Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1956 • France
Starring Pablo Picasso

In 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot joined forces with his friend Pablo Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film, “a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity.” Together, they devised an innovative...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira • 2001 • France, Portugal
Starring Jorge Trêpa, Ricardo Trêpa, Maria de Medeiros

With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublime...

Directed by RaMell Ross • 2018 • United States
Starring Quincy Bryant, Daniel Collins

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, RaMell Ross’s HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rura...

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack • 1925 • United States

In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack—later to achieve cinematic immortality as the makers of KING KONG—joined forces with journalist and spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an a...

Directed by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus • 2009 • United States

For French pastry chefs, the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (Best Craftsmen in France) is nothing less than the Olympics of their trade: an intense three-day competition in which a selection of the country’s finest pâtissiers tu...

Directed by Andrei A. Tarkovsky • 2019 • Italy, Russia

The life, art, and inner world of Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky is explored through the filmmaker’s own words and images in this appropriately hushed and reverent tribute to a cinematic titan. Lovingly made by the director’s son, ANDREI TA...

Directed by Philip Haas • 1988 • United States
Starring David Hockney

Artist David Hockney invites you to join him on a captivating journey through China via a magnificent, seventy-two-foot-long seventeenth-century Chinese scroll. Painted by Wang Hui (1632–1717) and his assistants, the work, kno...

Directed by Sean Price Williams • 2021 • United States

To pay tribute to one of his filmmaking heroes, Sean Price Willams adopts a style that’s just as out there as his subject, mixing new material and never-before-seen archival footage in this portrait of the underground film titan Robert Downe...

Directed by Les Blank • 1987 • United States

Filmmaker Les Blank breezily questions our commonly accepted standards of beauty with this paean to women with extra-wide dental spaces.

Directed by Forugh Farrokhzad • 1963 • Iran

The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony whose inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from ...

Directed by Margot Benacerraf • 1959 • Venezuela

A work of such overwhelming grandeur that Jean Renoir told director Margot Benacerraf after viewing the film, “Above all . . . don’t cut a single image,” this poetic documentary-narrative hybrid is a landmark of both neorealist and feminist South ...

Directed by Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Gilbert Prousch, George Passmore

See the world through the beautiful, humorous, shocking, and absurd lens of British “living sculpture” provocateurs Gilbert & George, a couple in life and art-making whose defiantly ...

Directed by Bruce Goldstein • 2020 • United States

In this original short documentary and personal essay, Bruce Goldstein, founder of Rialto Pictures and repertory director at New York’s FIlm Forum, tracks down many of the 100+ New York City locations—from the Bronx to the Lower East Side—used i...

Directed by Anna Maria Tatò • 1997 • Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni

Italian-cinema icon Marcello Mastroianni starred in more than a hundred films over the course of his astonishing, half-century career, though he will perhaps always be best remembered for the six masterpieces he made with F...

Criterion Collection Edition #1039

Directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker • 1979 • United States
Starring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos

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 Ma...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin • 1980 • United States

Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that's an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at...

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara • 1984 • Japan

Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) designed some of the world’s most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. In ANTONIO GAUDÍ, t...

Criterion Collection Edition #789

Directed by Howard Brookner • 1983 • United States

Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of le...