From the Collection: The Long Good Friday

From the Collection: The Long Good Friday

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…

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From the Collection: Le Samouraï

From the Collection: Le Samouraï

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…

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From the Collection: The Underground Railroad

From the Collection: The Underground Railroad

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…

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Movie Review: Last Stop in Yuma County

Movie Review: Last Stop in Yuma County

  Last Stop in Yuma County finds several strangers stranded at a diner in the middle of Arizona waiting for a gas truck to come to the neighboring gas station. The strangers include a knife salesman (Jim Cummings), a pair of thieves who just robbed a bank (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan), the diner’s lone waitress (Jocelin Donahue), a couple looking for trouble (Ryan Masson and Sierra McCormick), and an older couple (Gene Jones and…

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From the Collection: Girlfight

From the Collection: Girlfight

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…

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From the Collection: Werckmeister Harmonies

From the Collection: Werckmeister Harmonies

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…

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From the Collection: The Runner

From the Collection: The Runner

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…

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From the Collection: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

From the Collection: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams recently got a 4k release from the Criterion Collection.  In a cinematic experience unlike any other, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams unfolds in a series of eight vignettes inspired by the beloved director’s own nighttime visions, along with stories from Japanese folklore. In a visually sumptuous journey through the master’s imagination, tales of childlike wonder give way to apocalyptic apparitions: a young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts…

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From The Collection: One False Move

From The Collection: One False Move

Carl Franklin’s theatrical film debut One False Move is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  One False Move looks at a small-town police chief (Bill Paxton), holding on to a life-changing secret, who gets word that a pair of ruthless, murderous drug dealers (co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach) are on their way to his small Arkansas town. And an enigmatic woman (Cynda Williams), originally from the small town, who is caught up…

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From the Collection: Targets

From the Collection: Targets

Targets, the directorial debut by Oscar-nominated writer and director Peter Bogdanovich, is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection.  Old Hollywood collides with New Hollywood, and screen horror with real-life horror, in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film. Produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, this chillingly prescient vision of American-made carnage casts Boris Karloff as a version of himself: an aging horror-movie icon whose fate intersects with that of a seemingly ordinary young man (Tim O’Kelly)…

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