HIGH DEF UNIVERSE

Announcing Criterion’s July 2025 New Releases

2025-04-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

Coming in July: The Big Heat, a hard-boiled tale of vice and retribution directed by Fritz Lang; Carnal Knowledge, an unnervingly frank look at American masculinity in the postwar era, directed by Mike Nichols; and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, a soulful study of the complexities of a sibling relationship. Plus: Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick’s sumptuously crafted vision of a pitiless aristocracy, and The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, the celebrated saga from François Truffaut that chronicled one of the most indelible characters of the French New Wave—now on 4K UHD.

THE BIG HEAT

1953 • 89 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Noir doesn’t get any more hard-boiled than this scorching tale of vice and retribution, a film that finds director Fritz Lang working at the peak of his Hollywood style—stripped to the bone, simmering with outrage, and fatalistic to the core. A tightly wound Glenn Ford stars as a homicide detective whose investigation into a sprawling crime syndicate becomes a shockingly personal, hate-fueled quest for revenge. Costarring an iconic Gloria Grahame as the mink-coated gangster’s moll with her own axe to grind, and featuring a supporting cast led by a sensationally sleazy Lee Marvin, The Big Heat hits with raw, unstoppable force.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New audio commentary by film-noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini

• New video essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme on the women in the film

• Audio interviews with director Fritz Lang, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich

• Interviews with filmmakers Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author Jonathan Lethem

BARRY LYNDON

1975 • 185 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features

• Interviews with the cast and crew as well as archival audio featuring director Stanley Kubrick on the film’s cinematography, costumes, editing, and production

• Interview featuring historian Christopher Frayling on production designer Ken Adam

• Interview with critic Michel Ciment

• Interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised

• Interview with curator Adam Eaker about the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and two pieces about the look of the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer

THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL

The release of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959 shook world cinema to its foundations. The now-classic portrait of troubled adolescence introduced a major new director in the cinematic landscape and was an inaugural gesture of the revolutionary French New Wave. But The 400 Blows not only introduced the world to Truffaut—it also unveiled his most indelible creation, Antoine Doinel. Initially patterned closely after Truffaut himself, the Doinel character (played by the irrepressible and iconic Jean-Pierre Léaud) reappeared in four subsequent films that knowingly portrayed his myriad frustrations and romantic entanglements, from his stormy teens through marriage, children, divorce, and adulthood. This box set presents Truffaut’s celebrated saga in its entirety: the feature films The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run, and the short subject Antoine and Colette.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restorations of all five films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: Four 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and four Blu-rays with the films and special features

• New 4K restoration of Les mistons, Truffaut’s 1957 short film, with commentary by Claude de Givray, Truffaut’s then assistant director

• Two audio commentaries for The 400 Blows, one featuring film scholar Brian Stonehill and the other Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay

• Archival interviews with Truffaut and his collaborators, including actors Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, and Marie-France Pisier and cowriters de Givray and Bernard Revon

• Video essays by film historian Serge Toubiana for Stolen Kisses and Les mistons

• Introducing My Father, François Truffaut, a 2019 interview with Laura Truffaut by filmmaker Daniel Raim

• Trailers

• PLUS: Essays by Annette Insdorf, Kent Jones, Andrew Sarris, Noah Baumbach, and Chris Fujiwara, and a 1971 piece by Truffaut

THE 400 BLOWS

1959 • 99 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

with ANTOINE AND COLETTE

1962 • 30 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

François Truffaut’s first feature is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively recreates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood. The film established Truffaut as a trailblazing auteur of the French New Wave. Also included is Truffaut’s Antoine and Colette, from the 1962 omnibus feature Love at Twenty.

STOLEN KISSES

1968 • 91 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

Jean-Pierre Léaud returns in the delightful Stolen Kisses, the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually lovestruck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he stumbles into the unlikely profession of private detective and embarks on a series of misadventures. Whimsical, nostalgic, and irrepressibly romantic, Stolen Kisses is François Truffaut’s timeless ode to the passion and impetuosity of youth.

BED AND BOARD

1970 • 97 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, Bed and Board, finds our hapless hero once again in crisis. Expecting his first child and still struggling to find steady employment, Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) involves himself in a relationship with a beautiful Japanese woman that threatens to destroy his marriage. Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, Bed and Board is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.

LOVE ON THE RUN

1979 • 95 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

Antoine Doinel strikes again! In the final chapter of François Truffaut’s saga, we find Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now in his thirties, convivially concluding his marriage, enjoying moderate success as a novelist, and clinging to his romantic fantasies. The newly single Doinel finds an object of his affections in Sabine, a record-store salesgirl whom he pursues with the fervid belief that without love, one is nothing. Along the way, he renews his acquaintance with previous loves and confronts his own chaotic past. In Love on the Run, Antoine Doinel is still in love, and because he’s still in love, he’s still alive.

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

1971 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

Amid the sexual revolution and social upheaval of the early 1970s, acclaimed director Mike Nichols delivered a zeitgeist-defining examination of American mores. Sharply written by Jules Feiffer, this acerbic drama flashes through more than twenty years in the lives of two college buddies (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) whose casual chauvinism is all fun and games—until it’s not. As the women who suffer and see through the friends’ insecure posturing, Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane, and Cynthia O’Neal form an extraordinary ensemble that gives the film its soul. So controversial it became embroiled in an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Carnal Knowledge remains startling for its unnervingly frank look at postwar masculinity.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New audio commentary featuring filmmaker and playwright Neil LaBute

• New program with Mike Nichols biographer Mark Harris and film critic Dana Stevens

• New interview with film-editing historian Bobbie O’Steen

• Conversation from 2011 between Nichols and filmmaker Jason Reitman

• Q&A with screenwriter Jules Feiffer

• Radio spot and trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by scholar Moira Weigel and a 1971 piece from American Cinematographer about the look of the film

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME

2000 • 111 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Celebrated playwright Kenneth Lonergan first brought his rich, humanist vision to the screen with this soulful look at the complexities of a sibling relationship whose roots are as knotted as they are deep. Years after Sammy (Laura Linney) and her younger brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo), lost their parents in a car crash, small-town single mother Sammy is plunged into another crisis when the troubled, adrift Terry comes home for what turns out to be an extended stay—one that could either bring them closer together or tear them apart. With infinite grace and his peerless ear for dialogue, Lonergan offers something all too rare on-screen: beautifully flawed human beings whose journeys offer achingly relatable insight into what changes when you grow up—and what doesn’t.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Kenneth Lonergan, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring Lonergan

• New interviews with Lonergan and actors Matthew Broderick, Laura Linney, and Mark Ruffalo

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by playwright Rebecca Gilman and the script of the original one-act play

Announcing Criterion’s June 2025 New Releases

2025-03-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

Coming in June: The Wiz, a dazzling soul spin on a landmark tale, directed by Sidney Lumet; Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser, an intimate record of a jazz visionary from Charlotte Zwerin; Midnight, a topsy-turvy screwball comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen; William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, a pulse-pounding, hallucinatory thriller; and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an unconventional portrait of an iconoclastic pianist. Plus: Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a visually stunning biopic of a controversial Japanese author, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, a dystopian epic about a daydreaming bureaucrat—now on 4K UHD.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS

1985 • 121 minutes • Black & White/Color • 2.0 surround • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Paul Schrader’s visually stunning, collagelike portrait of the acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted the impossible task of finding harmony among self, art, and society. Taking place on the last day of Mishima’s life, when he famously committed public seppuku, the film is punctuated by extended flashbacks to the writer’s past as well as gloriously stylized evocations of his fictional works. With its rich cinematography by John Bailey, exquisite sets and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and unforgettable, highly influential score by Philip Glass, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a tribute to its subject and a bold, investigative work of art in its own right.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, supervised and approved by director Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Two alternate English narrations, including one by actor Roy Scheider

• Audio commentary featuring Schrader and producer Alan Poul

• Program on the making of the film featuring Bailey, producers Tom Luddy and Mata Yamamoto, composer Philip Glass, and production designer Eiko Ishioka

• Program on Yukio Mishima featuring his biographer John Nathan and friend Donald Richie

• Audio interview with coscreenwriter Chieko Schrader

• Interview excerpt from 1966 featuring Mishima talking about writing

• The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, a 1985 documentary about the author

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by critic Kevin Jackson, a piece on the film’s censorship in Japan, and photographs of Ishioka’s sets

BRAZIL

1985 • 143 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

In the dystopian masterpiece Brazil, Jonathan Pryce plays a daydreaming everyman who finds himself caught in the soul-crushing gears of a nightmarish bureaucracy. This cautionary tale by Terry Gilliam, one of the great films of the 1980s, has come to be esteemed alongside antitotalitarian works by the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut. And in terms of set design, cinematography, music, and effects, Brazil is a nonstop dazzler.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration of Terry Gilliam’s director’s cut, supervised and approved by Gilliam, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features

• Audio commentary by Gilliam

• What Is “Brazil”?, Rob Hedden’s on-set documentary

• The Production Notebook, a collection of interviews and video essays, featuring a trove of Brazil-iana from Gilliam’s personal collection

• The Battle of “Brazil,” a documentary about the film’s contentious release, hosted by Jack Mathews and based on his book of the same name

• “Love Conquers All” version, the studio’s ninety-four-minute, happy-ending cut of Brazil, with commentary by Brazil expert David Morgan

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Sterritt

THE WIZ

1978 • 134 minutes • Color • Dolby Atmos • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

L. Frank Baum’s timeless story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gets a funky reimagining in this lavish adaptation of a landmark Broadway show based on the book. Diana Ross brings her showstopping star power to the role of Dorothy, here a Harlem schoolteacher who is magically transported to a surreal fantasyland that resembles New York City, complete with man-eating trash cans and a disco paradise. Propelled by the musical contributions of Quincy Jones and an all-star cast that includes Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne, this dazzling soul spectacular from legendary director Sidney Lumet reframes a beloved tale through the Black American experience, creating a powerful celebration of self-determination.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by producer Rob Cohen, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New audio commentary featuring scholars Michael B. Gillespie and Alfred L. Martin

• Archival interviews with director Sidney Lumet and actor Diana Ross

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Aisha Harris

THELONIOUS MONK STRAIGHT, NO CHASER

1988 • 89 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

The closest a film camera ever got to enigmatic jazz visionary Thelonious Monk, this intimate portrait sheds light on the corners of a brilliant and complex life. Superbly crafted by Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin from a trove of precious 1960s archival footage, Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser captures the pianist and bebop innovator in rare, unguarded moments on- and offstage, revealing an eccentric and complicated personality. Made with the same freedom of spirit that defines Monk’s artistry, this essential slice of jazz history is a unique glimpse into the quixotic world of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Introduction by director Charlotte Zwerin

• New interview with musician T. S. Monk, son of Thelonious Monk

• New program about Zwerin and the making of the film featuring interviews with writer Michael Schulman, assistant editor Bernadine Colish, and Zwerin’s nieces Lisa and Laura Tesone

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by musician and scholar Paul Grimstad

MIDNIGHT

1939 • 94 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Screwball comedy doesn’t get any more effortlessly elegant and gleefully irreverent than this roulette wheel of romantic deception, gleaming with cunning wit and Continental élan. A couture-clad Claudette Colbert is divine as a penniless American showgirl who crashes Parisian high society by posing as a wealthy Hungarian baroness—but both a scheming nobleman (John Barrymore) and a smitten taxi driver (Don Ameche) are soon on to her game. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s sophisticated script—a typically subversive blend of fairy-tale escapism and caustic social observation—and the pitch-perfect direction of master craftsman Mitchell Leisen yield a topsy-turvy Cinderella story with a cynical bite.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• New audio commentary featuring author and film critic Michael Koresky

• New program featuring audio excerpts of a 1969 interview with director Mitchell Leisen

• Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1940

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Cairns

SORCERER

1977 • 121 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A hallucinatory journey into the heart of darkness, William Friedkin’s pulse-pounding reimagining of the suspense classic The Wages of Fear was dismissed upon its release, only to be recognized decades later as one of the boldest auteur statements of the New Hollywood. In a remote Latin American village, four desperate fugitives—a New Jersey gangster (Roy Scheider), a Mexican assassin (Francisco Rabal), an unscrupulous Parisian businessman (Bruno Cremer), and an Arab terrorist (Amidou)—take on a seemingly doomed mission: transporting two trucks full of highly explosive nitroglycerin through the treacherous jungle. Aided by Tangerine Dream’s otherworldly synth score, Friedkin turns each bump in the road into a tour de force of cold-sweat tension—conjuring a hauntingly nihilistic vision of a world ruled by chance and fate.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack approved by director William Friedkin

• Alternate 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features

• Friedkin Uncut (2018), a documentary by Francesco Zippel featuring interviews with Friedkin; screenwriter Walon Green; filmmakers Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino; and others

• New conversation between filmmaker James Gray and film critic Sean Fennessey

• Archival audio interviews with Green and editor Bud Smith, from the collection of Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, author of William Friedkin (2003)

• Conversation from 2015 between Friedkin and filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn

• Behind-the-scenes footage of Friedkin on set

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Justin Chang

THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD

1993 • 93 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A rare film biography as boldly unconventional as its subject, writer-director François Girard’s visionary portrait of iconoclastic, world-renowned pianist Glenn Gould explodes the conventions of the form to illuminate the brilliant mind and innermost obsessions of a singular artist. Across thirty-two vignettes encompassing everything from dramatic sketches to documentary interviews to avant-garde animation, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gouldpieces together the story of Gould’s trajectory from child prodigy to celebrated concert pianist who turned his back on public performance to pursue his all-consuming fascination with recording technology. Led by a tour-de-force performance by Colm Feore and underscored by Gould’s landmark recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Girard’s film daringly deconstructs the enigma of genius.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director François Girard, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New audio commentary featuring Girard and cowriter and actor Don McKellar

• New conversation between Girard and filmmaker Atom Egoyan

• Glenn Gould: Off the Record and Glenn Gould: On the Record, companion programs from 1959 produced for Canadian television

• Archival interviews with actor Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author and film critic Michael Koresky

Criterion's May 2025 Releases

2025-02-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Coming in May: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a quiet revelation of American independent filmmaking; Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, two indelible comedies from maverick British writer-director Bruce Robinson; Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, a meditative masterpiece set in rural Iran; and The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers, a two-part swashbuckling spectacular directed by Richard Lester. Plus: Jacques Demy’s TheUmbrellas of Cherbourg, one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time, and In the Heat of the Night, a Hollywood classic from the civil rights era directed by Norman Jewison—now on 4K UHD.

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

1964 • 92 minutes • Color • 5.0 surround • In French with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by Ciné-Tamaris and approved by Mathieu Demy, director Jacques Demy’s son, with 5.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• Alternate uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Once Upon a Time . . . “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 2008 documentary

• Interview with film scholar Rodney Hill

• French television interview from 1964 featuring Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the film

• Archival audio interviews with Legrand and actor Catherine Deneuve at the National Film Theatre in London

• Demonstration of the 2013 restoration

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by critic Jim Ridley

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

1967 • 110 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Passing through the backwoods town of Sparta, Mississippi, Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) becomes embroiled in a murder case. He forms an uneasy alliance with the bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger), who faces mounting pressure from Sparta’s hostile citizens to catch the killer and run the African American interloper out of town. Director Norman Jewison splices incisive social commentary into this thrilling police procedural with the help of Haskell Wexler’s vivid cinematography, Quincy Jones’s eclectic score, and two indelible lead performances—a career-defining display of seething indignation and moral authority from Poitier and an Oscar-winning masterclass in Method acting from Steiger. Winner of five Academy Awards, including for Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night is one of the most enduring Hollywood films of the civil rights era.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Interviews with director Norman Jewison and actor Lee Grant

• Segment from a 2006 American Film Institute interview with actor Sidney Poitier

• Interview with Aram Goudsouzian, author of Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

• Audio commentary featuring Jewison, Grant, actor Rod Steiger, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler

• Turning Up the Heat: Movie-Making in the ’60s, a program about the production of the film and its legacy, featuring Jewison, Wexler, producer Walter Mirisch, and filmmakers John Singleton and Reginald Hudlin

• Quincy Jones: Breaking New Sound, a program about Jones’s innovative soundtrack, including the title song sung by Ray Charles, featuring interviews with Jones, lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and musician Herbie Hancock

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic K. Austin Collins

THE WIND WILL CARRY US

1999 • 118 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Persian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

The mysteries of everyday life come into astonishing focus in one of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic achievements. A slyly self-reflexive commentary on the director’s own artistic practice, The Wind Will Carry Us unfolds with unhurried majesty as it follows an undercover documentarian (Behzad Dorani) whose assignment to cover a small village’s funeral rites is continually frustrated by an elderly woman’s refusal to die. Along the way, though, he forges surprising, unsettling, and enlightening connections with those he meets. Suffused with Kiarostami’s love for people, poetry, and the arid beauty of rural Iran, this meditative masterpiece reflects upon the boundaries between intimacy and alienation, tradition and modernity, with the utmost grace.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• A Week with Kiarostami (1999), a documentary by Yuji Mohara on the making of the film

