Criterion Collection Crowns Their August Batch of 4K UHD & Blu-ray Titles

The Criterion Collection has announced their August 2024 4K UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray titles. This wave includes Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor in 4K, Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova as well as Martha Coolidge's Not a Pretty Picture on Blu-ray, and finally Albert Brooks' Real Life and Mother - sold separately on both formats.

On August 13, The Criterion Collection will offer Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (the Blu-ray is already available).

The Last Emperor - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the scope of the film was, and remains, undeniably powerful—the life of Emperor Puyi, who took the throne in 1908, at age three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Qing-dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, The Last Emperor is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and political legacy.

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

On the same date, Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova will arrive on Blu-ray.

Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova - The Criterion Collection 

Nobody made films like Kira Muratova. Uncompromising and uncategorizable, the Ukrainian iconoclast withstood decades of censorship to realize her singular vision in hypnotically beautiful, expressionistically heightened films that remain unique in their ability to evoke complex interior worlds. Her first two solo features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, are fascinatingly fragmented portraits of women navigating work, romance, and family life with a mix of deep yearning and playful pragmatism. Long suppressed by Soviet authorities, these films became legendary—along with their maker—and they now make for a revelatory introduction to this most fearlessly original of artists.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• Interviews with scholars Elena Gorfinkel and Isabel Jacobs 
• Archival interview with director Kira Muratova 
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang         

Martha Coolidge's Not a Pretty Picture arrives on August 20.

Not a Pretty Picture - The Criterion Collection 

Trailblazing filmmaker Martha Coolidge made her feature debut with this unflinchingly personal hybrid of documentary and fiction. Centered on an intense reenactment of Coolidge’s experience of rape in her adolescence, the film casts Michele Manenti (also a survivor) as the director’s younger self, and observes the actor and her castmates as they engage in a profound dialogue about what it means to recreate these traumatic memories, and about their attitudes concerning consent and self-blame. A high-stakes experiment in metacinema that broke new ground with its uncompromising examination of date rape, Not a Pretty Picture brings a stunning immediacy to questions about the on-screen representation of sexual violence and the limits of artistic catharsis.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

The 1979 comedy Real Life from Albert Brooks is headed for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and Blu-ray on August 27.

Real Life - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

Decades before reality television reigned supreme, there was Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a brilliantly deadpan, stylistically innovative satire about the perils and pitfalls of trying to capture the truth on film. The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinaur 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape.

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

And rounding out the month also on August 27 is another Albert Brooks comedy, Mother - starring Brooks and Debbie Reynolds on both 4K UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray.

Mother - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

Reeling after his second divorce and struggling with writer’s block, sci-fi novelist John Henderson (Albert Brooks) resolves to figure out where his life went wrong, and hits on an unorthodox solution: moving back in with his relentlessly disapproving, cheerfully passive-aggressive mother (Debbie Reynolds), whose favorite son has always been John’s younger brother, Jeff (Rob Morrow). It’s an experiment that, however harebrained, delivers surprising results. Brooks’s film perfectly blends the writer-director-star’s biting wit with insight and inviting warmth, while giving him a formidable foil in the delightful Reynolds, triumphant in a comeback role that’s equal parts caustic and charming.

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

The Criterion Collection's August 4K UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray releases should be up for pre-order soon and we will update the links when they are available.