Criterion Collection
A curated selection of films from the Criterion Collection, known for its classic and important contemporary films.
Petite Maman Blu Ray
- Celine Sciamma
Blu-ray $48.99Reader Reward Price: $44.09
Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire transcends time and space to weave a delicate fable about grief, family, and connection across generations. In the wake of her grandmother’s death, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her distraught mother (Nina Meurisse) to her childhood home. There, Nelly’s encounter with another young girl (Gabrielle Sanz) brings mother and daughter together in a way neither could have ever imagined. Evoking childhood’s perpetual state of wonder through luminous, richly textured images, Petite maman takes viewers on a journey inward for a quietly miraculous tale of emotional time travel.
Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema
- Bo Widerberg
Blu-ray $120.99Reader Reward Price: $108.89
Driven by a desire to forge a socially conscious Swedish cinema—one that broke with the inward-looking psychodrama of Ingmar Bergman to give dynamic expression to the everyday experiences of working-class Swedes—writer Bo Widerberg turned to filmmaking in the early 1960s, realizing his ambition in politically committed yet poetic works that merge social-realist themes with a refined, often breathtakingly beautiful visual sensibility. Dramatizing the struggles of ordinary people fighting to chart their own destiny, these four acclaimed, popular, and pivotal films from Widerberg’s most prolific period live and breathe with a rare vitality—and helped launch a new Swedish cinema.
The Princess Bride
- Rob Reiner
4K UHD $59.99Reader Reward Price: $53.99
A high-spirited adventure that pits true love against inconceivable odds, The Princess Bride has charmed legions of fans with its irreverent gags, eccentric ensemble, and dazzling swordplay. A kid (Fred Savage), home sick from school, grudgingly allows his grandfather (Peter Falk) to read him a dusty storybook—which is how we meet the innocent Buttercup (Robin Wright, in her breakout role), about to marry the nefarious Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) though her heart belongs to Westley (Cary Elwes). The wedding plans are interrupted, however, by a mysterious pirate, a vengeful Spaniard, and a good-natured giant, in a tale full of swashbuckling, romance, and outrageously hilarious spoofery. Directed by Rob Reiner from an endlessly quotable script by William Goldman, The Princess Bride reigns as a fairy-tale classic.
Walkabout 4k Uhd
- Nicholas Roeg
4K UHD $59.99Reader Reward Price: $53.99
A young sister and brother are abandoned in the harsh Australian outback and must learn to cope in the natural world, without their usual comforts, in this hypnotic masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg. Along the way, they meet an Aboriginal youth on his walkabout, a rite of passage in which adolescent boys are initiated into manhood by journeying into the wilderness alone. Walkabout is a thrilling adventure as well as a provocative rumination on time and civilization.
The Trial
- Orson Welles
4K UHD $58.99Reader Reward Price: $53.09
A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s The Trial casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, the blacklist, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement—a bold, personal film that he himself considered one of his greatest. Dizzying camera angles, expressionistic lighting, increasingly surreal locations—Welles unleashed the full force of his visual brilliance to convey the nightmarish disorientation of a world gone mad.
La Bamba Blu Ray
- Luis Valdez
Blu-ray $48.99Reader Reward Price: $44.09
The brief but incandescent life of rock-and-roll trailblazer Ritchie Valens is immortalized in this enthralling biopic from another Mexican American icon, Luis Valdez, the father of Chicano cinema. With sweetness and swagger, Lou Diamond Phillips embodies the 1950s California teenager who, forged by his fiercely supportive mother (Rosanna DeSoto) and rebellious brother (Esai Morales), rises from his farm-working roots to chart-topping fame in the early days of rock—until one fateful night that haunts music history. Propelled by a hip-shaking soundtrack featuring Los Lobos and Carlos Santana, La Bamba captures the electric vitality of an artist who bridged cultures to create his own American dream.
