Criterion Collection (Firm)

In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families one of white landholders, and one of Black tenant farmers are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart. Writer-director Dee Rees, with co-writer Virgil...

Stowaway in the Sky: Lamorisse takes us on the breathtaking odessey of a young boy who sneaks aboard his inventor grand-father's experimental new hot-air balloon. Circus Angel: A daring young thief - having been affixed with a pair of wings in order to befome a flying circus attraction - finds himself mistaken for an angel.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), the housemaid to a wealthy family, forms a mysterious alliance with Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a small-town postal worker. Their violent pasts resurface when they feel unacknowledged. The film is considered the crowning achievement of Claude Chabrol's career and is a riveting study of class dynamics and the psychology of crime.

Walter Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo is the story of one man's attempt to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle. Filmmaker Les Blank captured the production, made perilous by Herzog's determination not to use models or special effects. For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career--Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man's attempt to build an opera...

The film is considered one of the most influential political films in history, by Gillo Pontecorvo. Vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, etc. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques...