Summary: The great Agnes Varda's film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complicated relationship between a married couple and a documentary-like look at the daily struggles of the locals, Varda's discursive, gorgeously filmed debut was radical enough to later...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner and his performer girlfriend suddenly changes, when they pull into the town where the owner's wife and children live, whom he hasn't seen in three years.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: The Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Northern England, the early 1960's. Frank Machin is a coal miner who is mean, tough and ambitious enough to rise up and become an immediate professional rugby star. The rugby league team is run by local employer Weaver. Machin lodges with Mrs Hammond, whose husband was killed in an accident at Weaver's, but his impulsive and angry nature stop him from being able to reach her as he would like....

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2008

Copies Available at Woodmere

Bunuel, Luis

Summary: A group of high-society friends find themselves unable to leave their host's mansion after a lavish dinner party.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion 2009

Copies Available at Woodmere

Miguel, Blondin

Summary: A young African refugee is saved from deportation by a kindly old man, who shines shoes for a living, and his tight-knit community.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Gere, Richard

Summary: In the early 20th century, a fugitive from the slums of Chicago becomes pitted against a shy, rich Texan for the love of Abby in the wheatfields of Texas.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The final day in the life of a British consul in Mexico just before WWII, and how he alienates himself while trying to reconnect with his estranged wife.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A man who has recently left the army attempts to become a preacher and open up his very own church without Christ.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2009

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: An aimless drifter wandering through the wintry French countryside encounters violence, hunger, fear and cold, yet touches the lives of the people she meets with her own ideas of freedom.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: The Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A farmworker sneaks across the border from Mexico into California in an effort to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromising, groundbreaking work of realism from American independent filmmaker Robert M. Young. Vivid and spare where other films about illegal immigration might sentimentalize, Young's take on the subject is...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The last person to die on New Year's Eve before the clock strikes twelve is doomed to take the reins of Death's chariot and work tirelessly collecting fresh souls for the next year. So says the legend that drives the Phantom Carriage, about an alcoholic, abusive ne'er-do-well who is shown the error of his ways and the pure-of-heart Salvation Army sister who believes in his redemption.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Based on one of the most controversial plays of its time, shows how a disaffected teenager finds her way amid the economic desperation of industrial Manchester, and despite an absent, self-absorbed mother. With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, a classic that is still a startling benchmark work of realism.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Woodmere

Binoche, Juliette

Summary: A British author on a book tour in Tuscany and a French art-gallery owner get to know each other over the course of an afternoon.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Ophuls, Max

Summary: Using a mask to hide his age, a man atttends balls and romances young women; the madame of a brothel brings her employees to her niece's confirmation; the affair between an artist and his model has dire consequences.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2008

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This eerie excursion into the Gothic recesses of Maddin's mad, imaginary childhood is a nightmare set in a lighthouse on grim Notch Island, where fictional protagonist Maddin was raised by an ironfisted, puritanical mother.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2008

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Two French beggars on their way to Spain's holy city of Santiago de Compostela meet stigmatic children, crucified nuns, and others on their pilgrimage.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Mayan Indian peasants are tired of being thought of as nothing more than manual laborers. They organize an effort to improve their lot in life, but are discovered by the Guatemalan army. After the army destroys their village and family, Enrique and Rosa, a teenage brother and sister, who barely escaped the massacre, decide they must flee to United States. After receiving clandestine help from...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2009

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A celebrated literary scholar, seemingly happily married, embarks on an affair with a gorgeous stewardess, who is captivated by his charm and reputation. As their romance gets serious, the film grows anxious, leading to a wallop of a conclusion.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: the Criterion Collection 2015

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Jarmusch, Jim

Summary: Follows the drivers and passengers in five cabs in five cities for one night.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: After the death in 2004 of American theater actor and monologist Spalding Gray, director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) pieced together a narrative of Gray's life to create the documentary And Everything is Going Fine. Brilliantly and sensitively assembled entirely from footage of Gray, taken from interviews and one-man shows from throughout his career, it is a rich, full portrait, and...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

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.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2009

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A small town in the south-west of France, summer of 1944. Having failed to join the resistance, the 18 year old Lucien Lacombe, whose father is a prisoner in Germany and whose mother dates her employer, works for the German police.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: The Criterion Collection 2006

Copies Available at Woodmere