Criterion Collection (Firm).
2) Scandal
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Description
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.
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...
4) 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,...
Description
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....
Description
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.
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...
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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,...
10) No bears
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One of the world's great cinema artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government since 2010. In No Bears completed shortly before his imprisonment in 2022, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, a dissident filmmaker who relocates to a rural border town to direct a film remotely...
11) Rififi
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Description
A story of a successful jewel robbery in which the four thieves betray each other.
12) The cameraman
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The final work over which he maintained creative control, this clever farce is the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long run that produced some of the most innovative and enduring comedies of all time. Keaton plays a hapless newsreel cameraman desperate to impress both his new employer and his winsome office crush as he zigzags up and down Manhattan hustling for a scoop.
14) Love affair
Description
Golden-age Hollywood's humanist master Leo McCarey brings his graceful touch and relaxed naturalism to this sublime romance, one of cinema's most intoxicating tear-wringers. Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer are chic strangers who meet and fall in love aboard an ocean liner bound for New York. Though they are both involved with other people, they make a pact to reconnect six months later at the top of the Empire State Building, until the hand of fate...
15) For all mankind
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A look at America's first manned flights to the moon told by the 24 men who traveled to the moon and using the images from their experiences.
16) EO
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Legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski created one of his freest and most visually inventive films yet with this story of a gray donkey named EO. After being removed from an itinerant circus, EO begins a trek across the countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness from a cast of characters including an Italian countess and a Polish soccer team. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and featuring stunning cinematography by...
17) Godland
Description
The struggle between the strictures of religion and humankind₂s brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychological epic from director Hlynur Pl̀mason. In the late nineteenth century, Danish priest Lucas made the perilous trek to Iceland₂s southeastern coast to establish a church. There, the arrogant man of God finds his resolve tested as he confronts the harsh terrain, temptations...
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.
19) Holiday
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An acrobatically inclined free spirit, following a whirlwind engagement, literally tumbles into the lives of his fiancě₂s aristocratic family, setting up a clash of values with her staid father while firing the rebellious imagination of her brash, black-sheep sister. With a sparkling surface and an undercurrent of melancholy, the film is an enchanting ode to nonconformists and pie-in-the-sky dreamers everywhere, as well as a thoughtful reflection...
20) La cérémonie
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Description
The crowning achievement of Claude Chabrol's career is a riveting study of class dynamics and the psychology of crime, starring Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire as a pair of outsiders who form a mysterious alliance that gradually goes haywire.