The Criterion Collection Complete

FASSBINDER, Rainer Werner (Germany) Eight Hours Don't Make A Day[1972-73] Spine #946 Blu-ray Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, dodging expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical — yet far from cynical — perspective. Over the course of five episodes, the sprawling story tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen (Gottfried John) and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves (Hanna Schygulla), his eccentric family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory floor. Rarely screened since its popular but controversial initial broadcast, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day  rates as a true discovery, one of Fassbinder's earliest and most tender experiments with the possibilities of melodrama. 495 minutes Color Monaural in German 1:37:1 ...

ASHBY, Hal (United States) Shampoo [1975] Spine #947 Blu-ray Shampoo  gives us a day in the life of George (Warren Beatty), a Beverly Hills hairdresser and lothario who runs around town on the eve of the 1968 presidential election trying to make heads or tails of his financial and romantic entanglements. His attempts to scrape together the money to open his own salon are continually sidetracked by the distractions presented by his lovers — played brilliantly by Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, and Lee Grant (in an Oscar-winning performance). Beatty dreamed up the project, cowrote the script with Robert Towne, and enlisted Hal Ashby as director, and the resulting carousel of doomed relationships is an essential seventies farce, a sharp look back at the sexual politics and self-absorption of the preceding decade. 110 minutes Color Monaural 1:85:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2018 Director/Writers Written by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty . Hal Ashby was 46 when he direct...

REINER, Rob (United States) The Princess Bride [1987] Spine #948 Blu-ray 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. 98 minutes Color 5.1 Surround 1:85:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2018 ...

MIZOGOUCHI, Kenji (Japan) A Story From Chikamatsu [1954] Spine #949 Blu-ray One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the first half of the 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu  (a.k.a. The Crucified Lovers ) is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Based on a classic of eighteenth-century Japanese drama, the film traces the injustices that befall a Kyoto scroll maker's wife and his apprentice after each is unfairly accused of wrongdoing. Bound by fate in an illicit, star-crossed romance, they go on the run in search of refuge from the punishment prescribed them: death. Shot in gorgeous, painterly style by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this delicately delivered indictment of societal oppression was heralded by Akira Kurosawa as a "great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi." 102 minutes Black & White Monaural in Japanese 1:37:1 aspect ratio Criterion Releas...

WILDER, Billy (United States) Some Like It Hot [1959] Spine #950 Blu-ray One of the most beloved films of all time, this sizzling masterpiece by Billy Wilder set a new standard for Hollywood comedy. After witnessing a mob hit, Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, in landmark performances) skip town by donning drag and joining an all-female band en route to Miami. The charm of the group's singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe, at the height of her bombshell powers) leads them ever further into extravagant lies, as Joe assumes the persona of a millionaire to woo her and Jerry's female alter ego winds up engaged to a tycoon. With a whip-smart script by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, and sparking chemistry among its finely tuned cast, Some Like It Hot  is as deliriously funny and fresh today as it was when it first knocked audiences out six decades ago. 121 minutes Black & White Monaural 1:85:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2018 Director/Writers ...

BYRNE, David (United States) True Stories [1986] Spine #951 Blu-ray Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories , Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show — all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience. 89 minutes Color 5.1 Surround 1:85:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2018 Director/Writers Written by Stephen Tobolowsky , Beth Henley , and...

KIAROSTAMI, Abbas (Iran) THE KOKER TRILOGY Through The Olive Trees [1994] Spine #992 Blu-ray Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy  exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director's sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes "reality" of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life. Abbas Kiarostami takes metanarrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy . Unfolding "behind the scenes" of An...

KIAROSTAMI, Abbas (Iran) THE KOKER TRILOGY And Life Goes On [1992] Spine #991 Blu-ray Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy  exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director's sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes "reality" of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life. In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the t...

KIAROSTAMI, Abbas (Iran) THE KOKER TRILOGY Where Is The The Friend's House? [1987] Spine #990 Blu-ray Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy  exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director's sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes "reality" of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life. The first film in Abbas Kiarostami's sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy  takes a simple premise — a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose s...

GHATAK, Ritwik (India) The Cloud-Capped Star [1960] Spine #993 Blu-ray Directed by the visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-Capped Star  tells the story of a family who have been uprooted by the Partition of India and come to depend on their eldest daughter, the self-sacrificing Neeta (Supriya Choudhury). She watches helplessly as her own hopes and desires are pushed aside time and again by those of her siblings and parents, until all her chances for happiness evaporate, leaving her crushed and ailing. Experimenting with off-balance compositions, discontinuous editing, and a densely layered soundtrack, Ghatak devised an intellectually ambitious and emotionally devastating new shape for the melodrama, lamenting the tragedies of Indian history and the inequities of traditional gender roles while blazing a formal trail for the generations of Indian filmmakers who have followed him. 127 minutes Black & White Monaural in Bengali 1:37:1 aspect ratio Criterion R...

FORSYTH, Bill (United Kingdom) Local Hero [1983] Spine #994 Blu-ray Bill Forsyth put Scottish cinema on the map with this delightfully eccentric culture-clash comedy. Riffing on popular representations of Scottish life and folklore, Local Hero  follows the Texas oil executive Mac (Peter Riegert), who is dispatched by his crackpot boss (Burt Lancaster) to a remote seaside village in Scotland with orders to buy out the town and develop the region for an oil refinery. But as business mixes with pleasure, Mac finds himself enchanted by both the picturesque community and its oddball denizens — and Texas starts to feel awfully far away. Packed with a near nonstop stream of droll one-liners and deadpan gags, this enchanting cult hit finds Forsyth surveying the idiosyncrasies of small-town life with the satirical verve of a latter-day Preston Sturges, arriving at a sly commentary on conservation, corporate greed, and the legacies we leave behind. 111 minutes Color Monaural 1:78:1 aspe...