The Criterion Challenge 2023

In medieval Japan, a compassionate governor is exiled to a remote province. His wife, Tamaki, and their children, Zushiō and Anju, attempt to join him but are deceived and separated. Tamaki is sold into prostitution, while Zushiō and Anju are enslaved on an estate ruled by the brutal Sanshō. As they grow up, Zushiō loses his humanity, becoming a harsh overseer, while Anju clings to their father's teachings of mercy.

Igor--a 15-year-old apprentice mechanic--spends his off hours at the beck and call of his father. Igor's father, Roger, is a low-life involved with smuggling undocumented immigrants into Belgium, and acts as their slumlord, housing them in barely livable conditions, and paying them menial wages to work construction on his building (among other scams). When the building inspector pays a surprise visit and Amidou falls off a scaffold in his hurry to hide, things start to unravel, particularly when Igor makes a promise to the injured Amidou that ultimately exposes the different values of Igor and Roger, and of Amidou's wife, Assita.

Lung, once a Little League star, now runs a fabric shop but longs for past glory. A chance reunion with a former teammate sparks shared nostalgia. He lives with Ah-chin, his modernized childhood love, who’s still uneasy about his past affair. After a fight, Ah-chin seeks comfort among her sister’s carefree, westernized friends.

Tax auditor Francis Brown visits Exotica, a nightclub on the outskirts of Toronto, every night to watch Christina dance and escape his own pain. His presence disturbs Eric, the club's MC and Christina's ex. As tensions build, Thomas becomes unexpectedly drawn into their lives.

The first film in Pedro Costa's transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby's safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L'argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.

Bullied at school and ignored and abused at home by his indifferent mother and older brother, Billy Casper (David Bradley), a 15-year-old working-class Yorkshire boy, tames and trains his pet kestrel falcon whom he names Kes. Helped and encouraged by his English teacher Mr. Farthing (Colin Welland) and his fellow students, Billy finally finds a positive purpose to his unhappy existence, until tragedy strikes.

This movie documents the Apollo missions perhaps the most definitively of any movie under two hours. Al Reinert watched all the footage shot during the missions--over 6,000,000 feet of it, and picked out the best. Instead of being a newsy, fact-filled documentary, Reinart focuses on the human aspects of the space flights. The only voices heard in the film are the voices of the astronauts and mission control. Reinart uses the astronaunts' own words from interviews and mission footage. The score by Brian Eno underscores the strangeness, wonder, and beauty of the astronauts' experiences which they were privileged to have for a first time "for all mankind."

Mance Lipscomb, born in 1895, a Black Texas sharecropper, guitarist, and singer, was recorded by Arhoolie Records in 1960. About ten years later, a film crew visits to listen to him play and sing and to record his reflections on a life well lived. We meet Elnora, his wife since 1913; she explains why she doesn't eat at the table with him. She cooks, Mance tells how a neighbor got his leg shot off, we see a baptism by immersion at which Mance assists. He talks about love and sacrifice, adopting and raising children including those of his sister, being with his grandchildren, traveling the US to sing, and his thoughts about dying. He presents peace, quiet, and great music.

Filmmaker William Greaves is shooting a series of screen tests in New York City's Central Park for the two leads of a feature length movie, with the working title of "Over the Cliff". Simultaneously, he has a documentary filmmaking crew filming the behind the scenes making of the movie. In addition to seeing these two sets of footage (the film and the film of the film), the viewer also sees footage of a third film crew filming the these two in relation to what is happening overall as they film in the park while real life goes on around them, which in Bill's mind is part of the realism of the movie. "Over the Cliff" itself has no plot and no full script but only a working concept of sexuality being the movie's theme and snippets of scripted dialogue. This unstructured approach is to give the movie a sense of realism. The actors imply as much, but many of the crew, discussing in Grieves-less bullpen sessions, believe Greaves is unfocused and inept at what he is doing, while a minority believe his experimental process will yield a special and great end product.

When Juliette marries Jean, she comes to live with him as he captains a river barge. Besides the two of them, are a cabin boy and the strange old second mate, Pere Jules. Soon bored by life on the river, she slips off to see the nightlife when they land at Paris. Angered by this, Jean sets off, leaving Juliette behind. Overcome by grief and longing for his wife, Jean falls into a depression and Pere Jules goes searching for Juliette.

A writer investigating the execution of a serial killer known as "The Haymarket Strangler" 20 years previously begins to suspect that the wrong man might have been hanged. However, when he picks up a scalpel used by the murderer, he finds himself possessed by the killer's spirit and begins to commit similar murders.

A scientist's thoughts materialize as an army of invisible brain-shaped monsters (complete with spinal-cord tails!) who terrorize an American military base in this nightmarish chiller, directed by Arthur Crabtree. This outstanding sci-fi/horror hybrid is a special effects bonanza, and a high-water mark in British genre filmmaking.

The Monkees disrupt a bridge ceremony and launch into surreal vignettes across genres—from war films to sci-fi—while questioning their reality and struggling to escape symbolic oppression, represented by a black box and a looming figure known as Victor Mature.

A surly Brooklyn gambler reluctantly hosts his cousin, a Hungarian immigrant, for an unexpected ten-day stay. Their initial indifference shifts to a strange bond, as they deal with their differences in the gritty New York City. A year later, restlessness drives him and his friend on a spontaneous journey to find her, taking them from the icy streets of Cleveland to the sun-bleached sands of Florida.

The Star Prince falls to earth on a star and is found and reared by a woodcutter. Because the haughty prince is cruel to the beggar who claims to be his mother, a fairy transforms him into an ugly pauper. Ashamed, the prince sets out to find his mother. On his quest, he survives several adventures involving the wicked witch and the little princess, who falls in love with him. When the evil dwarf tries to force the princess to marry him, the Star Prince rescues her, whereupon he is changed back to his original form. The dwarf, however, is turned into a pig, while the Star Prince marries the beautiful princess.