Criterion Collection (Firm).
1) Time
Description
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,...
2) Saint Omer
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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...
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....
4) The cremator
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Description
Karl Kopfrkingl works at a stately crematorium in Prague. Obsessed with his duties, he believes he is liberating the souls of the departed. With Nazi forces gathering at the Czech border, Karl descends into a mania that allows him to wholly enact his disturbed beliefs.
7) Pariah
Description
The revelatory and assured feature debut by Dee Rees is a coming-of-age tale of a queer Black woman navigating the expression of her gender and sexual identities, built around a beautifully layered performance from Adepero Oduye.
8) Eraserhead
Description
A nightmarish collage of images which blends the grotesque and the absurd, the deeply disturbing and the darkly humorous. Henry is the nerdish central character who lives in a squalid apartment with a strange girl and their monstrous baby. The extraordinary special effects create an eerie, dream-like world with a logic all its own.
Description
Existentialism goes pop in this benchmark of atomic-age science fiction, a superlative adaptation of a novel by the legendary Richard Matheson that has awed and unnerved generations of viewers with the question, What is humanity₂s place amid the infinity of the universe? Six months after being exposed to a mysterious radiation cloud, suburban everyman Scott Carey finds himself becoming smaller⁵ and smaller⁵ and smaller until he₂s left to fend...
10) Yōjinbō
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Description
A wandering Samurai-for-hire eventually finds a dramatic solution to the problems of a town with two warring clans.
Description
"Sparks fly both on and off the court in this groundbreaking feature debut by writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, who elevated the coming-of-age romance by giving honest expression to the challenges female athletes face in a world that doesn't see them as equal. Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps make for one of the most iconic screen couples of the 2000s as the basketball-obsessed next-door neighbors who find love over flirtatious pickup games, fall...
12) La haine =: Hate
Description
Three young, unemployed Frenchmen living in the ghettos surrounding Paris get embroiled in a violent conflict with the local police.
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...
15) Mudbound
Description
In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families one of white landholders, and one of Black tenant farmers are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart.