The Criterion Collection Complete

JOHNSON, Kristen (United States) Dick Johnson is Dead [2020] Spine #1111 Blu-ray This 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 tableaux interwoven with raw vérité footage capturing the pair’s tender but increasingly fragile bond. Tackling taboo questions of aging, mortality, and grief with subversive humor and surprising grace,  Dick Johnson Is Dead  is ultimately a triumphant celebration of life, and of the gentle, funny, unforgettable man at its center. Long live Dick Johnson. 89 minutes Color 5.1 Surround 1:78:1 aspect ratio Criterion Release 2022 Director...

CAMPION, Jane (New Zealand, Australia, France) The Piano [1993] Spine #1110 Blu-ray With this sublimely stirring fable of desire and creativity, Jane Campion became the first woman to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Holly Hunter is achingly eloquent through silence in her Academy Award–winning performance as Ada, an electively mute Scottish woman who expresses her innermost feelings through her beloved piano. When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter (Anna Paquin, in her Oscar-winning debut) to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her ineffectual husband (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. With its sensuously moody cinematography, dramatic coastal landscapes, and sweeping score, this uniquely timeless evocation of a woman’s inner awakening is an intoxicating sensory experience that burns with the twin fires of music and erotic passion. ...

BRADLEY, Garrett (United States) Time [2020] Spine #1109 Blu-ray What does the weight of time’s passage feel like for a family caught in the jaws of a brutal carceral system? Both a breathtaking cinematic love story and a bruising indictment of American injustice, the Academy Award–nominated feature documentary debut of Garrett Bradley traces the decades-long quest of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six and a fiercely outspoken prison abolitionist, to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he is serving a sixty-year sentence for robbery. Gracefully interweaving twenty years’ worth of Richardson’s own intimate home movies with luminously expressive monochrome footage of her present-day joys and struggles, Bradley crafts in  Time  a transcendentally poetic, soul-shaking look at the devastating toll of mass incarceration and one family’s extraordinary efforts to stay whole. 81 minutes Black and White 5.1 Surround 1:89:1 aspect ratio C...

VINTERBERG, Thomas (Denmark) The Celebration [1998] Spine #1108 Blu-ray The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with  The Celebration , the international breakthrough by Thomas Vinterberg, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity. On a wealthy man’s sixtieth birthday, a sprawling group of family and friends convenes at his country estate for a celebration that soon spirals into bedlam, as bombshell revelations threaten to tear away the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath. The dynamic handheld camera work, grainy natural lighting, cacophonous diegetic sound, and raw performance style that would become Dogme hallmarks enhance the shattering visceral impact of this caustic indictment of patriarchal failings, which swings between blackest comedy and bleakest tragedy as it turns the sick soul of a family inside out. ...

PARKS, Gordon (United States) The Learning Tree [1969] Spine #1107 Blu-ray With this tender and clear-eyed coming-of-age odyssey, the renowned photographer turned filmmaker Gordon Parks not only became the first Black American director to make a Hollywood studio film, he also served as writer, producer, and composer, resulting in a deeply personal artistic achievement. Based on Parks’s own semi-autobiographical novel,  The Learning Tree  follows the journey of Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson), a teenage descendant of Exodusters growing up in rural Kansas in the 1920s, as he experiences the bittersweet flowering of first love, finds his relationship with a close friend tested, and navigates the injustices embedded within a racist legal and educational system. Exquisitely capturing the bucolic splendor of its heartland setting, this landmark film tempers nostalgia with an incisive understanding of the harsh realities, hard-won lessons, and often wrenching moral choices that shape th...

KING, Regina (United States) One Night in Miami . . . [2020] Spine #1106 Blu-ray Adapted by Kemp Powers from his acclaimed play, the feature directorial debut of Academy Award–winning actor Regina King puts viewers in a room with four icons at the forefront of Black American culture as they carouse, clash, bare their souls, and grapple with their places within the sweeping change of the civil rights movement. February 25, 1964, has gone down in history as the day that the brash young boxer Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) defeated Sonny Liston, but what happened after the fight was perhaps even more incredible: Ali, civil rights leader Malcolm X, NFL great Jim Brown, and “King of Soul” Sam Cooke all came together at a Miami motel. Electric with big ideas and activist spirit,  One Night in Miami . . .  plunges us into the midst of an intimate, ongoing conversation—and a defining moment in American history. 114 minutes Color 5.1 Surround 2:39:1 aspect ratio Criter...

HUGHES, Albert and Allen (United States) Menace II Society [1993] Spine #1105 Blu-ray Directors Albert and Allen Hughes and screenwriter Tyger Williams were barely into their twenties when they sent shock waves through American cinema and hip-hop culture with this fatalistic, unflinching vision of life and death on the streets of Watts, Los Angeles, in the 1990s. There, in the shadow of the riots of 1965 and 1992, young Caine (Tyrin Turner) is growing up under the influence of his ruthless, drug-dealing father (Samuel L. Jackson, in a chilling cameo) and his loose-cannon best friend, O-Dog (Larenz Tate), leading him into a spiral of violent crime from which he is not sure he wants to escape, despite the best efforts of his grandparents and the steadfast Ronnie (Jada Pinkett). Fusing grim realism with a propulsively stylish aesthetic honed through the Hughes brothers’ work on rap videos,  Menace II Society  is a searing cautionary tale about the devastating human toll of hope...