Criterion Collection (Firm)

An elegy of exile and an epic immersion into the world of rural Italy during the Mussolini years, Francesco Rosi₂s sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and political activist Carlo Levi brings a monument of twentieth-century autobiography to the screen with quiet grace and solemn beauty. Banished to a desolate southern town for his anti-Fascist views, the worldly Levi discovers an Italy he never knew existed.

Sold into slavery as a young boy and sentenced to spend out the rest of his adult life laboring in the harsh deserts of Egypt, Spartacus gets a new lease on life when he is purchased by the owner of a Roman gladiator school. Moved by the defiance of an Ethopian warrior, Draba, Spartacus leads a slave uprising which threatens Rome's status quo. As Spartacus gains sympathy within the Roman Senate, he also makes a powerful enemy in form of Marcus Lucinius...

A playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director's 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...

Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape--pulsating with both freedom and menace--that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage's novel. After a sensitive widow (Kirsten Dunst) and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move in with her gentle new husband (Jesse...

Members of an African American family living in a cramped Chicago apartment, in this deeply resonant tale of dreams deferred. Following the death of their patriarch, the Youngers await a life insurance check they hope will change their circumstances, but tensions arise over how best to use the money.

A young sister and brother are abandoned in the harsh Australian outback and must learn to exist in the natural world, without their usual comforts, in this hypnotic masterpiece. Along the way, they met a young aborigine on his 'walkabout, ' a rite of passage in which adolescent boys are initiated into manhood by journeying into the wilderness alone.

Takes viewers on a World War II era journey from Prague to England to the Swiss Alps, as Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter who are being aided by a debonair British undercover agent. "Compact, propulsive screenplay ..."--Variety. "One of the finest spy films ever."--TV Guide.

A young Native American boy carves a small wooden man into a canoe. Follows the adventures of the tiny craft as it forges its own path from Lake Superior through the Great Lakes and down to the Atlantic Ocean. A thrilling journey across the waves and rapids of North America.

Close-up: This docudrama comments on Iranian society. Ali Sabzian claims to a fellow passenger on the bus that he is the famous Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He then becomes involved with his fellow passenger and her family, claiming that he has cast the family's son in a major role. At some point this tale comes unravelled, and the family takes him to court. A well-meaning judge persuades the family to drop the charges against this unemployed...

In this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the Fascist period, Fellini satirizes his youth and turns daily life into a circus of adolescent desires, male fantasies, rituals, sensations, and emotions.