The Criterion Collection Complete

REES, Dee (United States) Mudbound [2017] Spine #1205 Blu-ray In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families—one of white landholders, one of Black tenant farmers—are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart. Writer-director Dee Rees, with cowriter Virgil Williams, crafts a uniquely American tragedy, imbuing bitter historical realities with a timeless weight. Featuring bone-deep performances from her ensemble cast—including Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, and Jonathan Banks—and backed by Rachel Morrison’s darkly burnished cinematography,  Mudbound  is a searing humanist study of inheritance based upon Hillary Jordan’s novel. 134 minutes Dolby Atmos Color 2:39:1 Criteri...

BOYLE, Danny (United Kingdom) Trainspotting [1996] Spine #1204 Blu-ray A jolt of adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British cinema, this darkly funny adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel was a major breakthrough for director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and screenwriter John Hodge. With live-wire energy and stylistic verve,  Trainspotting  bounces across the life and times of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a Scottish heroin addict who, along with his misfit mates, gets high, gets in trouble, gets clean, and gets high again, all in a bid to outrun the banality of modern existence. Kinetically cut to an iconic soundtrack of techno, rock, and Britpop, this indie phenomenon chooses life in all its ugly, beautiful, terrifying exhilaration. 94 minutes 2.0 Surround Color 1:85:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Danny Boyle was 40 when he directed Trainspotting . Other Boyle films in the Collection: #616: Shallow Grave (1994) The Film a Film Rating (0-6...

AKERMAN, Chantal (Belgium/Germany/France) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [1978] Spine #1203h Blu-ray Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough,  Jeanne Dielman,  is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. While on a tour through Germany, Belgium, and France to promote her latest movie, Anna (Aurore Clément), an accomplished filmmaker, passes through a series of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—that gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. Mirroring the itinerant Akerman’s own restless wanderings, this quasi self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces—hotel rooms, railway stations, train cars—toward an indelible encounter with the specter of history. 127 minutes Monaural Color in French 1:66:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 28 when she directed Les rendez-vous d'Ann...

AKERMAN, Chantal (France/United States) News from Home [1976] Spine #1203g Blu-ray Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule. 89 minutes Monaural Color in French 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 26 when she directed News from Home . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) Eclipse Series 19/#1203c: La chambre (1972) Eclipse Series 19/#1203d...

AKERMAN, Chantal (Belgium/France) Je tu il elle [1975] Spine #1203f Blu-ray Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness,  Je tu il elle  finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision. 86 minutes Monaural Black and White in French 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 25 when she directed Je tu il elle . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (196...

AKERMAN, Chantal (Belgium/France) Le 15/8 [1973] Spine #1203e Blu-ray Shot and directed by Chantal Akerman and Samy Szlingerbaum, this quietly revealing variation on the filmmaker’s recurring themes of dislocation and alienation unfolds on one day—August 15, 1973—in a Paris apartment, where Finnish expat Chris Myllykoski opens up to the camera about her anxieties and uncertainties, her aspirations and ennui, and the sense of vulnerability she feels being a woman alone in an unfamiliar country. As Myllykoski’s voice-over narration shifts between the mundane and the searching, Akerman’s observant camera remains attuned to tiny gestures that tell a story of their own. 43 minutes Monaural Black and White in French 1:33:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 23 when she directed Le 15/8 . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) Eclipse Series 19/#1203c: La chambre (1972...

AKERMAN, Chantal (United States) Hotel Monterey [1972] Spine #1203d Blu-ray Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of fifteen hours, from evening to dawn, with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Babette Mangolte’s carefully controlled camera gradually making its way from the lamplit lobby to the rooftop overlooking an awakening city, this radical, silent experiment in duration stands as one of Akerman’s most arresting formal achievements, collapsing time and charging the quotidian space it surveys with an eerie unreality. 62 minutes Monaural Color 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 22 when she directed Hotel Monterey . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) Ecl...

AKERMAN, Chantal (United States/Belgium) La chambre [1972] Spine #1203c Blu-ray Chantal Akerman’s dialogue with the 1960s avant-garde movement of structural cinema begins here, with the first film she made in New York City—a breakthrough in her experiments with the bending of cinematic time and space. As the camera completes a series of circular pans around a small apartment, the interior’s furniture, its clutter, and the filmmaker herself—staring back at us from bed—become the subjects of a moving still life. 11 minutes Monaural Color 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 22 when she directed La chambre . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) Eclipse Series 19/#1203d: Hotel Monterey (1972) #1203e: Le 15/8 (1973) Eclipse Series 19/#1203f: Je tu il elle (1975) #484: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Eclipse Series 19/#1203g: Ne...

AKERMAN, Chantal (Belgium) L'enfant aimé, ou Je jous à être une femme mariée [1971] Spine #1203b Blu-ray One of Chantal Akerman’s most rarely seen works is an intimate portrait of a young mother (played by Claire Wauthion) whose day-to-day routines are intercut with her stream-of-consciousness ruminations on her family, sex life, relationships, and body. Though Akerman (who also appears in the film) was later dismissive of her second directorial effort, its patient focus on the tension between domesticity and a woman’s inner life marks  L’enfant aimé  as an important link in the development of her artistry. 32 minutes Monaural Black and White in French 1:37:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 21 when she directed L'enfant aimé, ou Je à être une femme mariée . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) Eclipse Series 19/#1203c: La chambre (1972) Eclipse Series 19/#1203d: Hotel Monterey (1972) #1203e: Le 15/8 (1973) Ecli...

AKERMAN, Chantal (Belgium) Saute ma ville [1968] Spine #1203a Blu-ray Made when the director was just eighteen, Chantal Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, alone in her kitchen, enacts a savaging of traditional domestic rituals that leads to a literally explosive climax. 13 minutes Monaural Black and White in French 1:66:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 18 when she directed Saute ma ville . Other Akerman films in the Collection: #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971) Eclipse Series 19/#1203c: La chambre (1972) Eclipse Series 19/#1203d: Hotel Monterey (1972) #1203e: Le 15/8 (1973) Eclipse Series 19/#1203f: Je tu il elle (1975) #484: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Eclipse Series 19/#1203g: News from Home (1976) Eclipse Series 19/...

ACKERMAN, Chantal Chantal Ackerman Masterpieces 1968-1978 Spine #1203 Blu-ray In the revolutionary first decade of her filmmaking career, Chantal Akerman devoted herself to nothing less than the total resculpting of cinematic time and space. Journeying between Europe and New York City, Akerman forged a highly personal style that fuses avant-garde influences with deeply human expressions of alienation, desire, and displacement—themes that she would explore in a series of increasingly ambitious shorts, documentaries, and features, including the towering  Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  With immersive rhythms that render the most minute details momentous, these landmarks of twentieth-century art continue to reveal new ways of experiencing cinema and framing reality. Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer Chantal Akerman was 50-60 when she directed these films. #1203a: Saute ma ville (1968) #1203b: L'enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (19...

SAYLES, John (United States) Lone Star [1996] Spine #1202 Blu-ray A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border. 135 minutes 2.0 Surround Color in English and Spanish 2:39:1 Criterion Release 2024 Director/Writer John Sayles was 46 when he directed Lone Star . Other Sayles films in the Collection: #999: Matewan (1987) The Film a Film Ra...