Catalog Search Results
Series
Criterion collection volume 396
Summary
A cave collapse in New Mexico traps a man, and all eyes turn toward the tragedy … including those of Charles "Chuck" Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a washed-up newspaper reporter who sees the incident as a ticket back to his former days at the top of the journalism heap. As the media circus begins to swirl around the trapped man's plight, Tatum takes command of the situation, embellishing the unfolding drama and prolonging the rescue effort … while feeding...
Series
Criterion collection volume 404
Summary
Spun from Daniel DeFoe's tale of the titular character, this sci-fi story involves a spaceship commander, Chris Draper (Paul Mantee) in a similar situation to the original Robinson Crusoe — but rather than being stranded on an island, our hero is on a hostile planet. Draper, Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West), and a test monkey look as if they are going to collide with a meteor. Draper and the chimp are able to eject themselves from the vessel, but...
Series
Criterion collection volume 99
Summary
This musical documentary concerns the Rolling Stones and their tragic free concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco in early December 1969. The event was all but destroyed by violence that marked the end of the peace and love euphoria of the 1960s. The night began smoothly, with the supercharged Flying Burrito Brothers opening up for the Rolling Stones and performing the truck-driving classic "Six Days on the Road" and Tina Turner giving a...
Series
Criterion collection volume 608
Summary
Deadpan rich boy Harold (Bud Cort) stages elaborate suicide tableaux to get the attention of his mother, but she keeps planning his brilliant future for him instead. Obsessed with the trappings of death, Harold freaks out his blind dates, modifies his new sports car to look like a mini-hearse, and attends funerals, where he meets the spirited Maude (Ruth Gordon). An eccentric to the core, Maude lives exactly as she pleases, with avid collecting and...
Series
Criterion collection volume 475
Summary
As a small time hood Eddie (Robert Mitchum) is about to go back to jail. In order to escape this fate he deals information on stolen guns to the feds. Simultaneously he is supplying arms to his bank robbing/kidnapping hoodlum chums. *"A good, tough unsentimental movie about the last days of a small-time Boston Hood." - Vincent Canby, **The New York Times*** *"...give him [Robert Mitchum] a character and the room to develop it, and what he does is...
Series
Summary
In 1910, Bill, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor. He flees to the Texas panhandle with his lover Abby and little sister Linda, where they work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer. When Bill learns that the farmer is ill and has less than a year to live, he encourages Abby to accept the man's attentions. The Farmer and Abby marry, and she and her "siblings" live in the big house, waiting for the Farmer to die, so...
Series
Criterion collection volume 1188
Summary
Wayne Wang's follow-up to his watershed indie Chan Is Missing is a family portrait that gracefully combines the director's signature gentle humanism and eye for poignant detail. Offering another fresh perspective on San Francisco's Chinese American community, Wang takes a bittersweet look at the generational pas de deux between an aging immigrant widow and her devoted daughter, torn between filial duty and her desires.
Series
Criterion collection volume 494
Summary
David Chappellet, a ruthlessly ambitious skier competing for Olympic gold with an underdog American team in Europe, clashes with his coach, who tries to temper the upstart's narcissistic drive for glory.
Series
Criterion collection volume 720
Summary
Seven college housemates from the 1960s who have drifted apart reunite at the funeral of a friend. Having entered adulthood as non-conformists, most now belong to the establishment. Stunned by the death of their peer, sensing their own mortality and the loss of their innocence, each takes the opportunity to reevaluate his or her life and re-establish their bonds.
10) Five easy pieces
Series
Criterion collection volume 546
Summary
An extremely crass and frustrated oil worker, and failed child pianist hiding from his past in Texas. Robert Dupea spends his life drinking beer and sleeping with (and cheating on) his annoying but adoring wannabe girlfriend, but when he learns that his father is dying in Washington State, he leaves because leaving is what Dupea does best, from his problems, fears, and those who love him.
Series
Criterion collection volume 31
Summary
In the gloom of a country graveyard, a young boy encounters an escaped convict, a chance meeting that years later leads the boy to tragedy, mystery and wealth.
12) The Seventh seal
Series
Criterion collection volume 11
Summary
"After a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight challenges Death to a fateful game of chess"--Container.
13) Summertime
Series
Summary
The story of a witty but lonely secretary who takes a vacation in Venice, hoping to fall in love. She does - with a very handsome but very married Italian man.
14) Videodrome
Series
Criterion collection volume 248
Summary
Cable TV programmer Max Renn seeks out the ultimate in bizarre shows for his channel. He meets a mysterious supplier named Harlan who gives him access to an underground sex and violence network called "Videodrome."
15) Badlands
Series
Summary
Based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of 1958, in which a fifteen-year-old girl and her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.
16) Barry Lyndon
Series
Summary
"Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling version of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O'Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years' War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of...
17) Easy rider
Series
Criterion collection volume 545
Summary
Hippie motorcyclists cross the Southwest and encounter a crazy quilt of good and bad people. An attorney joins their quest for awhile and articulates society's problem with freedom as the two hippies embody it.
18) Notorious
Series
Criterion collection volume 137
Summary
"With this twisted love story, Alfred Hitchcock summoned darker shades of suspense and passion by casting two of Hollywood's most beloved stars starkly against type. Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia, an alluring woman with a checkered past recruited by Devlin (Cary Grant), a suave, mysterious intelligence agent, to spy for the U.S. Only after she has fallen for Devlin does she learn that her mission is to seduce a Nazi industrialist (Claude Rains) hiding...
19) Yojimbo
Series
Criterion collection volume 52
Summary
Two warring clans vying for power bid for the services of a wandering samurai-for-hire.
20) The blob
Series
Criterion collection volume 91
Summary
Residents of a small Pennsylvania town combat a slimy space invader.