Criterion Collection (Firm)

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...

An actor has dinner with his friend, a theater director, at an Upper West Side restaurant, and discuss everything from money to death to love.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 anything-goes crime narrative about a young thief on the run and his American girlfriend.

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...

In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan's Inland Sea, recording his search for traces of a traditional way of life as well as his own journey of self-discovery. Twenty years later, filmmaker Lucille Carra undertook a parallel trip inspired by Richie's by-then-classic book, capturing images of hushed beauty and meeting people who still carried on the fading customs...

Based on the director's life, this film chronicles Malle's experiences during the German occupation of France in World War II.

"With her first and only feature film--a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in--Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loder), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and...

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.

After years on the road establishing his reputation as Japan's greatest fencer, Takezo returns to Kyoto to challenge the leader of the region's finest school of fencing.

For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries.