Criterion Collection (Firm)

Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New Yorks 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band's incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol's...

Newly deceased playboy Henry Van Cleve arrives at the outer offices of Hades where he asks a bemused Satan for permission to enter the gates of Hell. Though the Devil doubts he will qualify, Henry proceeds to recount a lifetime wooing and pursuing women.

One of the defining independent films of the 1990s, Atom Egoyan's mesmerizing international breakthrough takes the conventions of the psychological thriller into bold new territory; unsettling, dreamlike, and empathetic.

Two sisters, joined at birth as Siamese twins, are separated in late adolescence. One is lovely, gentle, kind -- the other is quite mad.

Willie, a disenchanted loner, is visited by his sixteen-year old Hungarian cousin Eva. Willie's equally slacker best friend Eddie also meets Eva, and the three become loose friends, until Eva decides to leave to visit Willie and Eva's Aunt Lottie in Cleveland. After a while Willie and Eddie are surprised to find that they miss Eva's companionship and take off for Cleveland in an old car. Finding Cleveland in winter to be disappointingly cold and unattractive,...

Set in the nation's music capital. The film weaves the stories of twenty-four characters; from country star to wannabe to reporter to waitress, into a cinematic tapestry that is equal parts comedy, tragedy, and musical.

"Ousmane Sembène ... made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot--about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally--into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set...

A sharp satire about eight Swedish aristocrats who become romantically and comically intertwined over a single weekend. Includes Director approved special edition features.

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',...

A dark documentary of the self-styled dictator of Uganda providing a disturbing portrait of one of the 20th century's most notorious figures.