly surprise: the corpses buried in their cellar. A bugle-playing brother who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, a crazed criminal who's a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, and a seriously slippery...
Series
Language
English
Description
Michael Roemer's groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the height of the civil rights movement, Nothing But A Man reveals the toll of systemic racism through its honest portrait of a southern Black railroad worker confronting the daily challenges of discrimination and economic precarity, as he attempts to settle...
20) Lone star
Series
Language
English
Description
A keen observer of America's social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neo-western mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds, son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles's...