The Criterion Collection Complete

BROOKS, Albert (United States) Defending Your Life [1991] Spine #1071 Blu-ray Is there love after death? Acerbic Everyman Albert Brooks finds a perfect balance between satirical bite and romantic-comedy charm as the writer, director, and star of this wonderfully warm and imaginative existential fantasy. After he dies suddenly the hapless advertising executive Daniel Miller (Brooks) finds himself in Judgment City, a gleaming way station where the newly deceased must prove they lived a life of sufficient courage to advance in their journey through the universe. As the self-doubting Daniel struggles to make his case, a budding relationship with the uninhibited Julia (Meryl Streep) offers him a chance to finally feel alive. Buoyed by a brilliant supporting cast that includes Rip Torn, Lee Grant, and Buck Henry, Defending Your Life  is a rare feat of personal, philosophical filmmaking that happens to also be divinely entertaining. 111 minutes Color 2.0 Surround 1:85:1 aspect ratio ...

LEIGH, Mike (United Kingdom) Secrets & Lies [1996] Spine #1070 Blu-ray Writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy in his ongoing contemplation of unembellished humanity with this resonant exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships to those we love. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptistery), a Black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth other, she doesn’t expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award), a desperately lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter spends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family. Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, Secrets & Lies  is a Palme d’Or-winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath the surf...

RIVETTE, Jacques (France) Céline And Julie Go Boating [1974] Spine #1069 Blu-ray Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cinema in the spirit of pure play — moviemaking as an anything-goes romp through the labyrinths of imagination. The result is one of the most exuberantly inventive and utterly enchanting films of the French New Wave, in which Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama. Incorporating allusions to everything from Lewis Carroll to Louis Feuillade, Céline and Julie Go Boating  is both one of the all-time-great hangout comedies and a totally unique, enveloping cinematic dream space that delights in the endless pleasures and poss...

FELLINI, Federico [Italy] Essential Fellini Spine #0000C Blu-ray One hundred years after his birth, Federico Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema. The Italian maestro is defined by his dualities: the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the provincial and the urbane. He began his career working in the slice-of-life poetry of neorealism, and though he soon spun off on his own freewheeling creative axis, he never lost that grounding, evoking his dreams, memories and obsessions in increasingly grand productions teeming with carnivalesque imagery and flights of phantasmagoric surrealism while maintaining an earthy, embodied connection to humanity. Bringing together fourteen of the director’s greatest spectacles, all beautifully restored, this centenary box set is a monument to an artist who conjured a cinematic universe all his own: a vision of the world as a three-ring circus in which his innermost infatuations fears, and fantasies take center stage....

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} 2046 [2004] Spine #0000D Blu-ray Wong Kar Wai’s loose sequel to In the Mood for Love combines that film’s languorous air of romantic longing with a dizzying time-hopping structure and avant-sci-fi twist. Tony Leung Chiu Wai reprises his role as writer Chow Mo-Wan, whose numerous failed relationships with women who drift in and out of his life (and the one who goes in and out of room 2046, down the hall from his apartment) inspire the delirious futuristic love story he pens. 2046 ’s dazzling fantasy sequences give Wong and two of his collaborators — cinematographer Christopher Doyle and editor/costume designer/production designer William Chang Suk Ping — license to let their imaginations run wild, propelling the sumptuous visuals and operatic emotions skyward toward the sublime. 128 minutes Color Monaural in Cantonese 1:66:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2021 Director/Writer Wong Kar-wai was 46 when he directed 2046 . Other Wong Kar-wai film...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} In The Mood For Love [2000] Spine #0000D/Spine #147 Blu-ray Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Chueung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite -- until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond betwen them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love  is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoub table career. 98 minutes Color Monaural in Cantonese and Shanghainese 1:66:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2021 Director/Writer Special thanks/quoted author: Liu Yi-chang . Wong Kar-wai was 42 when he wrote and directed In the Mood for Lov...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} Happy Together [1997] Spine #0000D Blu-ray One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong — when the country’s LGBTQ community suddenly faced on an uncertain future — Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that is by turns devastating and deliriously romantic. Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, Happy Together  is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilar...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} Fallen Angels [1995] Spine #0000D Blu-ray Lost souls reach out for human connection amid a glimmering Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked nocturne. Originally conceived as a segment of Chungking Express only to spin off on its own woozy axis, Fallen Angels plays like the dark, moody flip side of its predecessor as it charts the subtly interlacing fates of a handful of urban loners, including a coolly detached hit man (Leon Lai Ming) looking to go straight; his business partner (Michelle Reis), who secretly yearns for him; and a mute delinquent (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who wreaks mischief by night. Swinging between hard-boiled noir and slapstick lunacy with giddy abandon, the film is both a dizzying, dazzling city symphony and a poignant meditation on love, loss, and longing in a metropolis that never sleeps. 99 minutes Black and White/Color Monaural in Cantonese 2:39:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2021 Director/Writer Wong Ka...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} Chungking Express [1994] Spine #0000D/Spine #453 Blu-ray The whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu Wai), both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out food stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works. Anything goes in Wong’s gloriously shot and utterly unexpected charmer, which cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and forever turned canned pineapple and the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” into tokens of romantic longing. 102 minutes Color Monaural/5.1 Surround in Cantonese 1:66:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2008/2021 Director/Writer Wong Kar-wai was 36 when he wrote and directed Chungking Express . Other Wong Kar-wai films in the Collection: #0000D: As Tears Go By (1988) #0000D: Days Of Being Wild (1990)...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} Days Of Being Wild [1990] Spine #0000D Blu-ray The breakthrough sophomore feature by Wong Kar Wai represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The initial entry in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046 , this ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twentysomethings -- including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Tau Tak Wah) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship -- pull together and push apart in a dance of frustrated desire. The director' inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the films its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized se...

KAR-Wai, Wong {Hong Kong} As Tears Go By [1988] Spine #0000D Blu-ray Wong Kar Wai's scintillating debut feature is a kinetic, hypercool crime thriller graced with flashes of the impressionistic, daydream visual style for which he would become renowned. Set amid Hong Kong's ruthless, neon-lit gangland underworld, this operatic saga of ambition, honor, and revenge stars Andy Lau Tak Wah as a small-time mob enforcer who finds himself torn between a burgeoning romance with his ailing cousin (Marrige Cheung Man Yuk, in the first of her iconic collaborations with the director) and his loyalty to his loose-cannon partner in crime (Jacky Cheung Hok Yau), whose reckless attempts to make a name for himself unleash a spiral of violence. Marrying the pulp pleasures of the gritty Hong Kong action drama with hints of the head-rush romanticism Wong would push to intoxicating heights throughout the 1990s, As Tears Go By  was a box-office smash that heralded the arrival of one of contemporar...

KAR-wai, Wong {Hong Kong} World Of Wong Kar Wai Spine #0000D Blu-ray With his lush and sensual visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks, and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema. Joined by such key collaborators as cinematographer Christopher Doyle; editor and production and costume designer William Chang Suk Ping; and actors Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, Wong (or WKW, as he is often known) has written and directed films that have enraptured audiences and critics worldwide and inspired countless other filmmakers with their poetic moods and music, narrative and stylistic daring, and potent themes of alienation and memory. Whether they're tragically romantic, soaked in blood, or quirkily comedic, the seven films collected here are an invitation into the unique and wistful world of a deeply influential artist. Criterion Release 2021 As Tears Go By [1988] Days Of Being Wild [1990] Chungking Exp...