• Interview from 2002 with director Abbas Kiarostami

• New video essay presenting Kiarostami’s poetry narrated by Massoumeh Lahiji, a longtime translator and creative collaborator of the director’s

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar

WITHNAIL AND I

1987 • 107 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

The ultimate cult British comedy, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical cinematic bender is a feast of delectably florid dialogue delivered with deadpan relish by stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann as, respectively, Withnail and “I,” a pair of perpetually soused, unemployed actors in 1960s London who, desperate to escape their nightmarishly grimy flat, embark on a hilariously misbegotten country getaway beset by menacing locals, bare cupboards, and a randy uncle—all of which they may be able to withstand as long as they don’t run out of alcohol. While Robinson’s dazzling script yields quotable moments galore, it’s the film’s bittersweet evocation of a friendship gradually unraveling that gives this beloved end-of-youth tale its lasting poignancy.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Peter Hannan, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Two audio commentaries, one from 2020 featuring writer-director Bruce Robinson, and the other from 2001 featuring actors Ralph Brown and Paul McGann

• New short program featuring Robinson and actor Richard E. Grant

• Withnail and Us (1999), a documentary on the making of the film

• British Film Institute Q&A from 2017 with Robinson and Grant

• Stills gallery featuring photographs by artist Ralph Steadman

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic David Cairns

HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING

1989 • 94 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Writer-director Bruce Robinson and star Richard E. Grant, the cracked comic geniuses behind the cult favorite Withnail and I, reteamed for this diabolically dark satire of runaway capitalism in Margaret Thatcher–era England. Grant gives a virtuosically crazed performance as an ambitious advertising exec whose latest assignment—devising a campaign for a pimple cream—has him on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When he sprouts an enormous boil on his shoulder—one that not only talks but has evil ambitions of its own—a twisted battle of wills ensues. With fantastically fleshy body-horror effects and flourishes of gonzo surrealism, this tour de force of verbal jousting and physical comedy is a caustic Jekyll-and-Hyde tale for the greed-is-good 1980s.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 2K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Peter Hannan, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• New documentary featuring interviews with writer-director Bruce Robinson and actor Richard E. Grant

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic David Cairns

THE THREE MUSKETEERS / THE FOUR MUSKETEERS: TWO FILMS BY RICHARD LESTER

Alexandre Dumas’s immortal tale of adventure and camaraderie received perhaps the finest of its numerous screen adaptations with this two-part swashbuckling spectacular from A Hard Day’s Night director Richard Lester. Featuring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain as the swaggering swordsmen, who thrust and parry their way through courtly intrigue in seventeenth-century France, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are also graced with an all-star supporting cast that includes Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, and Charlton Heston. Lester’s exuberant epic breathes new life into an oft-told classic through its boisterous slapstick invention, its meticulous attention to period detail, and a sense of pure, unbridled bravado that is thrilling to behold.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features

• Two for One, a new documentary by critic David Cairns

• The Saga of the Musketeers (2002), a two-part documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew members

• The Making of “The Three Musketeers,” a 1973 featurette with behind-the-scenes footage of director Richard Lester

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Stephanie Zacharek

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

1973 • 107 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Richard Lester’s spirited adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s timeless novel immediately distinguished itself from previous film versions with its irresistible lightheartedness. It follows the brash, young wannabe musketeer d’Artagnan (Michael York) as he travels from the French countryside to Paris and befriends Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), famed swordsmen whom he must help to stop the conniving Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) and his plot to undermine the king. The Three Musketeers sweeps viewers away with its exquisite sets and costumes, chivalric romance, and breathless duels punctuated by the ingenious physical comedy that was Lester’s trademark.

THE FOUR MUSKETEERS

1974 • 106 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

It may be “one for all and all for one,” but it took director Richard Lester two films to contain the sweeping spectacle of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckling adventure. This sequel—shot simultaneously with The Three Musketeers, since they were originally conceived as a single film—dials down the comic high jinks that distinguished the first installment in favor of a more somber tone, as our heroes are drawn into a deadly revenge plot orchestrated by the seductive Milady de Winter (a deliciously wicked Faye Dunaway). Upping the psychological stakes and deepening our sense of the characters, The Four Musketeers brings this beloved tale of honor and friendship to a close with a rousing emotional flourish.

KILLER OF SHEEP

1977 • 80 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

A quiet revelation of American independent filmmaking, Charles Burnett’s lyrical debut feature unfolds as a mosaic of Black life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a father worn down by his job in a slaughterhouse, and his wife (Kaycee Moore) seek moments of tenderness in the face of myriad disappointments. Equally attuned to the world of children and that of adults, Burnett—acting as director, writer, producer, cinematographer, and editor—finds poetry amid everyday struggles in indelible images that glow with compassionate beauty. Largely unseen for decades following its completion in 1977, Killer of Sheep is now recognized as a touchstone of the groundbreaking LA Rebellion movement, and a masterpiece that brought Black American lives to the screen with an aching intimacy like no film before.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Charles Burnett, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring Burnett and film scholar Richard Peña

• New interviews with Burnett and actor Henry Gayle Sanders

• New appreciation by filmmaker Barry Jenkins

• Two short films by Burnett: Several Friends (1969) and The Horse (1973), with a new introduction to the latter by Burnett

• Excerpt from the 2010 UCLA LA Rebellion Oral History Project, featuring an interview with Burnett by film scholar Jacqueline Stewart

• A Walk with Charles Burnett (2019), a documentary by Robert Townsend

• Cast reunion from 2007

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Danielle Amir Jackson

Announcing Criterion's January 2025 New Releases

2024-10-15T09:57:00.002-07:00

Coming in January: The Mother and the Whore, the long-unavailable 1970s magnum opus from Jean Eustache; Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, a lacerating self-portrait by legendary comedian Richard Pryor; The Grifters, Stephen Frears's pulpy, dark-hearted neonoir; and Winchester '73, Anthony Mann's landmark, genre-redefining western. Plus: Yojimbo/Sanjuro, two of the most iconic and influential samurai films, by Akira Kurosawa, now on 4K UHD.

YOJIMBO / SANJURO: TWO SAMURAI FILMS BY AKIRA KUROSAWA

Thanks to perhaps the most indelible character in Akira Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Yojimbo surpassed even Seven Samurai in popularity when it was released. The masterless samurai Sanjuro, who slyly manipulates two warring clans to his own advantage in a small, dusty village, was so entertainingly embodied by the brilliant Toshiro Mifune that it was only a matter of time before he returned in a sequel. Made just one year later, Sanjuro matches Yojimbo’s storytelling dexterity yet adds a layer of world-weary pragmatism that brings the two films to a thrilling and unforgettable conclusion.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• Two 4K UHD discs of the films and two Blu-rays with the films and special features

• Optional DTS-HD Master Audio Perspecta 3.0 soundtracks, preserving the original simulated stereo effects

• Audio commentaries by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince

• Documentaries on the making of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create

• Teasers and trailers

• Stills galleries of behind-the-scenes photos

• PLUS: Essays by film writers Alexander Sesonske and Michael Sragow and comments from Kurosawa and members of his casts and crews

YOJIMBO

1961 • 110 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

The incomparable Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa’s visually stunning and darkly comic Yojimbo. To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro turns a range war between two evil clans to his own advantage. Remade twice, by Sergio Leone and Walter Hill, this exhilarating genre-twister remains one of the most influential and entertaining films of all time.

SANJURO

1962 • 95 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Akira Kurosawa’s tightly paced, beautifully composed Sanjuro. In this sly companion piece to Yojimbo, jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan’s evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a “proper” samurai on its ear. Less brazen in tone than its predecessor but equally entertaining, this classic character’s return is a masterpiece in its own right.

