Criterion Collection (Firm)

When a famous actress is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago, she retreats to Sils Maria, in the Alps to rehearse. A film star comes face to face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself while starring in a revival of the play that launched her career.

In the late twenties and early thirties, Yasujiro Ozu was working steadily for Shochiku studios, honing his craft on dozens of silent films in various genres, from romantic melodramas to college comedies to gangster pictures -- and, of course, movies about families. In these three droll domestic films -- Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But, and Passing Fancy, presented here with all-new scores by renowned silent-film composer Donald Sosin -- Ozu movingly...

The film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the holy Bengal River in India, around which their daily lives unfold.

El norte: Enrique and Rosa are brother and sister Mayan Indian peasants, living in the mountains of Guatemala. When the village attempts to organize for better treatment, Enrique and Rosa are forced to flee as the Guatemalan army is sent in to punish the townspeople. Receiving clandestine help from friends and humorous advice from a veteran immigrant, they make their way to Los Angeles, hoping to make a new life as young, uneducated, and illegal...

Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray's breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed new restoration of a family saga. Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) follows a poor Bengali family living in a village. The boy Apu's development grows as he witnesses the protection of family members' reputations, the relationship of the family group to an elderly 'aunt',...

"Travelogue, memoir and outrageous cinematic spectacle converge in this kaleidoscopic valentine to the Eternal City, composed by one of its most iconic inhabitants. Leisurely one moment and breathless the next, this urban fantasia by Federico Fellini interweaves recollections of the director's young adulthood in the era of Mussolini with an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Rome, where he and his film crew are shooting footage of the bustling...

After a fellow spy is murdered, an agent is assigned to pretend he is defecting, but soon suspects that the layers of betrayal go far beyond what was originally expected.

Focusing on the work of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé, this collection features twenty-three Painlevé nature films; a 2005 performance of the ninety-minute score, The sounds of science, written in 2001 by members of the rock group Yo La Tengo to accompany eight of Painlevé's films; an interview with Yo La Tengo; and the eight-part 1988 French television series, Jean Painlevé au fil de ses films, which explores Painlevé's life and work through...

Study of a French film actress and a Japanese architect, each with a troubled past, who have a brief affair in postwar Hiroshima.

In his unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord's book of the same name, the acclaimed British director Roy Ward Baker depicts with sensitivity, awe, and a fine sense of tragedy the Titanic's final hours. Featuring remarkably restrained performances, A Night To Remember is cinema's subtlest, finest dramatization of this monumental twentieth-century catastrophe.