Criterion Collection (Firm)

Over a decade in the making, this monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, and other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming SHOAH is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait...

Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras's career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family's integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses with an intimate journey through...

A story of four women's search for spiritual peace. Agnes, a spinster who lives with her housekeeper, is dying of cancer, and is visited one last time by her two sisters, Karin and Maria. These two become entangled in feelings of jealousy, manipulation and selfishness. Yet Agnes, tortured by cancer, is able to transcend her sisters' pettiness to remember moments of staggering beauty as well as horror.

Olive, a militant suffragette, takes on the education of Verena, a brilliantly gifted but naive young girl. Olive wants to mold and use this gift for the feminist cause. But Verena is also loved by Basil Ransom, an impecunious young lawyer with views strenuously opposed to the Boston feminists. The contest is met between Basil and Olive. The prize: possession of Verena.

An elderly and wealthy industrialist is so fearful of a nuclear attack that he pressures his family to leave Japan. His family, complacent and cynical, is outraged and move to him declared insane.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s *8 ½* (*Otto e mezzo*) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. An early working title for *8 ½* was "The Beautiful Confusion," and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. Winner of two **Academy...

A 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...

An uncompromisingly independent filmmaker, Les Blank (Burden of Dreams) made documentaries for nearly fifty years, elegantly disappearing with his camera into cultural spots rarely seen on-screen, mostly on the peripheries of the United States, but also occasionally abroad. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane, sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to musicians, food, and all sorts of regionally specific delights....

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer.

A wealthy older man has an affair with a young maid played by twodifferent actresses in this darkly humorous satire on sexualobsession.