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE

1973 • 218 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and the upheavals of May 1968 came the near religiously revered magnum opus by Jean Eustache. In his long-unavailable body of work, ranging from documentaries about his native village to closely autobiographical narrative films, Eustache pioneered a forthright and fearless brand of realism. The pinnacle of this innovative style, The Mother and the Whore follows Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a Parisian pseudo-intellectual who lives with his tempestuous girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), even as he begins a dalliance with the sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), leading the three into an emotionally turbulent love triangle. Through daringly sustained long takes and confessional dialogue, Eustache captures a generation navigating the disillusionment of the 1970s, and in the process achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New interview with actor Françoise Lebrun

• New conversation with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin and writer Rachel Kushner

• Program on the film’s restoration

• Segment from the French television series Pour le cinéma featuring Lebrun, director Jean Eustache, and actors Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Pierre Léaud

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by critic Lucy Sante and an introduction to the film by Eustache

JO JO DANCER, YOUR LIFE IS CALLING

1986 • 97 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

One of the greatest comedians of all time, Richard Pryor gets raw and real in this brutally funny and lacerating self-portrait. Following the notorious incident in which he caught on fire while high on cocaine, nearly losing his life, Pryor exorcised his inner demons by writing, producing, directing, and starring in this dizzying hall-of-mirrors biopic and backstage drama, which traces a young comedian’s rise to fame, from his childhood growing up in a brothel to the colorful experiences that shaped his edgy comic voice to the addiction struggles that brought him to the brink of death. As he did in his legendary stand-up sets, here Pryor fearlessly turns his soul inside out, revealing the deep vulnerability that made his art so compelling.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New interview on the film with filmmaker Robert Townsend

• Interview with director Richard Pryor from a 1985 episode of The Dick Cavett Show

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An appreciation by critic Hilton Als

THE GRIFTERS

1990 • 110 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A dark-hearted neonoir comes to a boil under the bright Los Angeles sun, in British director Stephen Frears’s rousing adaptation of the novel by dime-store bard Jim Thompson, a film that raises pulp to the realm of existential tragedy. A possessive mother (Anjelica Huston), her cynical son (John Cusack), and his scheming, seductive girlfriend (Annette Bening) are career swindlers circling one another in an elaborate emotional confidence game that grows increasingly perverse as love and trust turn to betrayal and Oedipal undercurrents rise to the surface. In Frears’s first Hollywood film, the ever-assured director and his trifecta of magnetic actors conjure a moody, unstuck-in-time vision of toxic Americana.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director of photography Oliver Stapleton, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring director Stephen Frears, actors John Cusack and Anjelica Huston, and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake

• New interview with actor Annette Bening

• Short making-of documentary featuring Cusack, Frears, Huston, Westlake, and production designer Dennis Gassner

• Seduction, Betrayal, Murder: The Making of “The Grifters,” featuring interviews with Frears, Stapleton, editor Mick Audsley, executive producer Barbara De Fina, and coproducer Peggy Rajski

• The Jim Thompson Story, featuring Westlake and Robert Polito, biographer of The Grifters novelist Jim Thompson

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien

WINCHESTER '73

1950 • 92 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.35:1 aspect ratio

Noirish shadows spread across the frontier in this landmark western, the first of the celebrated collaborations between director Anthony Mann and actor James Stewart that redefined the genre with their moral and psychological intensity. Beginning his midcareer transition into increasingly edgy roles, Stewart portrays an avenging sharpshooter whose stolen rifle becomes a harbinger of death as it is passed from one doomed hand to the next. Featuring a stellar cast that includes a touching Shelley Winters, a sensationally sleazy Dan Duryea, and a pre-stardom Rock Hudson, this elemental tale of violence begetting violence broke new ground with its evocation of the West as a no-man’s-land of antiheroes and villains.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring actor James Stewart and film historian Paul Lindenschmidt

• New interview with film programmer Adam Piron on the portrayal of Native Americans in the western genre

• Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1951

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith

The Criterion Collection - December 2024 - New Releases

2024-09-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

Coming in December: No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen's riveting West Texas borderlands noir, and Eastern Condors, Sammo Hung's bazooka blast of Hong Kong action spectacle. Plus, now on 4K UHD: Paris, Texas, a visually exquisite study of a drifter in the American Southwest, directed by Wim Wenders, and Federico Fellini’s 8½, one of the greatest films about film ever made.

PARIS, TEXAS

1984 • 145 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Wim Wenders, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring Wenders

• Archival interviews with Wenders; cinematographer Robby Müller; composer Ry Cooder; actors Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Peter Falk, and Hanns Zischler; novelist Patricia Highsmith; and filmmaker Samuel Fuller

• Interviews with filmmakers Allison Anders and Claire Denis

• Deleted scenes and Super 8 home movies

• Gallery of Wenders’ location-scouting photos

• Behind-the-scenes photos by Robin Holland

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Nick Roddick; interviews with Stanton, writer Sam Shepard, and actors Nastassja Kinski and Dean Stockwell; and excerpts from Wenders’ book of photos Written in the West

8½

1963 • 138 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. Also featured is Fellini’s rarely seen first film for television, Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969). Produced by Peter Goldfarb, this “imagined documentary” of Fellini on Fellini is a kaleidoscope of unfinished projects, all of which provide a fascinating and candid window into the director’s unique creative process.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Introduction by filmmaker Terry Gilliam

• Audio commentary featuring film critics Gideon Bachmann and Antonio Monda

• Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a short film by Federico Fellini

• The Last Sequence, a documentary on Fellini’s lost alternate ending for 8½

• Nino Rota: Between Cinema and Concert, a documentary about Fellini’s longtime composer

• Interviews with actor Sandra Milo, filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro

• Rare photographs from Bachmann’s collection

• Gallery of behind-the-scenes and production photos

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Stephanie Zacharek

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

2007 • 122 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

A deadly game of chance and destiny plays out against the stark backdrop of early-1980s West Texas in Joel and Ethan Coen’s powerful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. When he happens upon more than two million dollars from a drug deal turned desert massacre, a retired welder and Vietnam veteran (Josh Brolin) sets into motion a wave of senseless, inexorable violence as he’s stalked across the plains by a soul-weary sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and a psychopathic hit man (Javier Bardem). Winner of four Academy Awards—including Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actor for the indelibly disturbing Bardem—this darkly deadpan borderlands noir keeps both the tension and the existential unease mounting through each cruelly ironic twist of fate.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital master, supervised and approved by director of photography Roger Deakins, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen and author Megan Abbott

• New conversation between Deakins and associate producer David Diliberto, also featuring Abbott

• Archival interviews with actors Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Macdonald

• Behind-the-scenes documentary by Brolin

• Three documentaries about the making of the film featuring on-set footage and interviews with members of the cast and crew

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author Francine Prose and a 2007 piece on the film by author Larry McMurtry

EASTERN CONDORS

1987 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

Legendary actor-director Sammo Hung delivers a bazooka blast of pure adrenaline in this exemplar of Hong Kong action cinema at its most entertaining. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood war films like The Dirty Dozen, Eastern Condors follows a ragtag band of Asian American prisoners dropped into Vietnam on a secret suicide mission to prevent a cache of weapons from falling into the hands of the Viet Cong, who are more than ready for a fight. Propelled by a dynamic ensemble cast that includes the ever-charismatic Yuen Biao as a black-market trader and a superhuman Yuen Wah as a giggling martial-arts monster, this rip-roaring spectacle offers a nonstop barrage of turbocharged set pieces that defy death, logic, and gravity itself.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• New audio commentary featuring film critic Tony Rayns

• 2K digital restoration of the English-dubbed “export cut” of the film

• Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Sammo Hung

• Interviews from 2001 with Hung and actor Yuen Wah

• Eastern Condors Live!, an onstage performance from the 1987 Miss Hong Kong Pageant

• Teaser and trailers

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Sean Gilman

Criterion's September 2024 Releases!

2024-06-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

Coming in September: Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, a trio of films from the New Queer Cinema renegade; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh's metaphysical exploration of queer love and loneliness; and Happiness, Todd Solondz's disturbingly funny portrait of middle-class suburbia. Plus: The Long Good Friday, John Mackenzie's landmark of British crime cinema, and Repo Man, Alex Cox's quintessential 1980s cult comedy—now on 4K UHD.

REPO MAN

1984 • 92 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.78:1 aspect ratio

A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox’s singular sci-fi comedy stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton as a weathered repo man in a desolate Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez as the nihilistic middle-class punk he takes under his wing. The job becomes more than either of them bargained for when they get involved in repossessing a mysterious—and otherworldly—Chevy Malibu with a hefty reward attached to it. Featuring the ultimate early-eighties LA punk soundtrack, this grungily hilarious odyssey is also a politically trenchant take on President Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Alex Cox, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring Cox, executive producer Michael Nesmith, casting director Victoria Thomas, and actors Sy Richardson, Zander Schloss, and Del Zamora

• Interviews with musicians Iggy Pop and Keith Morris and actors Dick Rude, Olivia Barash, and Miguel Sandoval

• Deleted scenes

• Roundtable discussion about the making of the film, featuring Cox, Richardson, Rude, Zamora, and producers Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks

• Conversation between McCarthy and actor Harry Dean Stanton

• Cox’s “cleaned-up” television version of the film

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Sam McPheeters, an illustrated production history by Cox, and a 1987 interview with real-life repo man Mark Lewis

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 7/30/24

STREET: 9/3/24

CAT. NO.: CC3593UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-181-8

UPC: 7-15515-30131-2

ALL OF US STRANGERS

2023 • 105 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

A metaphysical exploration of queer love and loneliness, familial grief and healing, this delicate but audacious chamber drama confirms director Andrew Haigh’s gift for bringing complicated emotions to the screen. Isolated in a seemingly empty new high-rise, London screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) finds his solitary existence upended when he begins a passionate romance with the impulsive Harry (Paul Mescal), then reconnects with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) in a reunion that pushes beyond the limits of time and space. Putting a deeply personal imprint on a novel by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada, Haigh reaches cosmic heights while never losing sight of the story’s achingly human heart.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed stereo soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between director Andrew Haigh and author and critic Michael Koresky

• New interview with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay

• Behind-the-scenes documentary and featurettes

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Guy Lodge

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 8/6/24

STREET: 9/10/24

CAT. NO.: CC3596UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-184-9

UPC: 7-15515-30161-9

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 8/6/24

STREET: 9/10/24

CAT. NO.: CC3597BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-185-6

UPC: 7-15515-30171-8

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

1980 • 114 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A combustible performance from Bob Hoskins is the fuse that lights this underworld saga, a landmark of British crime cinema. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, an ambitious London mobster who, just as he attempts to close a major real-estate deal with the American Mafia, finds his crime empire rocked by a string of attacks, sending him on a ruthless quest to find out who’s responsible. Abetted by an ice-cool performance from Helen Mirren as Shand’s in-command moll, The Long Good Friday is not only a gripping gangster thriller but also a vivid portrait of late-1970s Britain—a powder keg of cultural and political tensions on the verge of explosion.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director of photography Phil Méheux, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features

• Audio commentary with director John Mackenzie

• An Accidental Studio (2019), a documentary about the early years of HandMade Films

• Introduction by Criterion Collection curatorial director Ashley Clark

• Documentary about the making of the film featuring interviews with Mackenzie and actors Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren

• Program comparing the soundtracks for the UK and U.S. releases

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Ryan Gilbey

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 8/13/24

STREET: 9/17/24

CAT. NO.: CC3598UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-186-3

UPC: 7-15515-30181-7

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 8/13/24

STREET: 9/17/24

CAT. NO.: CC3599BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-187-0

UPC: 7-15515-30191-6

GREGG ARAKI'S TEEN APOCALYPSE TRILOGY

Take the conventions of the American teen movie, transpose them to Los Angeles’s freaky fringes, anchor them in an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity, and top it all off with heavy doses of Gen X disillusionment, gonzo violence, and hallucinogenic surrealism, and you’ll end up with something like these audacious transgressions from New Queer Cinema renegade Gregg Araki. Gleefully mixing slacker irony with raw sincerity, Godardian cool with punk scuzz, the savagely subversive, hormone-fueled films that make up the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration of Totally F***ed Up and new 4K digital restorations of The Doom Generation and Nowhere, supervised and approved by director Gregg Araki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of The Doom Generation and Nowhere and two Blu-rays with all three films and the special features

• New conversation between director Gregg Araki and filmmaker Richard Linklater

• New audio commentary on Nowhere with Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons

• Audio commentary on Totally F***ed Up with Araki, Duval, and actor Gilbert Luna

• New documentary on the trilogy’s visual style featuring Araki, Duval, producer Andrea Sperling, cinematographer Jim Fealy, costume designers Cathy Cooper and SaraJane Slotnick, production designer Patti Podesta, art director Michael Krantz, and hair and makeup artist Jason Rail

• James Duval’s Teen Apocalypse Archive, a new conversation between Araki and Duval

• Q&As with Araki, moderated by filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Andrew Ahn

• The Doom Generation video comic book

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $99.95

PREBOOK: 8/20/24

STREET: 9/24/24

CAT. NO.: CC3594UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-182-5

UPC: 7-15515-30141-1

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $69.95

PREBOOK: 8/20/24

STREET: 9/24/24

CAT. NO.: CC3595BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-183-2

UPC: 7-15515-30151-0

TOTALLY F***ED UP

1993 • 79 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin féminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsiderhood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still bruises.

THE DOOM GENERATION

1995 • 83 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foulmouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky, and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Working with a significant budget for the first time, Araki employs boldly stylized lighting and art direction to create a heightened sense of unreality in a shocking, shoegaze-soundtracked chronicle of young lives careening toward oblivion.

NOWHERE

1997 • 82 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death, and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can—Araki folds it all into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively caustic close.

HAPPINESS

1998 • 140 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

As disturbingly funny as it is audaciously empathetic, auteur of unease Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburban “normalcy.” An extraordinary ensemble cast—including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Dylan Baker—embodies an array of loosely connected New Jersey deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of whom want just one thing: to be loved. One of the most controversial films of the 1990s, the unflinching Happiness unnerves precisely because it dares to see the humanity in those most often denied it.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Maryse Alberti, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between director Todd Solondz and filmmaker Charlotte Wells

• New interview with actor Dylan Baker

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 8/20/24

STREET: 9/24/24

CAT. NO.: CC3601UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-189-4

UPC: 7-15515-30211-1

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 8/20/24

STREET: 9/24/24

CAT. NO.: CC3602BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-190-0

UPC: 7-15515-30221-0

Criterion’s July 2024 Releases

2024-04-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Coming in July: Black God, White Devil, Glauber Rocha's blistering existential western from Brazil; Perfect Days, a serene ode to everyday life in Tokyo directed by Wim Wenders; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Sam Peckinpah's blood- and dust-caked elegy for the American West; Farewell My Concubine, a breathtakingly intimate saga in twentieth-century China, directed by Chen Kaige; and Risky Business, Paul Brickman's sly satire about a suburban Chicago prepster. Plus: Le samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece of cool about a contract killer with samurai instincts, now on 4K UHD.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

50TH ANNIVERSARY RELEASE 2024 • 117 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

ORIGINAL THEATRICAL RELEASE 1973 • 106 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

FINAL PREVIEW CUT 1973 • 122 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

Sam Peckinpah’s cycle of genre-redefining westerns came to a close with this blood- and dust-caked elegy for the American West, which marries his renegade style with a fatalistic sense of finality. As newly minted lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) stalks the outlaw Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) across the plains, their old friendship is twisted into rivalry, and mythic ideals of freedom come up against an emerging ruling-class order—all to the strains of a haunting soundtrack by Bob Dylan (who also appears as the mercurial Alias). Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—presented here for the first time in three separate versions—stands as perhaps the maverick auteur’s richest, most mature work, a world-weary ballad that bears the solemn weight of history passing into legend.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration of the 50th Anniversary Release, supervised by editors Paul Seydor and Roger Spottiswoode, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• New 4K digital restoration of the Original Theatrical Release, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Audio commentary for the 50th Anniversary Release featuring Seydor, Spottiswoode, and critic Michael Sragow

• In the 4K UHD edition: Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features

• New 2K digital master of director Sam Peckinpah’s Final Preview Cut, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Dylan in Durango, a new interview with author Clinton Heylin about the film’s soundtrack

• Passion & Poetry: Peckinpah’s Last Western, a new program about the making of the film

• Archival interview with actor James Coburn

• Trailer and TV spots

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author and critic Steve Erickson

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $69.95

PREBOOK: 5/28/24

STREET: 7/2/24

CAT. NO.: CC3571UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-155-9

UPC: 7-15515-29801-8

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 5/28/24

STREET: 7/2/24

CAT. NO.: CC3572BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-156-6

UPC: 7-15515-29811-7

LE SAMOURAÏ

1967 • 105 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Interviews with Rui Nogueira, editor of Melville on Melville, and Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris

• Interviews with Melville and actors Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, and Cathy Rosier

• Melville-Delon: D’honneur et de nuit (2011), a short documentary exploring the friendship between the director and the actor and their iconic collaboration on Le samouraï

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Thomson, an appreciation by filmmaker John Woo, and excerpts from Melville on Melville

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 6/4/24

STREET: 7/9/24

CAT. NO.: CC3574UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-160-3

UPC: 7-15515-29901-5

BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL

1964 • 118 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Portuguese with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Myth, mysticism, and revolution collide in a blistering existential western from Glauber Rocha, the father of Brazil’s socially committed Cinema Novo movement. After killing his swindling boss, ranch hand Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey) goes on the run with his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães). In the stark hinterlands, they join forces with armed bandits and pledge allegiance to a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners while perpetrating unspeakable acts of violence against the innocent. Suffused with antiauthoritarian fervor and the intensity of life in the desert, this landmark work of radical cinema is a scorched-earth allegory about mindless fanaticism and the allure of dead-end ideologies.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 19New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Audio commentary by restoration producer Lino Meireles

• New interview with film scholar Richard Peña

• Glauber the Movie, Labyrinth of Brazil (2003), a documentary on director Glauber Rocha

• Cinema Novo (2016), a documentary on the Brazilian film movement

• Memória do cangaço (1964), a short documentary on the origins of cangaço, a form of social banditry in northeastern Brazil

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Fábio Andrade

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 6/11/24

STREET: 7/16/24

CAT. NO.: CC3575BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-161-0

UPC: 7-15515-29911-4

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 6/11/24

STREET: 7/16/24

CAT. NO.: CC3576DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-162-7

UPC: 7-15515-29921-3

PERFECT DAYS

2023 • 124 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

A perfect song that hits at just the right moment, the play of sunlight through leaves, a fleeting moment of human connection in a vast metropolis: the wonders of everyday life come into breathtaking focus in this profoundly moving film by Wim Wenders. In a radiant, Cannes-award-winning performance of few words but extraordinary expressiveness, Koji Yakusho plays a public-toilet cleaner in Tokyo whose rich inner world is gradually revealed through his small exchanges with those around him and with the city itself. Channeling his idol Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders crafts a serenely minimalist ode to the miracle that is the here and now.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, approved by director Wim Wenders, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New interview with Wenders

• Interview with actor Koji Yakusho

• Some Body Comes into the Light (2023), a short by Wenders, featuring a new introduction by the director

• Interview with producer Koji Yanai, founder of the Tokyo Toilet project

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 6/11/24

STREET: 7/16/24

CAT. NO.: CC3577UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-163-4

UPC: 7-15515-29931-2

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 6/11/24

STREET: 7/16/24

CAT. NO.: CC3578BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-164-1

UPC: 7-15515-29941-1

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 6/11/24

STREET: 7/16/24

CAT. NO.: CC3579DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-165-8

UPC: 7-15515-29951-0

RISKY BUSINESS

1983 • 99 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A sly piece of pop subversion, this irresistible satire of Reagan-era materialism features Tom Cruise in his star-is-born breakthrough as a Chicago suburban prepster whose college-bound life spirals out of control when his parents go out of town for the week and an enterprising call girl (Rebecca De Mornay) invites him to walk on the wild side. While Cruise boogying in his briefs yielded one of the most iconic pop-cultural moments of the 1980s, it is the film’s unexpected mix of tender romance (enhanced by a moody synth score by Tangerine Dream) and sharp-witted capitalist critique that remains fresh and daring.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of the director’s cut and the original theatrical release, supervised and approved by director Paul Brickman and producer Jon Avnet, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary for the original theatrical release featuring Brickman, Avnet, and actor Tom Cruise

• New interviews with Avnet and casting director Nancy Klopper

• New conversation between editor Richard Chew and film historian Bobbie O’Steen

• The Dream Is Always the Same: The Story of “Risky Business,” a program featuring interviews with Brickman, Avnet, cast members, and others

• Screen tests with Cruise and actor Rebecca De Mornay

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film curator and critic Dave Kehr

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 6/18/24

STREET: 7/23/24

CAT. NO.: CC3580UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-166-5

UPC: 7-15515-29961-9

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 6/18/24

STREET: 7/23/24

CAT. NO.: CC3581BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-167-2

UPC: 7-15515-29971-8

FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE

1993 • 171 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Mandarin with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A breathtakingly intimate romance unfolds against a sweeping backdrop of social upheaval in renowned director Chen Kaige’s sumptuous saga of passion, fate, and the transcendent possibilities of art. Spanning fifty years of twentieth-century Chinese history, Farewell My Concubine follows aspiring actors Dieyi (a heartbreaking Leslie Cheung) and Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) as they emerge from a childhood of brutal training to become Beijing-opera stars, with life mirroring art as Dieyi’s unrequited love for Xiaolou and the country’s changing political tides engulf them in their own personal tragedies of jealousy and betrayal. The first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or is epic filmmaking of the highest order—visually and emotionally ravishing from frame to exquisite frame.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration of the original director’s cut, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between Chinese-cultural-studies scholar Michael Berry and producer Janet Yang

• Documentary from 2003 on the making of the film

• Interview from 1993 with director Chen Kaige conducted by journalist Charlie Rose

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by author and scholar Pauline Chen

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 6/18/24

STREET: 7/23/24

CAT. NO.: CC3582UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-168-9

UPC: 7-15515-29981-7

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 6/18/24

STREET: 7/23/24

CAT. NO.: CC3583BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-169-6

UPC: 7-15515-29991-6

Criterion's June 2024 Releases Announced

2024-03-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

Coming in June: Bound, Lana and Lilly Wachowski's hyperstylish, sapphic heist thriller; Querelle, a delirious depiction of gay desire from Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Victims of Sin, a vibrant Mexican musical-melodrama-noir from Emilio Fernández; and The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins's monumental reimagining of American history through the eyes of an enslaved woman. Plus: Blue Velvet, David Lynch's unforgettable vision of innocence lost, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's feverish psychedelic odyssey—now on 4K UHD.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS 1998 • 118 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio It is 1971, and journalist Raoul Duke barrels toward Las Vegas—accompanied by a trunkful of contraband and his slightly unhinged Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo—to cover a motorcycle race. What should be a cut-and-dried journalistic assignment quickly descends into a feverish psychedelic odyssey. Director Terry Gilliam and an all-star cast, headlined by Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, show no mercy in bringing Hunter S. Thompson’s excoriating dissection of the American way of life to the screen, creating a film both hilarious and savage.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Terry Gilliam, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack • Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features • Three audio commentaries: one with Gilliam, one with actors Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro and producer Laila Nabulsi, and one with author Hunter S. Thompson • Deleted scenes, with optional commentary by Gilliam • Selection of Thompson correspondence, read on camera by Depp • Hunter Goes to Hollywood, a short documentary • Program about the controversy over the screenwriting credit • Profile of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo • Collection of artwork by illustrator Ralph Steadman • Excerpt from a 1996 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas audio recording featuring filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and actor Maury Chaykin • Documentary from 1978 featuring Thompson and Steadman • Storyboards, production designs, stills, and trailer • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing • PLUS: An essay by critic J. Hoberman and two pieces by Thompson

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION SRP: $49.95 PREBOOK: 4/30/24 STREET: 6/4/24 CAT. NO.: CC3562UHDBD ISBN: 979-8-88607-146-7 UPC: 7-15515-29711-0

QUERELLE 1982 • 108 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio Conjured from the unholy meeting of two iconoclastic queer artists, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film audaciously raises Jean Genet’s controversial novel to the level of myth. In an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French seaport town—bathed in fiery reds and complete with phallic spires—a strapping sailor and unrepentant criminal (Brad Davis) comes ashore to arouse passion, rivalry, and violence among the libidinal denizens drawn into his orbit. Enacted with dreamlike stylization by a cast of international stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero, Querelle finds Fassbinder pushing his taboo-shattering depiction of gay desire to delirious extremes.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • Restored high-definition digital master, approved by director of photography Xaver Schwarzenberger, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • New interview with critic Michael Koresky on director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's aesthetics and visual storytelling • Rainer Werner Fassbinder—Last Works, a 1982 documentary by Wolf Gremm • Trailer • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing • PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee

BLU-RAY EDITION SRP: $39.95 PREBOOK: 5/7/24 STREET: 6/11/24 CAT. NO.: CC3565BD ISBN: 979-8-88607-149-8 UPC: 7-15515-29741-7 DVD EDITION SRP: $29.95 PREBOOK: 5/7/24 STREET: 6/11/24 CAT. NO.: CC3566DDVD ISBN: 979-8-88607-150-4 UPC: 7-15515-29751-6

