Justine Triet's Criterion picks

A Manhattan woman struggles with her identity as she tries to move on from a painful divorce.

A liberated small-town girl and the family's black sheep moves to Paris with her sister, only to find herself standing trial for the shocking murder of her young lover. Was his killing premeditated or was this a crime of passion?

A charming scoundrel reflects on his exploits, from childhood through to manhood.

Three narrators (French writer Jean Martin, an English royal equerry, and a papal chamberlain) tell the story of seven matched pearls, four of them now in the British Crown. Episodes whirl us from Pope Clement VII to Mary Queen of Scots, from whom the pearls are stolen while she's occupied with the headsman. Historic events are seasoned with sly, satiric humor, and famous beauties are portrayed by stunning actresses. Then the narrators meet, and decide to try tracing the three unrecovered pearls from 1587 to the present...

Shavian social satire. Odette is an actress who's now the mistress of a government minister. Her household of cook, maid, and chauffeur needs a valet. On the eve of going with the minister to Deauville, she engages Désiré, a robust and talkative man, even through his most recent employer, a countess, intimates improprieties. Things go well for a short time: the wealthy talk about the servants, the servants talk about their employers. Then, Désiré has explicit dreams about Odette; his outbursts wake the maid in the next room nightly. Odette has the same dream each night, awaking the minister and his jealousy. Is there any decorous way to handle these subconscious attractions?

The battle of the sexes as drawing room social satire. Philippe, a middle-aged newspaper editor, has lived for six years with Paulette, a successful stage actress. He tells her friend Claudine, a realistic and enterprising reporter, that he's thinking of proposing. Into the mix steps Carl Erickson, a charming Hollywood matinée idol in Paris briefly. He meets Paulette, sees her act (his box seat compliments of Philippe), and sets out to seduce her. The next two days bring talk, tears, separation, despair, surprises, and, perhaps, reconciliation as characters speak "exactly half the truth." It's a quadrille of changing partners.

Chronicles 7-weeks in the lives of 12 emotionally disturbed children and their therapist's experimental method of treatment at the Toronto-area Warrendale facility.

An "actuality drama" about a real-life marriage in crisis, in which the couple attempts to identify and resolve the conflicts and resentments that have driven them to the brink of separation.

Ten teenagers journey down a path to self-discovery as they adjust to life on a farm in this examination of the stress and alienation of adolescence.

Director Allan King documents the final months of five terminally ill cancer patients at the Toronto Grace Health Centre.

Elderly residents of a Toronto nursing home cope with loss, loneliness and other heartbreaking challenges of growing old, as the home's staff work tirelessly to provide an environment of dignified, compassionate care.

Nelly has just lost her grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother's childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods. One day she meets a girl her age building a tree-house.

A sexually repressed woman's husband is having an affair with her sister. The arrival of a visitor with a rather unusual fetish changes everything.

A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship.