Criterion Collection (Firm)
Description
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...
2) Nanny
Description
A spellbinding blend of social observation and artful shocks, the debut feature from Nikyatu Jusu plunges into the increasingly fractured consciousness of Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant who 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. This visually...
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 means...
Appears on list
Description
In an instant, nurse Manuela loses the teenage son she raised on her own. Grief-stricken, she sets out to search for the boy's long-lost father in Barcelona, where she reawakens into a new maternal role, at the head of a surrogate family that includes a pregnant, HIV-positive nun; an illustrious star of the stage; and a transgender sex worker.
7) Rushmore
Description
A gifted, rebellious teenager finds himself in competition with a wealthy older man for a favorite teacher's affections.
9) Faces
Description
Powerful story of the dissintegration of a marriage of a captain of industry and his wife.
10) La llorona
Appears on list
Description
A country's bloody history stains the present in the Guatemalan auteur Jayro Bustamante's transfixing fusion of folk horror and searing political commentary, inspired by the real-life indictment of the authoritarian Efraín Ríos Montt for crimes against humanity. A notorious, now aging former military dictator stands trial for atrocities committed against Guatemala's Mayan communities. While battling legal repercussions and the people's demands...
Description
An ordinary British couple vacationing in Switzerland suddenly find themselves embroiled in a case of international intrigue when their daughter is kidnapped by spies plotting a political assassination. This fleet and gripping early thriller from the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was the first film the director made after signing to the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation.
13) Bottle rocket
Description
Anthony finds himself embroiled in the machinations of his best friend, who is an elaborate schemer. With the help of a getaway driver they develop a plan to rob a small bookstore.
Description
Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape--pulsating with both freedom and menace--that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage's novel. After a sensitive widow and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son move in with her gentle new husband, a tense battle of wills plays out between...
Description
Harry, a devilish charmer from the Deep South, turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry's presence turns a seemingly peaceful household upside down, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, it is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous...
18) Okja
Appears on list
Description
Mija is a South Korean girl growing up on an Edenic mountainside with her grandfather and best friend: Okja, a giant, empathetic "super pig" created as part of a secret GMO experiment. When Okja is abruptly torn away from her, Mija embarks on a perilous rescue mission that places her at the center of a sinister corporate conspiracy. While Bong's trademark virtuosic set-pieces dazzle, Okja's beating heart is the connection between a girl and her super...
19) The naked city
Description
Jean Dexter is an attractive blonde model who is murdered in her New York City apartment. Homicide detectives Dan Muldoon and Jimmy Halloran investigate. Suspicion falls on various shifty people who all prove to have some connection with a string of apartment burglaries. Then a burglar is found dead who once had an elusive partner named Willie.
20) HIgh Sierra
Description
Marking the moment when the gritty gangster sagas of the 1930s began giving way to the romantic fatalism of 1940s film noir, High Sierra also contains the star-making performance of Humphrey Bogart, who, alongside top-billed Ida Lupino, proved his leading-man mettle with his tough yet tender turn as Roy Earle. A career criminal plagued by his checkered past, Earle longs for a simpler life, but after getting sprung on parole, he falls in with a band...