BOUND 1996 • 108 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio Before they blew the world’s mind with The Matrix, Lana and Lilly Wachowski delivered a jolt of pure pulp pleasure with their hyperstylish debut, which puts a deliciously sapphic spin on a crackerjack caper premise. When butch plumber Corky (Gina Gershon) catches the eye of alluring femme (fatale) Violet (Jennifer Tilly), little does she know she’s about to be drawn into both a torrid affair and a high-stakes heist that will pit the pair against the mob. With crackling dialogue, luscious neonoir cinematography, and live-wire performances by Gershon, Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, Bound is a genre-reimagining joyride that keeps both the tension and the erotic heat rising through each crazily careening twist.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Bill Pope, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack • In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features • Audio commentary featuring directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski; actors Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, and Jennifer Tilly; editor Zach Staenberg; and technical consultant Susie Bright • New video essay by film critic Christina Newland • Six interview programs featuring Gershon, Pantoliano, Pope, Staenberg, Tilly, actor Christopher Meloni, composer Don Davis, title designer Patti Podesta, and film scholars Jennifer Moorman and B. Ruby Rich • Trailers • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION SRP: $49.95 PREBOOK: 5/14/24 STREET: 6/18/24 CAT. NO.: CC3563UHDBD ISBN: 979-8-88607-147-4 UPC: 7-15515-29721-9 BLU-RAY EDITION SRP: $39.95 PREBOOK: 5/14/24 STREET: 6/18/24 CAT. NO.: CC3564BD ISBN: 979-8-88607-148-1 UPC: 7-15515-29731-8

VICTIMS OF SIN 1951 • 84 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Spanish with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera—a female nightclub dancer—who gives up everything to raise an abandoned boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical stars.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • New interview with filmmaker and archivist Viviana Garcia Besné • New interview with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on the work of Gabriel Figueroa • Archival documentary on cine de rumberas, featuring interviews with actor Ninón Sevilla • Trailer • New English subtitle translation • PLUS: An essay by scholar Jacqueline Avila

BLU-RAY EDITION SRP: $39.95 PREBOOK: 5/14/24 STREET: 6/18/24 CAT. NO.: CC3567BD ISBN: 979-8-88607-151-1 UPC: 7-15515-29761-5 DVD EDITION SRP: $29.95 PREBOOK: 5/14/24 STREET: 6/18/24 CAT. NO.: CC3568DDVD ISBN: 979-8-88607-152-8 UPC: 7-15515-29771-4

BLUE VELVET 1986 • 120 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, writer-director David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), as well as their person of interest, lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini)—and facing the fury of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep Dorothy in his grasp. With intense performances and hauntingly powerful scenes and images, Blue Velvet is an unforgettable vision of innocence lost, and one of the most influential American films of the late twentieth century.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, supervised and approved by director David Lynch • Alternate original 2.0 surround soundtrack • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features • The Lost Footage, fifty-three minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch • “Blue Velvet” Revisited, a feature-length meditation on the making of the movie by Peter Braatz, filmed on-set during the production • Mysteries of Love, a seventy-minute documentary from 2002 on the making of the film • Interview from 2017 with composer Angelo Badalamenti • It’s a Strange World: The Filming of “Blue Velvet,” a 2019 documentary featuring interviews with crew members and visits to the shooting locations • Lynch reading from Room to Dream, a 2018 book he coauthored with Kristine McKenna • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing • PLUS: Excerpts by McKenna from Room to Dream

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION SRP: $49.95 PREBOOK: 5/21/24 STREET: 6/25/24 CAT. NO.: CC3573UHDBD ISBN: 979-8-88607-159-7 UPC: 7-15515-29891-9

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 2021 • 585 minutes • Color • Dolby Atmos • 1.78:1 and 2.39:1 aspect ratios A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a full sensory immersion into the world of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), who, fleeing slavery, embarks on a treacherous quest for freedom—and is menaced by violence, supported by a clandestine community fighting for liberation, and haunted by the people she loses along the way. With images of searing power and stirring poetry, Jenkins delivers an epic saga of survival and resilience that pushes the limited-series format to new heights of cinematic transcendence.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • 4K digital master, approved by cowriter-director Barry Jenkins, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack • Alternate stereo soundtrack • New audio commentary featuring Jenkins and, on select chapters, cinematographer James Laxton and lead editor Joi McMillon, with an introduction by the director • New graphic-novel adaptation of “Genesis,” an unfilmed chapter of The Underground Railroad written by Jenkins and Nathan C. Parker, with an introduction by Jenkins • The Gaze, a companion film by Jenkins, with a new introduction by the director • Deleted scenes • Seven teasers made by Jenkins, with a new introduction by the director • Building “The Underground Railroad,” a short program featuring Jenkins and production designer Mark Friedberg discussing the creation of the train-station sets • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio • PLUS: An essay by critic Angelica Jade Bastién

BLU-RAY EDITION SRP: $79.95 PREBOOK: 5/21/24 STREET: 6/25/24 CAT. NO.: CC3569BD ISBN: 979-8-88607-153-5 UPC: 7-15515-29781-3 DVD EDITION SRP: $59.95 PREBOOK: 5/21/24 STREET: 6/25/24 CAT. NO.: CC3570DDVD ISBN: 979-8-88607-154-2 UPC: 7-15515-29791-2

Criterion's May 2024 Releases Announced

2024-02-15T09:22:00.000-08:00

Coming this May: Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène, three powerful 1970s works by the trailblazing Senegalese auteur; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's masterful examination of the line between truth and fiction; and Girlfight, Karyn Kusama's singular tale of a young woman’s path to self-realization. Plus: a Blu-ray upgrade of A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu, a silent classic from one of cinema’s greatest directors alongside his color remake, and Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s still-shocking masterpiece of British cinema, now on 4K UHD.

A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS / FLOATING WEEDS: TWO FILMS BY YASUJIRO OZU

In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds in color with celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and their son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. Together, the films offer a unique glimpse into the evolution of one of cinema's greatest directors. A Story of Floating Weeds finds Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; Floating Weeds reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness of everyday life.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master of Floating Weeds, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• High-definition digital master of A Story of Floating Weeds, featuring a score by composer Donald Sosin,presented in 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio

• Audio commentary for A Story of Floating Weeds by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie and for Floating Weeds by film critic Roger Ebert

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation for A Story of Floating Weeds and English subtitle translation by Richie for Floating Weeds

• PLUS: An essay by Richie

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 4/2/24

STREET: 5/7/24

CAT. NO.: CC3551BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-136-8

UPC: 7-15515-29581-9

A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS

1934 • 86 minutes • Black & White • Silent • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

Rich in backstage atmosphere and class-conscious insight, A Story of Floating Weeds was one of Yasujiro Ozu’s final silent films, and it displays his complete mastery of the form. With a vivid sense of character and the world of rural Japan, he sketches a poignant tale of family secrets, jealousy, and creative community, buoyed by grace notes of humanist observation and by luminous black-and-white cinematography that shows his spare yet lyrical visuals at their most soulful.

FLOATING WEEDS

1959 • 119 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

One of six sublime color masterworks that Yasujiro Ozu produced late in his career, the director’s second filming of his own 1934 silent triumph A Story of Floating Weeds represents the mature flowering of his style. Harnessing the full expressive potential of color, sound, music, and his exquisite compositional sense, he brings new depths of bittersweet feeling—tinged with an aging artist’s melancholic nostalgia—as well as a new air of expansiveness, to a story with enduring resonance.

PEEPING TOM

Having brought British cinema into exalted realms of fantasy and imagination, Michael Powell took a dark detour into obsession, voyeurism, and violence with this groundbreaking metacinematic investigation into the mechanics of fear. Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths—until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking Peeping Tom dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen.

1960 • 101 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Two audio commentaries, one featuring film scholar Laura Mulvey and one featuring film historian Ian Christie

• Introduction by filmmaker Martin Scorsese

• Interview with editor Thelma Schoonmaker

• Documentary about the film’s history, featuring interviews with Schoonmaker, Scorsese, and actor Carl Boehm

• Documentary about screenwriter Leo Marks

• Program on the film’s restoration

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 4/9/24

STREET: 5/14/24

CAT. NO.: CC3554UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-139-9

UPC: 7-15515-29611-3

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 4/9/24

STREET: 5/14/24

CAT. NO.: CC3555BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-140-5

UPC: 7-15515-29621-2

THREE REVOLUTIONARY FILMS BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE

Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms.

THREE-DISC SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and film writer Amy Sall

• The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

• New English subtitle translations

• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $99.95

PREBOOK: 4/16/24

STREET: 5/21/24

CAT. NO.: CC3552BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-137-5

UPC: 7-15515-29591-8

DVD EDITION

SRP: $79.95

PREBOOK: 4/16/24

STREET: 5/21/24

CAT. NO.: CC3553DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-138-2

UPC: 7-15515-29601-4

EMITAÏ

1971 • 101 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Diola and French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe’s patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army’s wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.

