Criterion Collection
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John Cassavetes's a WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is an emotionally devastating drama that charts the mental disintegration of a California housewife. Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) has no emotional or creative outlets. Instead, she pours all her energy into her family, spending her days waiting for her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular and COLUMBO star Peter Falk) to arrive home from work, and anxiously awaiting her children's return from school. This dependence causes Mabel to suffer a nervous breakdown, forcing her to spend time in a mental hospital. Meanwhile, Nick struggles mightily to keep his family together. Director: John Cassavetes Star: Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Matthew Cassel, Matthew Laborteaux, Christina Grisanti, Running Time: 147 minutes.
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Director Nathan Juran and special effects titan Ray Harryhausen reunited for the third time - following 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - and teamed up with Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Experiment) to take on the work of science-fiction icon H G Wells... and take viewers to the seven wonders of the moon world!
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Presented by Nicolas Winding Refn in a new 4K restoration, Curtis Harrington's acclaimed fantasy-thriller, featuring Dennis Hopper (The Last Movie) in his first starring role, is an offbeat classic of American cinema. Hopper plays a sailor on shore leave, when he meets a young woman (Linda Lawson) who may not be as she seems
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Nineteenth-century Ohio accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) lands a new job at a frontier town called Machine, but before long he kills a man in self-defense, is pursued by bounty hunters, and is helped by an Indian who thinks Blake is the reincarnation of his poet namesake. It's a "psychedelic western" as only director Jim Jarmusch could make, filled with offbeat humor and mythical symbolism. Co-stars Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, and Robert Mitchum; music by Neil Young. 121 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack: English DTS HD stereo Master Audio; Subtitles: English (SDH); audio commentary on selected scenes; featurettes; deleted scenes; image gallery; more.
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![The Virgin Suicides [Movie] - The Virgin Suicides (Criterion Collection)](https://aentcdn.azureedge.net/graphics/items/sdimages/b/500/6/0/2/1/3761206.jpg "The Virgin Suicides [Movie] - The Virgin Suicides (Criterion Collection)")
With this debut feature, Sofia Coppola announced her singular vision, exploring the aesthetics of femininity while illuminating the interior lives of young women. An adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's popular first novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES conjures the ineffable melancholy of teenage longing and ennui in its story of the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters, stifled by the rules of their overprotective religious parents-as told through the collective memory of a group of men who were boys at the time and still yearn to understand what happened. Evoking its 1970s suburban setting through ethereal cinematography by Ed Lachman and an atmospheric score by Air, the film secured a place for its director in the landscape of American independent cinema and has become a coming-of-age touchstone.
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The first gay-themed Best Picture Academy Award-winner-and the first to be initially rated "X"-director John Schlesinger's gritty drama stars Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a Texas-born stud who heads to New York City with dreams of life as a high-paid hustler, and Dustin Hoffman as his newfound companion, sleazy street bum "Ratzo" Rizzo. Features the hit Nilsson song "Everybody's Talkin'." Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro co-star in this adaptation of James Leo Herlihy's novel. 113 min. Widescreen; Soundtracks: English Dolby DTS HD stereo Master Audio, Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles: English (SDH); audio commentary; bonus documentary "Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey" (1990); bonus short "The Crowd Around the Cowboy" (1969); featurettes; theatrical trailer.
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Susan Seidelman established her distinctive vision of 1980s New York with this debut feature, the lo-fi original for her vibrant portraits of women reinventing themselves. After escaping New Jersey, the quintessentially punk Wren (Susan Berman) 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's getting involved with Paul (Brad Rijn), the nicest guy to ever live in a van next to the highway, and Eric (Richard Hell), an aloof rocker. Shot on 16 mm film that captures the grit and glam of the setting, with an alternately moody and frenetic soundtrack by the Feelies and others, Smithereens the first independent American film to compete for the Palme d'Or is an unfaded snapshot of a bygone era.
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![True Stories [Movie] - True Stories (Criterion Collection)](https://aentcdn.azureedge.net/graphics/items/sdimages/a/500/2/0/0/1/3821002.jpg "True Stories [Movie] - True Stories (Criterion Collection)")
Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.