Moonage Daydream 4k Uhd
- Movie
4K UHD $59.99Reader Reward Price: $53.99
An ecstatic voyage through the creative and spiritual universe of David Bowie, Moonage Daydream is a fittingly unclassifiable tribute to the shape-shifting rock iconoclast and his singular sound and vision. Exploding the conventions of the music documentary, director Brett Morgen remixes dazzling, never-before-seen footage of the artist throughout his career, reveling in his otherworldly presence while revealing the restless philosophical inquiry that guided his myriad metamorphoses. Graced with soulful narration by Bowie, this immersive audiovisual head rush transmits the essence of a phenomenon that cannot be explained—only experienced.
Night & The City Blu Ray
- Jules Dassin
Blu-ray $33.99Reader Reward Price: $30.59
Two-bit hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) longs for “a life of ease and plenty.” Trailed by an inglorious history of go-nowhere schemes, he tries to hatch a lucrative plan with a famous wrestler. But there is no easy money in this underworld of shifting alliances, bottomless graft, and pummeled flesh—and Fabian soon learns the horrible price of his ambition. Luminously shot in the streets of London while Hollywood blacklisters back home were closing in on director Jules Dassin, Night and the City, also starring Gene Tierney, is film noir of the first order, and one of Dassin’s crowning achievements.
After Hours 4k Uhd
- Martin Scorsese
4K UHD $58.99Reader Reward Price: $53.09
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home. With this Kafkaesque cult classic, Martin Scorsese—abetted by Michael Ballhaus’s kinetic cinematography and scene-stealing supporting turns by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard—directed a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity, turning the desolate night world of 1980s SoHo into a bohemian wonderland of surreal menace.
Medicine for Melancholy
- Barry Jenkins
Blu-ray $49.99Reader Reward Price: $44.99
Barry Jenkins’s captivating debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, is a lo-fi romance that unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. There, a one-night stand between two young bohemians, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), spins off into a woozy daylong affair marked by moments of tenderness, friction, joy, and intellectual sparring as they explore their relationships to each other, the city, and their own Blackness. Shooting on desaturated video, Jenkins crafts an intimate exploration of alienation and connection graced with the evocative visual palette and empathetic emotional charge that have come to define his work.
Pasolini 101 Blu Ray
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
Blu-ray $280.99Reader Reward Price: $252.89
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.
Rules of the Game 4K UHD
- Jean Renoir
4K UHD $58.99Reader Reward Price: $53.09
Jean Renoir's scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners, in which a weekend at a marquis’s countryside chateau lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haute bourgeois acquaintances. 1939. Considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’s country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut-bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the audience at its 1939 premiere, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here. 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features Introduction to the film by director Jean Renoir Audio commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich Comparison of the film’s two endings Selected-scene analysis by Renoir historian Chris Faulkner Excerpts from a 1966 French television program by filmmaker Jacques Rivette Part one of Jean Renoir, a two-part 1993 documentary by film critic David Thompson Video essay about the film’s production, release, and 1959 reconstruction Interview with film critic Olivier Curchod Interview from a 1965 episode of the French television series Les écrans de la ville with Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand Interviews with set designer Max Douy; Renoir’s son, Alain; and actor Mila Parély PLUS: An essay by Sesonske; writings by Jean Renoir, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bertrand Tavernier, and François Truffaut; and tributes to the film by J. Hoberman, Kent Jones, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, and others New cover by Raphael Geroni
Servant Blu Ray
- Joseph Losey
Blu-ray $48.99Reader Reward Price: $44.09
The prolific, ever-provocative Joseph Losey, blacklisted from Hollywood and living in England, delivered a coolly modernist shock to the system of that nation’s cinema with this mesmerizing dissection of class, sexuality, and power. A dissolute scion of the upper crust (James Fox) finds the seemingly perfect manservant (a diabolical Dirk Bogarde, during his transition from matinee idol to art-house icon) to oversee his new London town house. But not all is as it seems, as traditional social hierarchies are gradually, disturbingly destabilized. Lustrously disorienting cinematography and a masterful script by playwright Harold Pinter merge in The Servant, a tour de force of mounting psychosexual menace.
This is a selection of our current Criterion Collection titles. To find other titles or authors, or just to browse, please use the search box.