Criterion Collection (Firm)

Three films from one of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time.

In 1974, Leon Gast traveled to Africa to film Zaire 74; a music festival planned to accompany the Rumble in the Jungle, Muhammad Ali's heavyweight championship fight against George Foreman. This documentary captures the charismatic boxer training for one of the toughest bouts of his career.

The themes, images, and cultural vernacular of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz continue to haunt David Lynch’s filmography. Arguably, no filmmaker has so consistently drawn inspiration—consciously or unconsciously—from a single work. Through six distinct perspectives, Alexandre O. Philippe’s LYNCH/OZ helps us reexperience and reinterpret The Wizard of Oz by way of David Lynch, delivering new appreciations of both.

Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York's 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band's incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol's...

"An eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter, a writer who turns the material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration -- or was it suicide? -- of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. [A] mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead"--Container....

A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation draws the attention of her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a diabolically clinical mind. An unorthodox love story and a truly unsettling thriller.

The inventive, self-reflexive films of independent trailblazer Cheryl Dunye (THE WATERMELON WOMAN) offer multilayered, sharply funny commentaries on the intersections of black and queer identity. Over the course of six provocative, sardonic shorts, Dunye honed a unique, quasi-documentary style she dubbed “Dunyementary.”

What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon gradually reveals itself as something richer, stranger, and trickier: a mind-bending reflection on authenticity, in art as well as in relationships. Both cerebrally and emotionally engaging, reminds us that love itself is an enigma.

Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson reflects on her relationship with her beloved terrier Lolabelle.

A visceral plunge into the life of a famous torero played by real-life bullfighting legend Miguel Mateo, known as Miguelin. Charting his rise and fall with a single-minded focus on the bloody business at hand, the film is at once gritty and operatic, placing the viewer right in the thick of the rings action, as close to death as possible. This is a not just an electrifying drama but also a profound and moving inquiry into a violent world and perhaps...