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Passing through the backwoods town of Sparta, Mississippi, Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) becomes embroiled in a murder case. He forms an uneasy alliance with the bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger), who faces mounting pressure from Sparta's hostile citizens to catch the killer and run the African American interloper out of town. Director Norman Jewison splices incisive social commentary into this thrilling police procedural with the help of Haskell Wexler's vivid cinematography, Quincy Jones's eclectic score, and two indelible lead performances a career-defining display of seething indignation and moral authority from Poitier and an Oscar-winning master class in Method acting from Steiger. Winner of five Academy Awards, including for best picture, In the Heat of the Night is one of the most courageous Hollywood films of the civil rights era.
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Bob Fosse co-wrote and directed this glittery, surrealistic musical based on his own life. Roy Scheider is Joe Gideon, a demanding musical director trying to balance his work on a Broadway production with his hectic personal life and a consuming drug habit. Dazzling dance numbers include appearances by Ben Vereen, Jessica Lange, and Ann Reinking. Songs include "On Broadway," "After You've Gone," and the title tune. 123 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtrack: English DTS HD 3.0 Master Audio; audio commentaries; documentaries; featurettes; more.
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Mounted for Swedish television broadcast, (an uncredited) Ingmar Bergman's take on Mozart's classic fantasy-rendered as an 18th-century stage production before an audience-became perhaps the most acclaimed and successful filmed opera ever produced. The quest of a young noble (Josef Köstlinger) to rescue an abducted princess (Irma Urrila) from a sorcerer (Ulrik Cold) will captivate opera and movie fans alike. Birgit Nordin, Erik Saedén also star. 134 min. Standard; Soundtrack: Swedish PCM stereo; Subtitles: English; bonus documentary "Tystnad! "Tagning! Trollflötjen!" (1975); featurettes. In Swedish with English subtitles.
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It's 1964... and The Beatles are about to make their first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Six teenagers from New Jersey-with motivations ranging from obsessed fandom to all-out sabotage-embark on a hilarious, trouble-filled pilgrimage to New York City in an attempt to get close to the Fab Four. Breezy Beatlemania comedy from co-writer/director Robert Zemeckis stars Nancy Allen, Wendie Jo Sperber, Marc McClure, and Eddie Deezen; soundtrack includes 17 Beatles songs. 99 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtrack: English DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio; Subtitles: English (SDH); audio commentary; bonus shorts "The Lift" (1972), "A Field of Honor" (1973); featurettes; radio spots; theatrical trailer; more.
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Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors for these transitory tales of urban displacement and existential angst, all staged as encounters between cabbies and their fares. Spanning time zones, continents, and languages, Night on Earth traverses through scenes of uproarious comedy and nocturnal poetry.
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Directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg, this incisive satire is an eerily prescient diagnosis of the toxic intimacy between media and politics in American life. Starring Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, brandishing his charm in an uncharacteristically sinister role in his debut screen performance.
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One Sings the Other Doesn't/Bd
One Sings, The Other Doesn't (Criterion Collection)
Blu-Ray: $39.95 Buy
A buoyant hymn to sisterly solidarity rooted in the hard-won victories of a generation of women, One Sings, the Other Doesn't is one of Agnes Varda's warmest and most politically trenchant films, a feminist musical for the ages.
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In this irresistible musical, the legendary dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are at the pinnacle of their art as a feckless gambler and the shrewd dancing instructor in whom he more than meets his match. Director George Stevens laces their romance with humor and clears the floor for the movie's showstopping dance scenes, in which Astaire and Rogers take seemingly effortless flight in a virtuosic fusion of ballroom and tap styles. Buoyed by beloved songs by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern including the Oscar-winning classic The Way You Look Tonight Swing Time is an exuberant celebration of it's stars' chemistry, grace, and sheer joy in the act of performance.
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Stepping back into the high-heeled shoes of his off-Broadway play's title character, director/co-writer John Cameron Mitchell stars as an East German glam rock performer and recipient of a semi-successful sex-change operation. As Hedwig and her band embark on a cross-country tour of U.S. dives and seafood restaurants, she seeks a reunion with an ex-lover who became famous performing Hedwig's songs. This campy and unique rock musical also stars Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Andrea Martin.
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This masterly adaptation of George Orwell's chilling parable about totalitarian oppression gives harrowing cinematic expression to the book's bleak prophetic vision. In a rubble-strewn surveillance state where an endless overseas war props up the repressive regime of the all-seeing Big Brother, and all dissent is promptly squashed, a profoundly alienated citizen, Winston Smith (thrillingly played by John Hurt), risks everything for an illicit affair with the rebellious Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) in a defiant assertion of humanity in the face of soul-crushing conformity. Through vividly grim production design and expressionistically desaturated cinematography by Roger Deakins, Michael Radford's 1984 conjures a dystopian vision of postwar Britain as fascistic nightmare a world all too recognizable as our own.
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For his first studio picture, filth maestro John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow (vintage heartthrob Tab Hunter). Enhanced with Odorama technology that enables you to scratch and sniff along with Francine, Polyester is one of Waters' most hilarious inventions, replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.
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With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuaron recreated the early-1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family through the experiences of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, in a revelatory screen debut), the indigenous domestic worker who keeps the household running. Charged with the care of four small children abandoned by their father, Cleo tends to the family even as her own life is shaken by personal and political upheavals. Written, directed, shot, and coedited by Cuaron, Roma is a labor of love with few parallels in the history of cinema, deploying monumental black-and-white cinematography, an immersive soundtrack, and a mixture of professional and nonprofessional performances to shape it's author's memories into a world of enveloping texture, and to pay tribute to the woman who nurtured him.
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Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in Kelly Reichardt's breakout feature, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of contemporary American cinema's most independent artists. As they drive from Portland into the woods in search of a secluded hot spring, expectant father Mark (Daniel London) and nomadic Kurt (Will Oldham) make fumbling attempts to reconnect, butting up against the limits of their friendship and coming to grips with just how much their paths have diverged since their shared youth. Adapted from a short story by Jonathan Raymond and accompanied by an atmospheric Yo La Tengo score, Old Joy is a contemplative, wryly observed triumph whose modest scale belies the richness of it's insight.
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This Oscar-winning melodrama, one of Pedro Almodovar's most beloved films, provides a dizzying, moving exploration of the meaning of motherhood. In an instant, nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) loses the teenage son she raised on her own. Grief-stricken, she sets out to search for the boy's long-lost father in Barcelona, where she reawakens into a new maternal role, at the head of a surrogate family that includes a pregnant, HIV-positive nun (Penelope Cruz); an illustrious star of the stage (Marisa Paredes); and a transgender sex worker (Antonia San Juan). Beautifully performed and bursting with cinematic references, All About My Mother is a vibrant tribute to female fortitude, a one-of-a-kind family portrait, and a work of boundless compassion.
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Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, the last romantic couple. With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard's last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
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Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City's African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion houses, from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
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With this blisteringly funny, unapologetically confrontational satire, writer-director Spike Lee examined the past, present, and future of racism in American popular culture, issuing a daring provocation to creators and consumers alike. Under pressure to help revive his network's low ratings, television writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) hits on an explosively offensive idea: bringing back blackface for a new-millennium minstrel show. The white network executives love it, and so do audiences, forcing Pierre and his collaborators to confront their public's insatiable appetite for dehumanizing stereotypes. Shot primarily on unvarnished digital video and boasting spot-on performances from Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Rapaport, Mos Def, and Paul Mooney, Bamboozled is a stinging indictment of mass entertainment at the turn of the twenty-first century that looks more damning with each passing year.
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Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's immortal musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's sprawling novel receives it's most faithful and enduring cinematic adaptation under the elegant direction of James Whale. A rich portrait of changing American entertainment traditions and race relations, Show Boat spans four decades and three generations as it follows the fortunes of the stage-struck Magnolia (Irene Dunne), an aspiring actor whose journey takes her from her family's humble floating playhouse in the 1880s South to the height of fame in the 1930s North. The cast of show-business legends includes Helen Morgan, Hattie McDaniel, Charles Winninger, and the great Paul Robeson, whose iconic, soul-shaking rendition of Ol' Man River is one of the crowning glories of the American stage and screen.