XALA

1975 • 123 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French and Wolof with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

An adaptation of Ousmane Sembène’s own 1973 novel, Xala is a hilarious, caustic satire of political corruption under an inept patriarchy. On the night of his wedding to his third bride, government official El Hadji (Thierno Leye) is rendered impotent and begins to suspect that one of his other wives has placed a curse on him. After seeking a cure from a local marabout, El Hadji must face the possibility that he deserves the infliction for his part in embezzling public funds and for helping to keep Senegal under French control. Adeptly combining elements of African folklore and popular cinema, Sembène indicts the hubris, entitlement, and opportunism of male authority figures.

CEDDO

1977 • 116 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Wolof with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.

ANATOMY OF A FALL

The closer we look, the less we know in Justine Triet’s masterful Palme d’Or–winning Anatomy of a Fall, an eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter (a transfixing Sandra Hüller), a writer who turns the material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration—or was it suicide?—of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. Tapping into the minimalist intensity of a chamber drama—and using intricate, elliptical editing—Triet constructs a mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead.

2023 • 151 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French and English with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 2K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• New interview with director Justine Triet

• Deleted and alternate scenes with commentary by Triet

• Audition footage of actors Milo Machado Graner and Antoine Reinartz and rehearsal footage of Machado Graner and actor Sandra Hüller

• Trailer

• PLUS: An essay by critic Alexandra Schwartz

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 4/23/24

STREET: 5/28/24

CAT. NO.: CC3556BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-141-2

UPC: 7-15515-29631-1

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 4/23/24

STREET: 5/28/24

CAT. NO.: CC3557DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-142-9

UPC: 7-15515-29641-0

GIRLFIGHT

Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity and deep wells of vulnerability as a young woman hitting back at society’s expectations and her own personal demons. Capturing the full emotional weight of Diana’s journey and the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion, Kusama crafts a singularly uncompromising story of self-realization.

2000 • 111 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Karyn Kusama and director of photography Patrick Cady, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• Audio commentary featuring Kusama

• New interviews with Kusama, editor Plummy Tucker, and composer Theodore Shapiro

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author Carmen Maria Machado

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 4/23/24

STREET: 5/28/24

CAT. NO.: CC3558BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-143-6

UPC: 7-15515-29651-9

March Criterion Releases

2023-12-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

Coming in March: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a powerful documentary from Laura Poitras about art and activism; Saint Omer, Alice Diop's morally and emotionally complex courtroom drama; The Runner, Amir Naderi's lyrical portrayal of childhood in postrevolutionary Iran, and To Die For, a deliciously subversive media satire from Gus Van Sant. Plus: All That Money Can Buy (a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster), William Dieterle's stylish take on the Faust legend, now on Blu-ray.

Coming in March: a powerful documentary about art and activism, a morally and emotionally complex courtroom drama, a lyrical portrayal of childhood in postrevolutionary Iran, and a deliciously subversive media satire. Plus: a stylish take on the Faust legend, now on Blu-ray.

ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY (a.k.a. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER)

Jabez Stone is a hardworking farmer trying to make an honest living, but a streak of bad luck tempts him to do the unthinkable: bargain with the devil himself. In exchange for seven years of good fortune, Stone promises “Mr. Scratch” his soul. But when the troubled farmer begins to realize the error of his choice, he enlists the aid of the one man who might save him: the legendary orator and politician Daniel Webster. Directed with stylish flair by William Dieterle, All That Money Can Buy brings the classic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét to life with inspired visuals, an unforgettable, Oscar-winning score by Bernard Herrmann, and a truly diabolical performance from Walter Huston as the devil. T

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Audio commentary by film historian Bruce Eder and Steven C. Smith, biographer of composer Bernard Herrmann
New restoration demonstration
Reading by actor Alec Baldwin of the short story by Stephen Vincent Benét on which the film is based
Episode of the Criterion Channel series Observations on Film Art about the film’s editing
Comparison of the differences between the July 1941 preview version of the film, Here Is a Man, and the film’s 1943 rerelease as The Devil and Daniel Webster
The Columbia Workshop’s radio adaptations of Benét’s short stories “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent,” both featuring music by Herrmann h
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by author Tom Piazza and a 1941 article by Benét i

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 2/6/24

STREET: 3/12/24

CAT. NO.: CC3532BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-117-7

UPC: 7-15515-29341-9

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras’s career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed entwines the mission of PAIN—an advocacy group she founded to raise awareness about the billionaire Sackler family’s integral role in the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses—with an intimate journey through Goldin’s life, from her rebellious adolescence and immersion in New York City’s thriving underground arts scene to her personal experiences of addiction and the AIDS epidemic. Through it all, her indelible photographs and candid reflections on memory and trauma reveal her unyielding solidarity with marginalized communities that refuse to remain silent.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New high-definition digital master, approved by director Laura Poitras and artist Nan Goldin, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interview with Poitras
Two conversations from the 2022 New York Film Festival, one featuring Poitras, Goldin, coproducer and PAIN activist Megan Kapler, PAIN activist Harry Cullen, and lawyer and PAIN member Mike Quinn discussing the making of the film, and the other featuring Goldin on art and activism
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
PLUS: An essay by author and activist Sarah Schulman

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 2/6/24

STREET: 3/12/24

CAT. NO.: CC3533BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-118-4

UPC: 7-15515-29351-8

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 2/6/24

STREET: 3/12/24

CAT. NO.: CC3534DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-119-1

UPC: 7-15515-29361-7

THE RUNNER

Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi’s own boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand’s electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city, determined to rise above his circumstances—working odd jobs, passing time with friends, learning to read—and running, always running, toward the future. Water, fire, the human body in motion: in hypnotic images of lyrical power, Naderi finds unexpected glory in the world of a boy suspended between modernity and elemental natural forces as he chases his own path forward.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Amir Naderi, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New conversation between Naderi and filmmaker Ramin Bahrani
Audio interview from 2022 with Naderi and actor Madjid Niroumand, moderated by curator Bruce Goldstein
Waiting, a 1974 film by Naderi, featuring an afterword by the director
Trailer
English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by filmmaker and critic Ehsan Khoshbakht

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 2/13/24

STREET: 3/19/24

CAT. NO.: CC3539BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-124-5

UPC: 7-15515-29411-9

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 2/13/24

STREET: 3/19/24

CAT. NO.: CC3540DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-125-2

UPC: 7-15515-29421-8

SAINT OMER

Bringing a documentarian’s sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop constructs a morally and emotionally layered courtroom drama unlike any other. When she travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of murdering her infant daughter, novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) finds herself shaken to the core by a case that proves to have profound resonances with her own life. Interweaving complex themes of mother-daughter bonds, immigrant alienation, and postcolonial trauma into a piercing portrait of two mysteriously connected women, Diop forgoes mere questions of guilt and innocence in order to plumb the unsettling unknowability of the human soul.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 2K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interviews with director Alice Diop
Conversation between Diop and author Hélène Frappat
Conversation between Diop and filmmaker Dee Rees from a 2023 episode of The Director’s Cut – A DGA Podcast
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by critic Jennifer Padjemi

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 2/20/24

STREET: 3/26/24

CAT. NO.: CC3535BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-120-7

UPC: 7-15515-29371-6

DVD EDITION

SRP: $29.95

PREBOOK: 2/20/24

STREET: 3/26/24

CAT. NO.: CC3536DDVD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-121-4

UPC: 7-15515-29381-5

TO DIE FOR

The all-American obsession with celebrity turns monstrous in this deliciously subversive (and disturbingly prescient) satire of our television-mediated, true-crime-obsessed age. In a career breakthrough, Nicole Kidman delivers a diabolical deconstruction of the girl next door as a local TV weather reporter whose perfectly perky facade belies a murderous heart, as her ruthless pursuit of fame ensnares three disaffected teens in a sordid, tabloid-ready scandal. Deftly deploying shifting perspectives, faux-documentary interviews, and a supporting cast featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Matt Dillon, and Casey Affleck, director Gus Van Sant adds provocative layers of meaning to this darkly funny examination of suburban sociopathy.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Gus Van Sant and director of photography Eric Alan Edwards, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
Audio commentary featuring Van Sant, Edwards, and editor Curtiss Clayton
Deleted scenes
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang

4K UHD + BLU-RAY COMBO EDITION

SRP: $49.95

PREBOOK: 2/20/24

STREET: 3/26/24

CAT. NO.: CC3537UHDBD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-122-1

UPC: 7-15515-29391-4

BLU-RAY EDITION

SRP: $39.95

PREBOOK: 2/20/24

STREET: 3/26/24

CAT. NO.: CC3538BD

ISBN: 979-8-88607-123-8

UPC: 7-15515-29401-0