Criterion Collection (Firm)

The themes, images, and cultural vernacular of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz continue to haunt David Lynch’s filmography. Arguably, no filmmaker has so consistently drawn inspiration—consciously or unconsciously—from a single work. Through six distinct perspectives, Alexandre O. Philippe’s LYNCH/OZ helps us reexperience and reinterpret The Wizard of Oz by way of David Lynch, delivering new appreciations of both.

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...

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...

Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, WILD STRAWBERRIES dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage of self-discovery. This richly humane masterpiece, full of iconic imagery, is a treasure from...

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...

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...

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the **Academy Award–winning** BICYCLE THIEVES, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly...

Winner of both the **Academy Award** for best foreign-language film and the **Cannes Film Festival’s** Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis...

Adapting the award-winning novel by Paolo Cognetti, directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch portray through observant detail and stunning landscape photography the profound, complex relationship between Pietro and Bruno, who first meet as children when Pietro’s Milan family vacations in an isolated village at the base of the Alpine slopes. As they mature, Pietro becomes estranged from his business-minded father even as Bruno takes...

A concentration camp survivor discovers her former torturer and lover working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempts to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them. Operatic and disturbing, it deftly examines the lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime.