Criterion Collection (Firm)
Series
Language
Czech
Formats
Description
With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, a hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual...
Series
Criterion collection volume 130
Language
Czech
Description
In 1942 a Czech peasant befriends the old Jewish women whose button shop he takes over and faces a dilemma when the authorities decree all Jews must leave the city.
Language
Czech
Description
Czechoslovak filmmaker Karel Zeman devoted his career to transporting viewers to realms beyond their wildest imagining. The deft, breathtaking combinations of live-action and animation techniques that he pioneered in the postwar years earned him comparisons to legends such as Georges Méliès. Presented here are three of Zeman's most enchanting fantasies: Journey To The Beginning Of Time; Invention For Destruction; and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen....
Language
Czech
Description
Includes: Invention For Destruction.
Czechoslovak filmmaker Karel Zeman devoted his career to transporting viewers to realms beyond their wildest imagining. The deft, breathtaking combinations of live-action and animation techniques that he pioneered in the postwar years earned him comparisons to legends such as Georges Méliès. Presented here are three of Zeman's most enchanting fantasies: Journey To The Beginning Of Time; Invention For Destruction;...
5) The cremator
Language
Czech
Formats
Description
Karl Kopfrkingl works at a stately crematorium in Prague. Obsessed with his duties, he believes he is liberating the souls of the departed. With Nazi forces gathering at the Czech border, Karl descends into a mania that allows him to wholly enact his disturbed beliefs.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1157
Language
Czech
Description
If the entire world is bad, why shouldn₂t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women, both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over?
Series
Criterion collection volume 145
Language
Czech
Description
In a small provincial town, arrangements and events surrounding the firemen's annual ball, honoring a retiring firechief, go wrong at every turn.
Series
Criterion collection volume 761
Language
Czech
Description
A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape. Ravishingly shot, enchantingly scored, and spilling over with surreal fancies.
11) Marketa Lazarová
Series
Criterion collection volume 661
Language
Czech
Description
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and pagansim, humankind and nature, and love and violence.
Series
Criterion collection volume 661
Language
Czech
Description
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vanécura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and Pagansim, humankind and nature, and love and violence.
Language
Czech
Description
"A manifesto of sorts for the Czech New Wave, this five-part anthology shows off the breadth of expression and the versatility of the movement's directors. Based on the stories by the legendary writer, Bohumil Hrabal, the shorts range from the surreally chilling to the caustically observant to the casually romantic, but all have a cutting, wily view of the world"--Container.
Smrt pana Baltazara = Mr. Baltazar's death: A group of aimless, nostalgia-inclined...
Language
Czech
Description
Rozmarné léto: Three middle-aged men have their summer interrupted by the arrival of a circus performer and his beautiful assistant.
Žert: A man is expelled form the Communist Party due to a joke. After he is released from working the mines and prison, he plots revenge against the person who betrayed him.
Language
Czech
Description
Sedmikrasky = Daises: Two teenage girls decide that since the world is spoiled they will be spoiled as well; accordingly they embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world about them.
O slavnosti a hostech = A report on the party and guests: A group of happy picnickers are accosted by a group of strangers led by a bullying sadist who has an unbreakable hold over his followers. After he interrogates one of them,...