496
Daring in its refusal to make the socialist leader into an easy martyr or hero, Che paints a vivid, naturalistic portrait of the man himself (Benicio del Toro), from his overthrow of the Batista dictatorship to his 1964 United Nations trip to the end of his short life.
500
Roberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II—Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero—that he left his first transformative mark on cinema.
501
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard.
502
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann, a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption.
503
Max Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a meticulous, one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.
504
Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger, about IRA member Bobby Sands’s 1981 prison hunger strike, is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.
505
Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap.
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.
Hiroshi Inagaki’s acclaimed “Samurai Trilogy” is a sweeping saga of the legendary seventeenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto (powerfully portrayed by Toshiro Mifune), set against the turmoil of a devastating civil war.
Criterion presents four classic literary adaptations together in a single set at a special price.
These four classic films, from four masters of Japanese cinema, turn a genre upside down, redefining for a modern generation the meaning of loyalty and honor, as embodied by the iconic figure of the samurai.
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.
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.