Criterion Collection (Firm)

This compilation of five early short films by Martin Scorsese offers a fascinating window onto his artistic development. Spanning the years from Scorsese's time at NYU in the mid-1960s to the late '70s. The collection includes Italian American; American Boy; The Big Shave; What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?; and It's Not Just You, Murray!

Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoon worthy romance that Sturges wrote, directed, and produced.

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.

A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life that lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo.

The great Agnes Varda's film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complicated relationship between a married couple and a documentary-like look at the daily struggles of the locals, Varda's discursive, gorgeously filmed debut was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the coming French...

When three friends find their new roommate dead and a suitcase full of money under his bed, they have no trouble deciding how to dispose of the cash, but the body is a different story. Their troubles are compounded when they meet the men who come to retrieve the money.

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...

A love story about divorce. A marriage coming apart and a family coming together. A hilarious and harrowing, sharply observed, and deeply compassionate film from writer-director Noah Baumbach. Charlie is a charismatic New York theater director wedded to his work. Nicole is an actor who is ready to change her own life. Their hopes for an amicable divorce fade as they are drawn into a system that pits them against each other and forces them to redefine...

Parry is a homeless history professor who lives in a fantasy world full of castles, Red Knights, and damsels in distress. Jack is New York's number one shock deejay, until the day his off-hand arrogance triggers a tragedy that ruins his career. Penniless and without prospects, Jack finds himself plucked from disaster by the most improbable of saviors, Parry.

A witty, delightful story about a lovestruck suitor named Jack whose fiancee can only love a man named Ernest.