Criterion

A young woman (Meiko Kaji), trained from childhood as an assassin and hell-bent on revenge for the murders of her father and brother and the rape of her mother, hacks and slashes her way to gory satisfaction in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan. Rampant with inventive violence and spectacularly choreographed swordplay, Toshiya Fujita’s pair of influential cult classics Lady Snowblood and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance are bloody, beautiful extravaganzas composed of one elegant widescreen composition after another. The first Lady Snowblood was a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga, and both of Fujita’s films remain cornerstones of Asian action cinema.

Over the past four decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) has created one of cinema’s most distinctive bodies of work—formally daring, often autobiographical films about people and places, time and space. In this collection, we present the early films that put her on the map: intensely personal, modernist investigations of cities, history, family, and sexuality, made in the 1970s in the United States and Europe and strongly influenced by the New York experimental film scene. Bold and iconoclastic, these five films pushed boundaries in their day and continue to have a profound influence on filmmakers all over the world.

There has never been a filmmaker like Marlon Riggs: an unapologetic gay Black man who defied a culture of silence and shame to speak his truth with resounding joy and conviction. An early adopter of video technology, Riggs employed a bold mix of documentary, performance, poetry, and music in order to confront the devastating legacy of racist stereotypes, the impact of AIDS on his community, and the very definition of what it means to be Black. Bringing together Riggs’s complete films—including his controversy-inciting queer landmark Tongues Untied and Black Is . . . Black Ain’t, the deeply personal swan song that was completed after his death at the age of thirty-seven—The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs traces the artistic and political evolution of a transformative filmmaker whose work is both an electrifying call for liberation and an invaluable historical document.

There has never been a filmmaker like Marlon Riggs: an unapologetic gay Black man who defied a culture of silence and shame to speak his truth with resounding joy and conviction. An early adopter of video technology, Riggs employed a bold mix of documentary, performance, poetry, and music in order to confront the devastating legacy of racist stereotypes, the impact of AIDS on his community, and the very definition of what it means to be Black. Bringing together Riggs’s complete films—including his controversy-inciting queer landmark Tongues Untied and Black Is . . . Black Ain’t, the deeply personal swan song that was completed after his death at the age of thirty-seven—The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs traces the artistic and political evolution of a transformative filmmaker whose work is both an electrifying call for liberation and an invaluable historical document.

In the 1970s, Wim Wenders was among the first true international breakthrough artists of the revolutionary New German Cinema movement, a filmmaker whose fascination with the physical landscapes and emotional contours of the open road proved to be universal. In the middle of that decade, Wenders embarked on a three-film journey that took him from the wide roads of Germany to the endless highways of the United States and back again. Each starring Rüdiger Vogler as the director’s alter ego, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road are dramas of emotional transformation that follow their characters’ searches for themselves, all rendered with uncommon soulfulness and visual poetry.

Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a monumental, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of new restorations by the International Olympic Committee.

Deep in the windswept marshes of war-torn medieval Japan, an impoverished older woman and her daughter-in-law murder lost samurai and sell their belongings for the most meager of sustenance. When a bedraggled neighbor returns from battle, lust, jealousy, and rage threaten to destroy the trio’s tenuous existence, before an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask seals their horrifying fate. Driven by primal emotions, dark eroticism, a frenzied score by Hikaru Hayashi, and stunning images both lyrical and macabre, Kaneto Shindo’s chilling folktale Onibaba conjures a nightmarish vision of humankind’s deepest desires and impulses.

Giving voice to the anguish of a nation fighting for its soul, Usmar Ismail’s After the Curfew follows the descent into disillusionment of a former freedom fighter who is unable to readjust to civilian life following the revolution that gave Indonesia its independence from the Netherlands. Steeped in moody atmospherics and psychological tension, the film struck its national cinema like a bolt of lightning, illuminating on-screen, for the first time and with unflinching realism, the emotional toll of Indonesian society’s postcolonial struggles.

Years before Akira Kurosawa changed the face of cinema with such iconic works as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, he made his start in the Japanese film industry with four popular and exceptional works, created as World War II raged. All gripping dramas, those rare first films - Sanshiro Sugata; The Most Beautiful; Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two; and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail - are collected here and include a two-part martial arts saga, a portrait of female volunteers helping the war effort, and a kabuki-derived tale of deception. These captivating films are a glorious introduction to a peerless career.

Giving voice to the anguish of a nation fighting for its soul, Usmar Ismail’s After the Curfew follows the descent into disillusionment of a former freedom fighter who is unable to readjust to civilian life following the revolution that gave Indonesia its independence from the Netherlands. Steeped in moody atmospherics and psychological tension, the film struck its national cinema like a bolt of lightning, illuminating on-screen, for the first time and with unflinching realism, the emotional toll of Indonesian society’s postcolonial struggles.