criterion

The name Dorothy Arzner may not be at the fore of many younger cinephile's minds, but it should be. A career going back to the silent era, as an editor on Too Much Johnson (1919). The film was re-made in 1938 any another filmmaker. The first woman director in the DGA, and then there's that...

When a young woman spends the night with an alleged terrorist, her quiet, ordered life falls into ruins. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum portrays an anxious era in West Germany amid a crumbling postwar political consensus. Katharina, though apparently innocent, suddenly becomes a suspect...

Town Bloody Hall On April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York’s intellectual elite packed the city’s Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer—fresh from the controversy over his essay “The Prisoner of Sex” and the backlash it received from leaders of the women’s movement—tangle with a...

In 1934, Jean Renoir stepped off the soundstage and headed to the South of France, where he captured vivid human drama amid the bucolic splendor and everyday social rituals of the countryside. Based on a true story and set in a community of immigrants living, working, and loving on the margins...

Adapting the acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan, playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter lends his trademark unnerving dialogue and air of creeping menace to this spellbinding study of power, control, and the frighteningly thin line between pleasure and pain. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson...

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda A founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. In an abundant career in which...

https://www.facebook.com/PHFilms/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARB7zmeeTmCop8nxJwNcDxmgybA1Pr_cZM6WaWqkAQ21UU-lytLMUUVrCgkZvAJe9rBomThpl8C267rH Hasn't officially been announced by Criterion but Pennebaker Hegedus Films posted it was coming on their Facebook page in the next few months. Pennebaker...

Do you think we might see this underrated animated classic from Chuck Jones out before the year ends (providing we all live and survive it that is)? Warner Archive first released it on DVD back in 2011, but instead of them doing it again I'd like to see either Shout Factory or even Criterion do...

John Sturges' The Great Escape was a July 4th gift to cinema-lovers. Based upon actual events, as lived by the author of the source book, Paul Brickhill, it's one of the finest, most stirring, and patriotic films concerning World War II. It was filmed in Germany, in 1962, by cinematographer...

Here's a bona fide classic Universal title from Criterion. The wonderful classic from 1939, Destry Rides Again. James Stewart taking second billing to Marlene Dietrich, as directed by George Marshall, who'd been working in film since 1915. One for the ages, so just grab a copy. It's a new...

The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives around the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will agree to dispose of his body after he commits...

Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoonworthy romance. Aboard a cruise liner sailing up the coast of South America, Stanwyck’s conniving card sharp sets her sights on...

A love story about divorce. A marriage coming apart and a family coming together. Marriage Story is a hilarious and harrowing, sharply observed, and deeply compassionate film from the acclaimed writer-director Noah Baumbach. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson deliver tour-de-force performances...

A mysterious, meteorlike object has landed in a small California town. All clocks have stopped. A fleet of glowing green UFOs hovers menacingly over the entire globe. The Martian invasion of Earth has begun, and it seems that nothing—neither military might nor the scientific know-how of nuclear...

In the early 1970s, a kung-fu dynamo named Bruce Lee side-kicked his way onto the screen and straight into pop-culture immortality. With his magnetic screen presence, tightly coiled intensity, and superhuman martial-arts prowess, Lee was an icon who conquered both Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema...

One woman’s journey of self-discovery brings about a warmly human cultural conversation about female liberation, in this wonderfully frank, funny chronicle of changing 1970s sexual politics by Paul Mazursky. When her husband of sixteen years abruptly leaves her for a younger woman, Manhattan...

Buster Keaton is at the peak of his slapstick powers in The Cameraman—the first film that the silent-screen legend made after signing with MGM, and his last great masterpiece. The final work over which he maintained creative control, this clever farce is the culmination of an extraordinary...

Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until they together create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a...

A spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkable intimacy, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports. Supervising a team of hundreds of technicians using more than a thousand cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious...

This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather...

One of the great American musicals, the 1936 Show Boat, with massive talent in the leads, including one of the finest voices ever recorded, Paul Robeson, and original cast member, Helen Morgan. Derived from a safety fgm, Criterion's new Blu, is the best I've ever seen this film look. Gorgeous...

Robert Harris submitted a new blog post A few words about...™ Leave Her to Heaven - in Blu-ray Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

R. Dixon Smith 455 East Nees Avenue, Apartment 263 Fresno, California 93720 Film historian R. Dixon Smith offers classic DVDs for sale at bargain prices: CRITERION COLLECTION, MASTERS OF CINEMA, SILENT CINEMA, ALFRED HITCHCOCK, MARLENE DIETRICH, & ANIMATION. Discs, cases, artwork...

Sometimes DVD's or Blu-rays that were universally criticized are corrected and reissued, as happened with PATTON, GLADIATOR, SPARTACUS and GANGS OF NEW YORK. And sometimes one might not even have heard of the upgrade. I am wondering if Marcel Carnes' CHILDREN OF PARADISE was ever released with a...

The directorial debut of actor Paul Dano reveals a filmmaking talent of remarkable intelligence and restraint. Adapted by Dano and Zoe Kazan from the novel by Richard Ford, this meticulously crafted portrait of the American nuclear family in crisis charts the rift that forms within a 1960s...

The multifaceted, deeply personal work of Eric Rohmer has had an effect on cinema unlike any other. One of the founding critics of the history-making Cahiers du cinéma,Rohmer began translating his written manifestos to film in the 1960s, standing apart from his New Wave contemporaries with his...

One of the most exciting adventure tales ever told, this action epic recounts the planning, execution, and aftermath of a daring true-life escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, in which 250 men attempted to tunnel their way to freedom. In the role that cemented his...

Dorothy Arzner, the sole woman to work as a director in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and early ’40s, brings a subversive feminist sensibility to this juicily entertaining backstage melodrama. A behind-the-footlights look at friendship, jealousy, and ambition in the ruthless world of...

The trailblazing independent auteur John Cassavetes pushes his raw, uncompromising emotional realism to its limit in this unflinching portrait of masculinity in crisis. SPECIAL FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Audio commentary from 2009...

This compilation of five early short films by Martin Scorsese offers a fascinating window onto his artistic development. Spanning the years from Scorsese’s time at NYU in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, when he was emerging as one of the era’s most electrifying talents, Scorsese Shorts centers...