Criterion Collection (Firm)
1) Rififi
Language
Français
Appears on list
Description
A story of a successful jewel robbery in which the four thieves betray each other.
2) Shoah
Language
English
Description
Over a decade in the making, this monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, and other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming SHOAH is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait...
Language
Swedish
Appears on list
Description
A story of four women's search for spiritual peace. Agnes, a spinster who lives with her housekeeper, is dying of cancer, and is visited one last time by her two sisters, Karin and Maria. These two become entangled in feelings of jealousy, manipulation and selfishness. Yet Agnes, tortured by cancer, is able to transcend her sisters' pettiness to remember moments of staggering beauty as well as horror.
4) Scandal
Language
English
Appears on list
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.
Language
English
Description
In 1960, a filmmaking group was granted direct access to John F. Kennedy, filming him on the campaign trail and eventually in the Oval Office. This resulted in three films of remarkable, behind-closed-doors intimacy, Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, and Crisis, and, following the president's assassination, the poetic short Faces of November. Collected here are all four of these titles, early exemplars of the movement known as Direct Cinema....
Language
English
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.
8) Pierre Etaix
Language
Français
Appears on list
Description
The following films were influened by Pierre Etaix's experience as a circus acrobat, clown, and by the silent film comedies he adored.
9) Cameraperson
Language
English
Description
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.
10) Gates of Heaven
Language
English
Description
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,...
Language
English
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....
Language
English
Description
A young Native American boy carves a small wooden man into a canoe. Follows the adventures of the tiny craft as it forges its own path from Lake Superior through the Great Lakes and down to the Atlantic Ocean. A thrilling journey across the waves and rapids of North America.
Language
English
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...
14) Koyaanisqatsi
Language
English
Description
This first work of The Qatsi Trilogy wordlessly surveys the rapidly changing environments of the Northern hemisphere, in an astonishing collage created by the director, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass. It shuttles viewers from one jaw-dropping vision to the next, moving from images of untouched nature to others depicting human beings, increasing dependence on technology.
15) 8 1/2
Language
Italiano
Appears on list
Description
Fellini's autobiographical film about a famous film director who loses his inspiration in the midst of making a film.
Language
English
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...
18) The in-laws
Language
English
Description
A mild-mannered dentist becomes involved with his daughter's father-in-law's bizarre life with the CIA, which may or may not even be true.
19) For all mankind
Language
English
Description
Presents an impressionistic look at NASA's first manned flights to the moon as filmed and narrated by the astronauts who made the voyages.
20) Time
Language
English
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,...