The Criterion Collection

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  49th Parallel

  Michael Powell
  1941 • 123 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
  Spine: #376  Editions: DVD, iTunes

  A Nazi U-boat crew, headed by the ruthless Eric Portman, is stranded in Canada during the thick of World War II in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s quick-witted wartime thriller, 49th Parallel.

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  8½

  Federico Fellini
  1963 • 138 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
  Spine: #140  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto e mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.

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  Amarcord

  Federico Fellini
  1973 • 123 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
  Spine: #4  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes

  Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the fascist period. The Academy Award–winning Amarcord remains one of cinema’s enduring treasures.

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  Bicycle Thieves

  Vittorio De Sica
  1948 • 89 minutes • 1.37:1 • Italy
  Spine: #374  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes

  Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema.

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  Black Narcissus

  Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
  1947 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
  Spine: #93  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes

  This explosive work about the conflict between the spirit and the flesh is the epitome of the sensuous style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

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  Black Orpheus

  Marcel Camus
  1959 • 107 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
  Spine: #48  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

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  Closely Watched Trains

  Jiří Menzel
  1966 • 93 minutes • 1.33:1 • Czechoslovakia
  Spine: #131  Edition: DVD

  At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Wry and tender, Jirí Menzel’s Academy Award-winning Closely Watched Trains is a masterpiece of human observation.

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  Cries and Whispers

  Ingmar Bergman
  1972 • 91 minutes • 1.66:1 • Sweden
  Spine: #101  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes

  An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary color photography of Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behavior in the face of death.

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  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

  David Fincher
  2008 • 165 minutes • 2.40:1 • United States
  Spine: #476  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray

  Brad Pitt is a man who is born in his eighties and ages backward and Cate Blanchett is the woman he is destined to love forever in David Fincher’s monumental, Academy Award–winning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a powerful testament to life and death, love and loss.

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  Days of Heaven

  Terrence Malick
  1978 • 94 minutes • 1.77:1 • United States
  Spine: #409  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray

  A timeless American idyll and a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor, Terrence Malick’s glorious period tragedy Days of Heaven features Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros.

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  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  Luis Buñuel
  1972 • 102 minutes • 1.66:1 • France
  Spine: #102  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

  In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric Oscar winner, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

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  Divorce Italian Style

  Pietro Germi
  1961 • 104 minutes • 1.85:1 • Italy
  Spine: #286  Edition: DVD

  In Pietro Germi’s hilarious and cutting satire of Sicilian male-chauvinist culture, Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) longs to marry his nubile young cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), but one obstacle stands in his way: his fatuous and fawning wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca).

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  Fanny and Alexander — The Theatrical Version

  Ingmar Bergman
  1982 • 188 minutes • 1.66:1 • Sweden
  Spine: #263  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.

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  Forbidden Games

  René Clément
  1952 • 86 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
  Spine: #318  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets

  A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted, René Clément’s mythical and heartbreakingly real Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play.

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  Great Expectations

  David Lean
  1946 • 118 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
  Spine: #31  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean’s Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens’s masterpiece to robust on-screen life.

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  Hamlet

  Laurence Olivier
  1948 • 153 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
  Spine: #82  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet continues to be the most compelling version of Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy.

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  Harlan County USA

  Barbara Kopple
  1976 • 103 minutes • 1.78:1 • United States
  Spine: #334  Edition: DVD

  Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs.

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  Hearts and Minds

  Peter Davis
  1974 • 112 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
  Spine: #156  Editions: Dual Format Blu-ray/DVD, iTunes

  A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it.

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  Howards End

  James Ivory
  1992 • 142 minutes • 2.35:1 • United Kingdom
  Spine: #488  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray

  The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Howards End is a luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England.

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  The Last Command

  Josef von Sternberg
  1928 • 88 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
  Spine: #530  Edition: Collector’s Sets

  Emil Jannings won the first best actor Academy Award for his performance as a sympathetic tyrant: an exiled Russian general turned Hollywood extra who lands a role playing a version of his former czarist self, bringing about his emotional downfall.

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  The Last Emperor

  Bernardo Bertolucci
  1987 • 160 minutes • 2.00:1 • China
  Spine: #422  Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes

  Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, about the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated.

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  The Last Picture Show

  Peter Bogdanovich
  1971 • 126 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
  Spine: #549  Edition: Collector’s Sets

  Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal film in the career of the invaluable director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich.

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  Missing

  Costa-Gavras
  1982 • 122 minutes • 1.85:1 • United States
  Spine: #449  Edition: DVD

  Starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, Missing is political filmmaker extraordinaire Costa-Gavras’s compelling, controversial dramatization of the search for American filmmaker and journalist Charles Horman, who mysteriously disappeared during the 1973 coup in Chile.

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  Mon oncle

  Jacques Tati
  1958 • 116 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
  Spine: #111  Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, iTunes

  Mon oncle is a supremely amusing satire of mechanized living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

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  The Naked City

  Jules Dassin
  1948 • 96 minutes • 1.33:1 • United States
  Spine: #380  Editions: DVD, iTunes

  Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin’s dazzling police procedural The Naked City was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir.

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