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Criterion Collection (Firm)
Series
Summary
With a poet's eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcendent elegy for what is lost in the name of progress. Grieving and alone following the deaths of her husband and children, elderly Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo, in a soul-shaking end-of-life performance) prepares for her death and to be buried alongside her ancestors. When plans...
2) The Irishman
Series
Summary
Left behind by the world, former hit man and union truck driver Frank Sheeran looks back from a nursing home on his life's journey through the ranks of organized crime: from his involvement with Philadelphia mob boss Russell Bufalino to his association with Teamsters union head Jimmy Hoffa to the rift that forced him to choose between the two.
Summary
Fashioned as a tribute to his parents, the film depicts one day in the life of the Yokoyamas, gathered together for a celebratory ritual that only gradually makes itself clear. Rather than focus on big dramatic moments, Kore-eda relies on simple gestures and domestic routines (especially cooking) to evoke a family's entire life, its deep regrets and its daily joys.
Summary
This evocative character study tells the story of a young American fashion assistant and spiritual medium who is living in Paris and searching for signs of an afterlife following the sudden death of her twin brother. A chilling meditation on modern modes of communication and the way one mourn those they love.
5) Come and see
Series
Summary
As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora 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 feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov₂s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, is...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1151
Summary
Darius Marder's Academy Award-winning film stars Riz Ahmed in an intense, committed performance as a drummer who loses his hearing and comes to discover deafness not as a disability but as a rich culture and community.
Summary
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...
Summary
A mystery man, a murder, and a wad of missing cash in his wryly offbeat breakthrough, Wayne Wang updates the ingredients of classic film noir for the streets of contemporary San Francisco's Chinatown. When their business partner disappears with the money they had planned to use for a cab license, driver Jo and his nephew Steve scour the city's back alleys, waterfronts, and Chinese restaurants to track him down. But what begins as a search for a missing...
10) Graduation
Series
Summary
Blending rigorous naturalism with the precise construction of a thriller, this Cannes award-winning drama from Cristian Mungiu sheds light on the high stakes and ethical complexities of life in contemporary Romania. As his daughter nears high-school graduation, Romeo, an upstanding doctor, counts on her winning a competitive scholarship that will send her to university in England.
11) The great beauty
Series
Criterion collection volume 702
Summary
For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries.
12) Paris is burning
Summary
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 Cityb2ss African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, it offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion b1shouses,b2s from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and...
13) Take out
Series
Criterion collection volume 1149
Summary
A day in the life of Ming Ding begins as a pair of hammer-wielding loan sharks come to the door of Ming's squalid apartment. Their ultimatum, delivered in Mandarin, is as simple as it is virtually impossible to fulfill, needing to give them $800 by the evening or the debt will be doubled. With the family he supports half a world away, Ming has a single rain-soaked shift at his job in which to pay off his thuggish creditors. Ming Ding anonymously and...
14) Okja
Series
Summary
Mija is a South Korean girl growing up on an Edenic mountainside with her grandfather and best friend: Okja, a giant, empathetic 'super pig' created as part of a secret GMO experiment. When Okja is abruptly torn away from her, Mija embarks on a perilous rescue mission that places her at the center of a sinister corporate conspiracy. While Bongb2ss trademark virtuosic set-pieces dazzle, Okja's beating heart is the connection between a girl and her...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1034
Summary
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 portrait soon becomes a...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1111
Summary
A playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director₂s beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1106
Summary
A fictional account of one amazing night where icons Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown gathered discussing their roles in the Civil Rights Movement and cultural turmoil of the '60s.
18) The elephant man
Series
Summary
When the London surgeon Frederick Treves meets the freak-show performer John Merrick, who has severe skeletal and soft tissue deformities, he assumes that he must be intellectually disabled as well. As the two men spend more time together, though, Merrick reveals the intelligence, gentle nature, and profound sense of dignity that lie beneath his shocking appearance, and he and Treves develop a friendship.
19) Gate of hell
Series
Criterion collection volume 653
Summary
In the midst of epic, violent intrigue in twelfth-century Japan, an imperial warrior falls for a lady-in-waiting; even after he discovers she is married, he goes to extreme lengths to win her love.
Series
Criterion collection volume 300
Summary
Internationally reknown oceanographer Steve Zissou and his crew - Team Zissou - set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, always elusive, possibly non-existant Jaguar Shark that supposedly killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. On this journey, Steve's crew are joined by a young airline co-pilot, who may or may not be Zissou's son, a beautiful journalist who has been assigned to write a profile...
