Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

The disintegration of a marriage is dissected in John Cassavetes’ searing Faces. Shot in high-contrast 16 mm black and white, the film follows the futile attempts of a captain of industry (John Marley) and his wife (Lynn Carlin) to escape the anguish of their empty marriage in the arms of others.

John Cassavetes has been called a genius, a visionary, and the father of independent film. The five films included here represent his works made outside the Hollywood studio system, on which he was afforded complete control.

One of the most influential political films in history, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (La bataille d’Alger) vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. This is one of David Cronenberg’s most provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking sex and violence.

Richard Linklater’s Slacker, shot on 16 mm for a mere three thousand dollars, presents a day in the life of a loose-knit subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in Austin, Texas. This is one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.

In Fellini’s semiautobiographical masterpiece, five young men linger in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small seacoast town. They while away their time spending the lira doled out by their indulgent families on drink, women, and nights at the pool hall.

Filmmaking legend Roberto Rossellini brings his passion for realism and unerring eye for the everyday to this portrait of the early years of the reign of France’s “Sun King,” and in the process reinvents the costume drama.

A brother and sister flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. A work of social realism imbued with dreamlike imagery, El Norte is a lovingly rendered, heartbreaking story of hope and survival.

In one of Douglas Sirk’s most flamboyant master classes in melodrama, reckless playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) and a local doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), find themselves inextricably linked amid a series of increasingly wild twists, turns, trials, and tribulations.

Criterion presents four classic literary adaptations together in a single set at a special price.

Legendary auteur Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) emerged in the 1950s as an art-house icon and remained one for more than four decades. Here, together in one box set, Criterion presents four of the unforgettable works that helped establish his international preeminence.

Laurence Olivier directed only five films in his sixty-year career, yet his three Shakespeare adaptations, presented here together on DVD for the first time, are still widely considered the definitive film adaptations.

A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece. Made one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this is a furthering of Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the frivolous upper classes.

Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel’s wicked and wild take on the life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God.

An unsung comic triumph from David Lean, Hobson’s Choice stars the legendary Charles Laughton as the harrumphing Henry Hobson, the owner of a boot shop in late Victorian northern England whose haughty, independent daughter decides to forge her own path, romantically and professionally.

Thanks to perhaps the most indelible character in Akira Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Yojimbo surpassed even Seven Samurai in popularity when it was released. Made one year later, Sanjuro matches Yojimbo’s storytelling dexterity, and brings the duo to a thrilling and unforgettable conclusion.

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale—high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.—thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion.

By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Kurosawa’s gloriously shot first color film displays all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion.

Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping character study. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, this is Truffaut’s tribute to art overcoming adversity.

A magnetic Vittorio De Sica is Bardone, an opportunistic rascal in wartime Genoa forced by the Nazis to impersonate a dead partisan general in prison to extract information from fellow inmates. Roberto Rossellini’s gripping drama is among his most commercially popular films.