Criterion Collection (Firm).
41) The Bostonians
Description
Olive, a militant suffragette, takes on the education of Verena, a brilliantly gifted but naive young girl. Olive wants to mold and use this gift for the feminist cause. But Verena is also loved by Basil Ransom, an impecunious young lawyer with views strenuously opposed to the Boston feminists. The contest is met between Basil and Olive. The prize: possession of Verena.
42) Copie conforme
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Description
What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon gradually reveals itself as something richer, stranger, and trickier: a mind-bending reflection on authenticity, in art as well as in relationships. Both cerebrally and emotionally engaging, reminds us that love itself is an enigma.
43) After hours
Description
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman. So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home.
Description
An enterprising gambler and a bordello madam, both newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of whorehouse experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans.
45) Holiday
Description
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...
46) Scanners
Description
After a man with extraordinary, and frighteningly destructive, telepathic abilities is nabbed by agents from a mysterious rogue corporation, he discovers he is far from the only possessor of such strange powers, and that some of the other "scanners" have their minds set on world domination, while others are trying to stop them.
47) No Bears
Description
One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite his oppression at the hands of the Iranian government. In NO BEARS, as in many of his recent titles, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, in this case relocated to a rural border town to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey - the story of which...
Description
The inventive, self-reflexive films of independent trailblazer Cheryl Dunye (THE WATERMELON WOMAN) offer multilayered, sharply funny commentaries on the intersections of black and queer identity. Over the course of six provocative, sardonic shorts, Dunye honed a unique, quasi-documentary style she dubbed “Dunyementary.”
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Description
Abbas Kiarostami takes metanarrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy. Unfolding 'behind the scenes' of And Life Goes On, this film traces the complications that arise when the romantic misfortune of one of the actors--a young man who pines for the woman cast as his wife, even though, in real life, she will have nothing to do with him--creates turmoil on set and leaves the hapless director caught...
50) 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.
51) Chop shop
Description
Willets Point, Queens, an industrial sliver of automotive-repair shops that remains perpetually at risk of being redeveloped off the map. It₂s within this precarious ecosystem that twelve-year-old Ale must grow up fast, hustling in the neighborhood chop shops to build a more stable life for himself and his sister even as their tenuous circumstances force each to compete with other struggling people and make desperate decisions.
52) Punch-drunk love
Description
Struggling to cope with his erratic temper, novelty toilet plunger salesman Barry Egan spends his days collecting frequent-flyer-mile coupons and dodging the insults of his seven sisters. The promise of a new life emerges when Barry inadvertently attracts the affections of a mysterious woman named Lena. But their budding relationship is threatened when he falls prey to the swindling operator of a phone sex line and her deranged boss.
53) Frances Ha
Description
A woman in her late twenties living in contemporary New York tries to sort out her ambitions, finances, and above all, her tight but changing bond with her best friend Sophie. Frances Ha gets at both the frustrations and the joys of being young and unsure of where to go next.
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...
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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.
57) The brood
Description
A disturbed woman is receiving a radical form of psychotherapy at a remote, mysterious institute. Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter, under the care of her estranged husband, is being terrorized by a group of demonic beings. How these two storylines connect is the shocking and grotesque secret of this bloody tale of monstrous parenthood.
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Description
One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, it is a subtly piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife's city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband's small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change, in the form of their headstrong, modern niece, sweeps over their...
59) Hearts and minds
Description
Examines the American involvement in Vietnam, and is a chronicle of the war from a psychological perspective. Includes interviews with General William Westmoreland, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, Senator William Fulbright, Walt Rostow, and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as American Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese leaders. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon are shown in rare footage.
Description
Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life. This breathless adventure in the shadow of Armageddon takes its heroes to the ends of the earth and into the oneiric depths of their own souls.