Criterion Collection (Firm)

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical...

In ANSELM, Wim Wenders creates a hypnotic portrait of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and important painters and sculptors of our time. Shot in 6K resolution, and presented theatrically and on Blu-ray in 3D, the film presents an immersive cinematic experience of the German artist’s work, which explores the overawing beauty of human existence, landscape, and myth while confronting the horrors of his country’s history and seeking to undo...

The inventive, self-reflexive films of independent trailblazer Cheryl Dunye (THE WATERMELON WOMAN) offer multilayered, sharply funny commentaries on the intersections of black and queer identity. Over the course of six provocative, sardonic shorts, Dunye honed a unique, quasi-documentary style she dubbed “Dunyementary.”

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...

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...

The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life...

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the **Academy Award–winning** BICYCLE THIEVES, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly...

Winner of both the **Academy Award** for best foreign-language film and the **Cannes Film Festival’s** Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis...

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....

Adapting the award-winning novel by Paolo Cognetti, directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch portray through observant detail and stunning landscape photography the profound, complex relationship between Pietro and Bruno, who first meet as children when Pietro’s Milan family vacations in an isolated village at the base of the Alpine slopes. As they mature, Pietro becomes estranged from his business-minded father even as Bruno takes...