Criterion Collection (Firm)

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,...

An absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From the privacy of his home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood in Idaho and Virginia to his experiences at art school in Boston and Philadelphia to the beginnings of his filmmaking career in Los Angeles; in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies.

After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head. An adaptation of a novella by the director himself is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption,...

Filmed in 1955 at Auschwitz, Alain Resnais combines color footage with black and white newsreels and stills to tell the story of not just the Holocaust, but the horror of man's brutal inhumanity.

In 1956, Frank Tashlin brought the talent for zany visual gags and absurdist pop-culture satire that he'd honed as a master of animation to the task of capturing, in glorious DeLuxe Color, a brand-new craze: rock and roll. This blissfully bonkers jukebox musical tells the story of a mobster's bombshell girlfriend the one and only Jayne Mansfield, in a showstopping first major film role and the washed-up talent agent who seeks to revive his career...

A wrenching historical drama that recounts the true story of a West Virginia coal town where the local miners' struggle to form a union rose to the pitch of all-out war in 1920. Written and directed by John Sayles, this film issues an impassioned cry for justice that still resounds today.

The film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the holy Bengal River in India, around which their daily lives unfold.

With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuaron recreated the early 1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family through the experiences of Cleo, the indigenous domestic worker who keeps the household running. Charged with the care of four small children abandoned by their father, Cleo tends to the family even as her own life is shaken by personal and political upheavals.

A faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams's classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits seeking safety and happiness after their warren comes under terrible threat.

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.