Criterion Collection (Firm)
Series
Criterion collection volume 1111
Publication Date
[2022]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (89 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 folded sheet.
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...
2) Time
Series
Criterion collection volume 1109
Publication Date
[2022]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (81 min.) : sound, black and white ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 folded sheet.
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,...
Series
Publication Date
2018.
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (120 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore takes aim at America's love affair with guns and violence. Featuring interviews with everyone from the NRA's Charlton Heston to shock-rocker Marilyn Manson. Winner of the 55th Anniversary Prize at Cannes Film Festival.
Series
Publication Date
[2017]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (88 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Appears on list
Description
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.
5) Boat people
Series
Publication Date
[2022]
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (109 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
One of the preeminent works of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui's shattering look at the circumstances that drove Vietnamese refugees to flee their homeland in the wake of the Vietnam War is told through images of haunting, unforgettable power.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1065
Publication Date
[2021]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (91 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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,...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1210
Publication Date
[2024]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (122 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 pamphlet (folded : color illustrations ; 18 cm)
Appears on list
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...
Series
Publication Date
2016.
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (32 min.) : sound, color with black and white sequences ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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.
9) No bears
Series
Publication Date
2023.
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (107 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 folded sheet (4 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 19 cm)
Description
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...
Series
Publication Date
[2022]
Physical Desc
1 video recording (97 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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...
11) Jellyfish eyes
Series
Publication Date
[2015]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (101 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
After moving to a country town with his mother following his father's death, a young boy befriends a charming, flying, jellyfish-like sprite, only to discover that his schoolmates have similar friends, and that neither they nor the town itself are what they seem to be. Pointedly set in a post-Fukushima world, Murakami's modest-budgeted special effects extravaganza boasts unforgettable creature designs and carries a message of cooperation and hope...
12) Matewan
Publication Date
2019.
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (133 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 pamphlet (1 page : color illustrations ; folded to 17 cm.)
Description
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.
13) The great beauty
Series
Publication Date
[2014]
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (142 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries.
14) The River
Series
Criterion collection volume 276
Publication Date
[2005]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (99 min.) : sd., col. ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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.
16) Roma
Series
Publication Date
[2020]
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (135 min.) : sound, black and white ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1211
Publication Date
2024.
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (90 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi's boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand's electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city, determined to rise above his circumstances working odd jobs, passing time with friends, learning to read and running, always running, toward the future. Water,...
18) Watership down
Series
Criterion collection volume 748
Publication Date
[2015]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (92 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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.
19) Wings
Series
Publication Date
2008
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (85 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
Suffocated by modern-day living, a buttoned-down headmistress reminisces about her glory days as a World War II pilot.
20) Louie Bluie
Publication Date
2010
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (60 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
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.

