Janus Films
Series
Criterion collection volume 2
Language
日本語
Description
Tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire seven out-of-work warriors to protect them from invading bandits.
2) Charulata
Series
Criterion collection volume 669
Language
Bengali
Formats
Description
Set in late 19th-century, pre-independence India, this film is about a woman's artistic and romantic yearning. It is about the lonely wife of a workaholic newspaper editor, Charulata, whose beautiful face masks a burning creativity. When her husband's poet cousin comes to stay with them, Charulata finds herself both inspired by him creatively and dangerously drawn to him physically. A delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the...
Series
Criterion collection volume 668
Language
Bengali
Formats
Description
Set in mid-1950s Calcutta and directed by Satyajit Ray, this story follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati, who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray gradually builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the contemporary...
Series
Criterion collection volume 490
Language
Deutsch
Formats
Description
Wings of Desire is one of cinema's loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts fears, hopes, and dreams of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot...
Language
Français
Description
Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers; it was the first entry in the Hulot series and the film that launched its maker to international stardom. Nominated for Best Writing - Story and Screenplay at the 1956...
Language
English
Description
In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish "Tomainian" dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supporting turns, The Great Dictator, boldly going after...
7) Richard III
Language
English
Description
In Richard III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare's masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life. Olivier is diabolically captivating as Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, through a series of murderous machinations, steals the crown from his brother Edward. And he surrounds himself with a royal supporting cast, which includes Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom. Filmed in VistaVision...
8) L'avventura
Series
Criterion collection volume 98
Language
Italiano
Appears on list
Description
Concerns the enigmatic disappearance of a young woman during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily, and the search taken up by her disaffected lover and best friend. Antonioni's controversial international sensation is a gorgeously shot tale of modern ennui and spiritual isolation. Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative in its own right.
Series
Language
Swedish
Description
In medieval Sweden a knight returns from war only to find a ravaged homeland. He meets up with a group of traveling players and eventually confronts the embodiment of death with whom he engages in a game of chess for his life. The knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused.
10) Seven samurai
Series
Language
日本語
Appears on these lists
Asian American & Pacific Islander Month
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
MPL Criterion Collection
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
MPL Criterion Collection
Description
This epic masterpiece is about a group of 16th century samurai who are hired to defend a small Japanese village that finds itself annually raided by an army of bandits who steal the meager crops harvested by the peasants. Tired of relinquishing their food supply but woefully inept in combat skills, the villagers decide to hire a band of samurai to protect them. In addition to the primary conflict between the villagers and the bandits, much of the...
11) Hamlet
Series
Criterion collection volume 82
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
The classic version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the towering tragedy of the Danish prince who feigns madness to trap his father's murderer.
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding's legendary novel on the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center. Taking an innovative documentary-like approach, Brook shot Lord of The Flies with an off-the-cuff naturalism, seeming to record a spontaneous eruption of its characters' IDs. The result is a rattling masterpiece, as provocative as its...
Series
Criterion collection volume 139
Language
Swedish
Description
A distinguished professor emeritus who lives alone with his housekeeper can only come to terms with his egocentricity by traveling back in time to his earliest youth, finding there the seeds of his failure as husband, lover, father. This film deals with the phenomena of old age wherein childhood memories return with ever-increasing clarity while great stretches of the prime of life vanish into obscurity. In Swedish with English subtitles.
15) Grey Gardens
Series
Criterion collection volume 123
Language
English
Description
Portrait of the relationship between Edith Bouvier Beale and her grown daughter, Little Edie, once and aspiring actress in New York who left her career to care for her aging mother in their East Hampton home, and never left again. The aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis feed their cats and raccoons and rehash their pasts behind the walls of their decaying mansion, Grey Gardens.
16) Z
Series
Criterion collection volume 491
Language
Français
Description
A Greek pacifist leader is murdered at a rally. Despite the official police report of accidental death, a journalist's persistent questioning leads to a full-scale investigation, revealing corruption in high places.
Series
Criterion collection volume 62
Language
Français
Appears on list
Description
Dramatization of the life of Joan of Arc centering on her trial and execution.
Series
Criterion collection volume 519
Language
Persian
Formats
Description
In this documentary-style film, which reconstructs events leading up to a trial and includes footage of actual trial proceedings, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami tells the story of unemployed Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian, who insinuated himself into the lives of a well-to-do Iranian family by posing as famous Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf and promising their son a prominent role in his next film.
Series
Criterion collection volume 699
Language
English
Formats
Description
Errol Morris (The Fog of War) turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris's documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking's body has been accompanied by the untrammeled...