Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the rural south are forced to confront a tangle of difficult choices in a decaying world. The first feature film by director David Gordon Green is an ambitiously constructed, sensuously photographed meditation on adolescence.

In 1971, self-styled dictator General Idi Amin Dada took control of Uganda; director Barbet Schroeder turns his cameras on the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous tyrant.

In Ronald Neame’s film of Joyce Cary’s classic novel, Alec Guinness transforms himself into one of cinema’s most indelible comic figures: the lovably scruffy painter Gulley Jimson.

Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Kon Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film.

A courageous and startling film, Peter Davis’s landmark documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronts the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to documentary footage of the conflict at home and abroad.

Wes Anderson’s hilarious, touching, and brilliantly stylized study of melancholy and redemption centers around a dysfunctional family of geniuses.

Oscar Wilde’s enduringly hilarious story of two young women who think themselves engaged to the same nonexistent man is given the grand Technicolor treatment. Seldom has a classic stage comedy been so engagingly transferred to the screen.

A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director (Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa).

One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair’s À nous la liberté tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old jail pal Emile) to upset his carefully laid plans.

In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.

Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher explores the experiences of a poor adolescent boy as he struggles to reconcile his dreams and his guilt with the abjection that surrounds him.

One of the CIA’s top international operatives, Miles Kendig (Walter Matthau) suddenly finds himself relegated to a desk job in an agency power play. Unwilling to go quietly, Kendig writes a memoir exposing the innermost secrets of every major intelligence agency in the world.

A psychologist and cosmonaut embarks on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness in Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliantly original science-fiction epic.

Controversial winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, Man Bites Dog stunned audiences worldwide with its unflinching imagery and biting satire of media violence.

When fate lands three hapless men—an unemployed disc jockey, a small-time pimp, and a strong-willed Italian tourist—in a Louisiana prison, their singular adventure begins. Described by Jim Jarmusch as a “neo–Beat noir comedy,” Down by Law is part nightmare and part fairy tale.

On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the first and only Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll.

In 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the first and only Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey would launch the careers of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few.

Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology.

When thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) meets his true love in pickpocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins), they embark on a scam to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch’s masterful touch is in full flower in Trouble in Paradise.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive Contempt, Michel Piccoli is a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director, a crude and arrogant American producer, and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey.