Features

William Wyler’s Funny Girl was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Barbra Streisand makes a screen debut for the ages in William Wyler’s musical spectacular. From humor to pathos, she hits every note as popular 1920s singer-comedian Fanny Brice, a young Jewish New Yorker whose spirit and supernova talent propel her to fame in the Ziegfeld Follies, but whose devotion to an unreliable gambler (a charismatic Omar Sharif) brings drama and heartbreak into her life. Adapted…

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 Oscar-winner Paper Moon was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Director Peter Bogdanovich recreates the world of the 1930s Dust Bowl in this beloved, briskly entertaining chronicle of one of cinema’s unlikeliest crime sprees. Real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O’Neal (who became the youngest-ever Oscar winner for her spark-plug performance) play off each other with almost musical agility as a Bible-hawking con man and the precocious, recently orphaned tomboy who…

Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster classic Scarface was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Blazing across the screen in a spray of bullets, the gangster-film sensation Scarface helped set the standard for the genre for decades to come. Swaggering, scary, and unexpectedly charming, Paul Muni gives an iconic portrayal of criminal sociopathy as Tony Camonte, the ruthless, machine-gun-toting mobster who rises through the ranks of a bootlegging empire atop an ever-increasing body count, but whose possessive relationship…

John Mackenzie’s London crime thriller The Long Good Friday has been given a 4k restoration from the Criterion Collection. A combustible performance from Bob Hoskins is the fuse that lights this underworld saga, a landmark of British crime cinema. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, an ambitious London mobster who, just as he attempts to close a major real-estate deal with the American Mafia, finds his crime empire rocked by a string of attacks, sending him on…

Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic crime film Le Samouraï recently got a 4k upgrade from the Criterion Collection. In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is…

Barry Jenkins’ epic mini-series The Underground Railroad has been added to the Criterion Collection. A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced…

Karyn Kusama’s directorial debut Girlfight is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection. Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity…

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies is one of the newest films added to the Criterion Collection. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village in Hungary, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. Shot in stark…

Amir Naderi’s 1984 film The Runner is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  Inspired by director Amir Naderi’s own 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, fire, the human body in motion: in hypnotic images…