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Wes Anderson brings his dry wit and visual inventiveness to this exquisite caper set amid the old-world splendor of Europe between the World Wars. At the opulent Grand Budapest Hotel, the concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his young protege Zero (Tony Revolori) forge a steadfast bond as they are swept up in a scheme involving the theft of a priceless Renaissance painting and the battle for an enormous family fortune while around them, political upheaval consumes the continent. Meticulously designed, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a breathless picaresque and a poignant paean to friendship and the grandeur of a vanished world, performed with panache by an all-star ensemble that includes F. Murray Abraham, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Mathieu Amalric, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray.
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With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange an original vision of creativity, sexuality, childhood, and loneliness through a series of braided vignettes around a pair of potential lovers: Richard, a newly single shoe salesman and father of two (John Hawkes), and Christine, a lonely video artist and Eldercab driver (July). While they take hesitant steps toward romance, Richard's sons follow their own curiosity toward their first sexual experiences, online and in real life, venturing into uncharted territories in their attempts to connect with others. Playful and profoundly transgressive, Me and You and Everyone We Know is a poetic look at the tortuous routes we take to intimacy in an isolating world, and the moments of magic and redemption that unite us.
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This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov's subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve it's script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.
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H.G. Wells' timeless tale of a Martian invasion of Earth is vividly brought to the screen in this classic film from producer George Pal. Armed with highly advanced technology that includes flying war machines, force fields, and death rays, the Martians are more than a match for humanity. Is there anything on Earth able to defeat the evil alien attackers? Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne star. 85 min. Standard; Soundtracks: English DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio, Uncompressed PCM mono; Subtitles: English (SDH); audio commentary; featurettes; interview; documentary; 1938 radio broadcast; theatrical trailer; radio program.
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On April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York's intellectual elite packed the city's Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer fresh from the controversy over his essay The Prisoner of Sex and the backlash it received from leaders of the women's movement tangle with a panel of four prominent female thinkers and activists: Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling. Part intellectual death match, part three-ring circus, the proceedings were captured with crackling, fly-on-the-wall immediacy by the documentary great D. A. Pennebaker and a small crew, with Chris Hegedus later condensing the three-and-a-half-hour affair into this briskly entertaining snapshot of a singular cultural moment. Heady, heated, and hilarious, Town Bloody Hall is a dazzling display of feminist firepower courtesy of some of the most influential figures of the era, with Mailer plainly relishing his role as the pugnacious rabble-rouser and literary lion at the center of it all.
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Winner of four Academy Awards-including Best Picture (the first non-English-language recipient) and Director-Bong Joon-Ho's genre-bending social satire follows the family of teenager Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik), who were just scraping by in the Seoul slums before he lucked into a position as tutor to a wealthy businessman's daughter (Jung Ji-So). It isn't long before the Kims have connived three more household positions working for the Park clan... but the fates conspire to derail their gravy train in shocking ways. Co-stars Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun. 132 min. Widescreen; Soundtracks: Korean Dolby Atmos, DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio; Subtitles: English; audio commentary; black and white version; featurettes; storyboards; theatrical trailers; more. In Korean with English subtitles. Two-disc set.
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Paralyzed by post graduation ennui, a group of college friends remain on campus, patching together a community for themselves in order to deny the real-world futures awaiting them. Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Noah Baumbach's hilarious and touching directorial debut was one of the highlights of the American independent film scene of the nineties, speaking directly to a generation of adults-to-be unable to reconcile their hermetic educational experience with workaday responsibility, and posing the eternal question, where do we go from here? Stingingly funny and incisive, Baumbach's breakthrough features endlessly quotable dialogue, delivered by a stellar ensemble cast.
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Few films have had as large a cultural impact as Ingmar Bergman's the Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet). Disillusioned and exhausted after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight (Max von Sydow) encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman's stunning allegory of man's search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America's 1950s art house heyday, pushing cinema's boundaries and ushering in a new era of movie going.