Criterion Collection (Firm)

An embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher's tensions with his independent-minded adopted son reach epic proportions during a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail--From product description.

In his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami created a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.

Filmed over several weeks, "Bergman Island" is an impressively intimate look at the waning hours of one of cinema's true legends. Granted unprecedented access to the man himself, Marie Nyreröd captures stories from Bergman that cover his entire life to that point. Bergman is remarkably candid, whether he's discussing his abusive father or his last directorial effort, Saraband. Even those not particularly interested in Bergman's cinema will find something...

"When Queen Elizabeth I asks her court alchemist to show her England in the future, she's transported 400 years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fascistic police, scattered filth, and twisted sex."--Container back.

Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.

A film star comes face to face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself while starring in a revival of the play that launched her career.

"With her first and only feature film--a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in--Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loder), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and...

In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish "Tomainian" dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supporting turns, The Great Dictator, boldly going after...

In Richard III, director, producer, and star Laurence Olivier brings Shakespeare's masterpiece of Machiavellian villainy to ravishing cinematic life. Olivier is diabolically captivating as Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, through a series of murderous machinations, steals the crown from his brother Edward. And he surrounds himself with a royal supporting cast, which includes Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom. Filmed in VistaVision...

Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi's boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand's electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city, determined to rise above his circumstances working odd jobs, passing time with friends, learning to read and running, always running, toward the future. Water,...