Criterion Collection (Firm).
1) Scandal
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Portrayal of a sensitive young artist who decides to sue after the tabloid press twists his circumstantial meeting with a famous singer into a torrid affair.
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In 1960, a filmmaking group was granted direct access to John F. Kennedy, filming him on the campaign trail and eventually in the Oval Office. This resulted in three films of remarkable, behind-closed-doors intimacy, Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, and Crisis, and, following the president's assassination, the poetic short Faces of November. Collected here are all four of these titles, early exemplars of the movement known as Direct Cinema....
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A playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director's beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative...
5) Cameraperson
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A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.
6) Time
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What does the weight of time's passage feel like for a family caught in the jaws of a brutal carceral system? Both a breathtaking cinematic love story and a bruising indictment of American injustice, the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary debut of Garrett Bradley traces the decades-long quest of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six and a fiercely outspoken prison abolitionist, to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary,...
7) Pierre Etaix
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The following films were influened by Pierre Etaix's experience as a circus acrobat, clown, and by the silent film comedies he adored.
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An uncompromisingly independent filmmaker, Les Blank (Burden of Dreams) made documentaries for nearly fifty years, elegantly disappearing with his camera into cultural spots rarely seen on-screen, mostly on the peripheries of the United States, but also occasionally abroad. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane, sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to musicians, food, and all sorts of regionally specific delights....
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This evocative character study tells the story of a young American fashion assistant and spiritual medium who is living in Paris and searching for signs of an afterlife following the sudden death of her twin brother. A chilling meditation on modern modes of communication and the way one mourn those they love.
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In the early 1970s, Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini brought to the screen a trio of premodern world literature; The Decameron (Rated R); The Canterbury Tales (Rated NC-17); and The Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights) (Rated NC-17). He titled this group of films Trilogy of Life. Special features include interviews with the director, deleted scenes from Arabian Nights, and more.
11) The lure
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Follow a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczynska's imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", in which the girls' bond is tested and...
12) My Winnipeg
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A work of memory and imagination, Maddin's film burrows into what the filmmaker calls "the heart of the heart" of the continent, conjuring a city as delightful as it is fearsome, populated by sleepwalkers and hockey aficionados. Take part in Winnipeg's annual epic scavenger hunt! Pay your respects to the racehorses forever frozen in the river! Help judge the yearly homoerotic Golden Boy pageant.
13) For all mankind
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Presents an impressionistic look at NASA's first manned flights to the moon as filmed and narrated by the astronauts who made the voyages.
14) Gates of Heaven
Formats
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This classic documentary by Errol Morris showcases workers in the animal burial industry while dealing with heavier existential questions regarding mortality and the afterlife. The first pet mortician featured is Floyd "Mac" McClure, who believes that a graceful burial is as important for pets as it is for people. The film chronicles his struggles to keep his niche business afloat, and interviews several of his associates and one of his competitors,...
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Shaunak Sen’s ALL THAT BREATHES reinvents the environmental documentary by portraying, in incisive yet lyrical fashion, the reciprocal influence of animals and humans. For more than a year, Sen followed New Delhi brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad as they rescued birds of prey from the increasingly destructive effects of urban pollution.
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Errol Morris (The Fog of War) turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris₂s documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking₂s body has been accompanied by the untrammeled...
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A story of four women's search for spiritual peace. Agnes, a spinster who lives with her housekeeper, is dying of cancer, and is visited one last time by her two sisters, Karin and Maria. These two become entangled in feelings of jealousy, manipulation and selfishness. Yet Agnes, tortured by cancer, is able to transcend her sisters' pettiness to remember moments of staggering beauty as well as horror.
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A rambunctious dark comedy. An unbalanced but alluring former mental patient takes a B-movie porn star prisoner in the hopes of convincing her to marry him. A highly unconventional romance that came on the spike heels of Almodovar's international sensation Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this is a splashy, sexy central work in the career of one of the world₂s most beloved and provocative auteurs.