Criterion Collection (Firm)

This compilation of five early short films by Martin Scorsese offers a fascinating window onto his artistic development. Spanning the years from Scorsese₂s time at NYU in the mid-1960s to the late ₂70s. The collection includes Italian American; American Boy; The Big Shave; What₂s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?; and It₂s Not Just You, Murray!

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.

What does the weight of time's passage feel like for a family caught in the jaws of a brutal carceral system? Both a breathtaking cinematic love story and a bruising indictment of American injustice, the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary debut of Garrett Bradley traces the decades-long quest of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six and a fiercely outspoken prison abolitionist, to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary,...

In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan₂s 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 Richie₂s by-then-classic book, capturing images of hushed beauty and meeting people who still carried on the fading customs...

Combines film footage and photos shot inside Nazi concentration camps and scenes of the death camps taken 10 years after the war with narration describing the horrors that took place there.

Poto and Babengo: Gracie and Ginny are twins that have developed their own language which is a mixture of the German and English that is spoken at home. Gorin looks at this family from various angles, casting himself as a sociological detective. Routine pleasures: what do model-train enthusiasts and the painter Manny Farber have in common? The cultural inquisitor Gorin shows how these worlds intersect in the elaborate minature worlds created by the...

"La jetée" was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's film "Twelve Monkeys" and is almost entirely narrated using black and white stills. After Paris is destroyed in a third world war, the survivors are forced to retreat underground where scientists conduct strange time-travel experiments in an effort to escape to a better past or future. In "Sans soleil", an unknown woman reads the writings of a cameraman who travels the world to produce a study of...

A stirring look at three women striving to forge their own paths amidst the wide-open plains of the American Northwest: a lawyer who finds herself contending with both office sexism and a hostage situation; a wife and mother whose determination to build her dream home puts her at odds with the men in her life; and a young law student who forms an ambiguous bond with a lonely ranch hand. A portrait emerges of flawed, but strong-willed individuals in...

Louis Malle, known as one of the world's most versatile storytellers, gives us 6 discs of documentaries. Set includes: Vive le Tour; Humain, Trop Humain; Place de la Republique; Phantom India; Calcutta; ...And the Pursuit of Happiness; and God's Country.

A young woman battles indecisiveness as she traverses the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path.