Criterion Collection (Firm)

Documents the obscure country blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist, Howard 'Louie Bluie' Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America. Director Terry Zwigoff honors him with an unsentimental but endlessly affectionate tribute. Full of infectious music and comedy, this is a humane evocation of the kind of pop-cultural marginalia that Zwigoff would continue to make in the coming years.

A wealthy older man has an affair with a young maid played by twodifferent actresses in this darkly humorous satire on sexualobsession.

When his boss demands more speed and efficiency, Chaplin goes crazy from his repetitious assembly line job.

Set after the Spanish Civil War, a little girl is obsessed with the image of Frankenstein and is driven to a sense of dread.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s *8 ½* (*Otto e mezzo*) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. An early working title for *8 ½* was "The Beautiful Confusion," and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. Winner of two **Academy...

In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish "Tomainian" dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supporting turns, The Great Dictator, boldly going after...

Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers; it was the first entry in the Hulot series and the film that launched its maker to international stardom. Nominated for Best Writing - Story and Screenplay at the 1956...

Part crime thriller, part family farce, Louis Garrel’s THE INNOCENT shows the dangerous lengths two men go to, and the outlandish lies they tell, for the women they love. Garrel stars as Abel, a museum educator and widower whose mother, Sylvie, marries Michel, one of her drama pupils in the local penitentiary. Once on parole, Michel attempts to start a legitimate life for Sylvie’s sake but soon reverts to his old ways, with the suspicious Abel...

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....

Winner of the **Academy Award** for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity, and of one father’s need to avenge the death of a child.