Criterion Collection (Firm)

One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite his oppression at the hands of the Iranian government. In NO BEARS, as in many of his recent titles, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, in this case relocated to a rural border town to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey - the story of which...

Part crime thriller, part family farce, Louis Garrel’s THE INNOCENT shows the dangerous lengths two men go to, and the outlandish lies they tell, for the women they love. Garrel stars as Abel, a museum educator and widower whose mother, Sylvie, marries Michel, one of her drama pupils in the local penitentiary. Once on parole, Michel attempts to start a legitimate life for Sylvie’s sake but soon reverts to his old ways, with the suspicious Abel...

With his first film in seven years, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski directs one of his most free and visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a nomadic gray donkey named EO. After being removed from the traveling circus, which is the only life he’s ever known, EO begins a trek across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness in equal measure, all the while observing the follies and triumphs of humankind....

From Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori, two immigrants—from Cameroon and Benin, respectively—whose sibling-like bond is the only resource they can depend on in their struggle for survival on the margins of European society. The inseparable pair work as performers in a trattoria, dealing drugs on the side for the restaurant’s abusive cook, while balancing the demands of an indifferent...

When steely French matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) learns she has leukemia, she asks her children and grandchildren at the family Christmas gathering to see if they are eligible to become bone marrow donors. This causes deep friction in the family, especially between Junon's daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) and son Henri (Mathieu Amalric), who already have a tumultuous relationship. Their mother's sickness also recalls the traumatic loss of...

The struggle between the strictures of religion and humankind's brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychological epic from director Hlynur Pl̀mason. In the late nineteenth century, Danish priest Lucas made the perilous trek to Iceland's Southeastern coast to establish a church. There, the arrogant man of God finds his resolve tested as he confronts the harsh terrain, temptations...

From two-time Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori, two immigrants to Belgium from Cameroon and Benin, respectively whose siblinglike bond is the only resource they can depend on in their struggle for survival on the margins of European society. The pair work as performers in a cheap trattoria, dealing drugs on the side, while balancing the demands of an indifferent bureaucracy....