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,...

As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country,...

Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger to whom she recounts a schocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise. Setting her languid images to d'Alessio's incongruously breezy, endlessly looping score, Duras fashions a quietly shattering portrait of marriage as a kind of prison.

After escaping New Jersey, the quintessentially punk Wren, a sparkplug in fishnets who lives dangerously downtown, moves to the city with the mission of becoming famous. When not pasting up flyers for herself or hanging at the Peppermint Lounge, she is getting involved with Paul, the nicest guy to ever live in a van next to the highway, and Eric, an aloof rocker.

Dark, biting satire of the television industry. A frustrated writer devises a plan to revive the minstrel show; but instead of white actors in black face, the show stars black actors in even blacker face. Directed by Spike Lee.

An intimate documentary portrait of underground artist Robert Crumb, whose unique drawing style and sexually and racially provocative subject matter have made him a household name in popular American art. Zwigoff candidly and colorfully delves into the details of Crumb's incredible career, as well as his past, including his family of reclusive eccentrics, some of the most remarkable people ever seen on-screen.

Two years after his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku arrives in Hiroshima to direct a production of Uncle Vanya for a theater festival and, through relationships with an actor with whom he shares a tangled history and a chauffeur with whom he develops a surprising rapport, finds himself confronting emotional scars. This quietly mesmerizing tale of love, art, grief, and healing is ultimately a cathartic exploration of what it means to go on living...

"For this icily erotic fusion of flesh and machine, David Cronenberg adapted J.G. Ballard's future-shock novel of the 1970s into one of the most singular and provocative films of the 1990s. A traffic collision involving a disaffected commercial producer, James (James Spader), and an enigmatic doctor, Helen (Holly Hunter), brings them, along with James's wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger, in a sublimely detached performance), together in a crucible...

An enchanting countryside comedy about the marital woes of a sweetly deluded baker whose wife has run off wirth a shepherd. Because the baker is upset and cannot bring himself to work, the scandal snowballs and engulfs the entire town.

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes a collaborative...