Criterion Collection (Firm)

A playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director's beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative...

Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses with an intimate journey through...

Close-up: This docudrama comments on Iranian society. Ali Sabzian claims to a fellow passenger on the bus that he is the famous Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He then becomes involved with his fellow passenger and her family, claiming that he has cast the family's son in a major role. At some point this tale comes unravelled, and the family takes him to court. A well-meaning judge persuades the family to drop the charges against this unemployed...

A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller.

Two sisters, Karin and Maria, are keeping vigil for a third, Agnes, who is dying of cancer and can find solace only in the arms of a beatific nurse.

Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi's boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand's electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city, determined to rise above his circumstances working odd jobs, passing time with friends, learning to read and running, always running, toward the future. Water,...

One of the preeminent works of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ann Hui's shattering look at the circumstances that drove Vietnamese refugees to flee their homeland in the wake of the Vietnam War is told through images of haunting, unforgettable power.

It is a love letter from director Bertrand Tavernier to the heyday of bebop and to the Black American musicians who found refuge in the smoky underground jazz clubs of 1950s Paris. In a miraculous, sui generis fusion of performer and character that was nominated for an Oscar, legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays Dale Turner, a brilliant New York jazz veteran whose music aches with beauty but whose personal life is ravaged by addiction. Searching...

Thirteen-year-old Antoine Doinet lives in a cramped apartment with his mother and stepfather, neglected by them and unlucky at school. Living an intensely imaginative life of his own,he gets into trouble and is finally committed to reform school, from which he escapes and runs towards the sea, which he has never seen.

Justine Triet's masterful Palme d'Or winner, a riveting courtroom thriller starring Sandra Huller as a writer who is put on trial for her husband's suspicious demise, is a mystery that is less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead.