The first announced titles include Jerzy Skolimowski's Cannes Jury Prize winner and Academy Award nominee EO, Jafar Panahi's No Bears, Louis Garrel's The Innocent, Hlynur Pálmason's Godland, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Tori and Lokita, and Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's The Eight Mountains.

The Criterion Collection and Janus Films' Janus Contemporaries home video library will feature first-run theatrical films on Blu-ray and DVD following their streaming premieres on The Criterion Channel.

As the premier U.S. distributor of international art house cinema, Janus is widely known for some of the greatest movies of all-time -- from legends such as Chantal Akerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Cocteau, the Coen brothers, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembène, François Truffaut, Melvin Van Peebles, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, and Wong Kar.

"It's an exciting moment for Janus Films," said Peter Becker, president of Criterion and a partner in Janus Films. "With a more robust first-run lineup than it has had since the 1960s and powerful partnerships with theatrical specialists Sideshow and the Criterion Channel streaming service, Janus is uniquely well positioned to bring the best films from around the world to theaters and homes across North America. The launch of Janus Contemporaries completes that picture."

Janus Contemporaries Blu-ray titles will retail for $29.95 and DVDs will have a MSRP of $24.95 and it has been revealed that these titles will include new interviews from The Criterion Channel's Meet the Filmmakers series.

More to follow soon as autumn approaches, but you can check out the the full press release: in the meantime below:

Titles include The Watermelon Woman (Blu-ray), Breathless (4K UHD), After Hours (4K UHD and Blu-ray), One False Move (4K UHD and Blu-ray) and The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher (4K UHD).

The month's Blu-ray-only title is the romantic comedy The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye arriving on July 11.

The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life as she navigates a new relationship with a white girlfriend (Guinevere Turner). Balancing breezy romantic comedy with a serious inquiry into the history of Black and queer women in Hollywood, The Watermelon Woman slyly rewrites long-standing constructions of race and sexuality on-screen, introducing an important voice in American cinema.

1996 • 84 minutes • Color • 3.0 surround • 1.33:1 aspect ratio 

The Watermelon Woman
 

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

On the same date comes Martin Scorsese's 1985 dark comedy After Hours also available on Blu-ray.

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home. With this Kafkaesque cult classic, Martin Scorsese—abetted by Michael Ballhaus’s kinetic cinematography and scene-stealing supporting turns by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard—directed a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity, turning the desolate night world of 1980s SoHo into a bohemian wonderland of surreal menace.

1985 • 97 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

After Hours - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (Criterion)
 

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

Arriving on July 18 is a 4K UHD upgrade of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.

1960 • 90 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio 

Breathless - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
 

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Also on July 18 is The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.

The five briskly entertaining, vividly performed westerns made by director Budd Boetticher and strapping star Randolph Scott in the second half of the 1950s transcend their B-movie origins to become rich, unexpectedly profound explorations of loyalty, greed, honor, and revenge. Often grouped under the name Ranown (after producer Harry Joe Brown and Scott’s production company) and colorfully scripted by Burt Kennedy and Charles Lang, these films seem to unfold in a world unto themselves, staking a claim between traditional westerns and the subversive genre revisionism of the 1960s—and representing the crowning achievement of the underappreciated auteur Boetticher.

The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray - The Criterion Collection
 

THE TALL T

Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, this collaboration between director Budd Boetticher, actor Randolph Scott, and screenwriter Burt Kennedy is a model of elegantly economical storytelling charged with psychological tension. Here, Scott is the easygoing rancher who, along with the newlywed daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan) of a wealthy mining baron, must use his wits to stay alive when he is taken hostage by a band of ruthless stagecoach robbers. He is memorably matched by Richard Boone’s dangerously charming, nearly sympathetic villain in a performance that exemplifies the fine moral shading that distinguishes the Ranown westerns.

1957 • 78 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

DECISION AT SUNDOWN

Randolph Scott boldly subverts his upstanding image in this stark, often startlingly bleak tale of revenge and a man’s misguided quest for redemption. He plays the mysterious stranger who, consumed by hatred for the man he blames for his wife’s suicide, rides into the corrupt town of Sundown hell-bent on vengeance. There, both he and the townspeople face a reckoning that forces them to confront disturbing truths about themselves. All but annihilating the myth of the righteous western hero, Decision at Sundown edges the Ranown films into increasingly dark, despairing territory.

1957 • 77 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE

Welcome to Agry Town, a corrupt border outpost presided over by a pair of rival brothers whose bottomless greed corrupts everything in their orbit. Into this moral cesspool rides drifter Tom Buchanan (Randolph Scott), who soon finds himself railroaded for murder and, alongside a vengeful young Mexican vaquero, forced to take a stand for justice. The noir-tinged narrative—replete with twists, double crosses, and the kind of richly drawn villains who are hallmarks of the Ranown westerns—moves with entertaining economy toward a memorably ironic climax.

1958 • 79 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

RIDE LONESOME

Mysterious motivations drive taciturn bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) to capture a wanted murderer—but his quest is complicated when he is accosted by a pair of outlaws who have their own inscrutable reasons for riding along. Masterfully scripted by Burt Kennedy, who weaves a complex web of ambiguous loyalties and motives, and featuring supporting turns by genre icons James Coburn (in his film debut) and Lee Van Cleef, the first of the Ranown westerns to be shot in CinemaScope makes striking use of the enlarged frame—with a final shot that stands as perhaps the single most unforgettable image in the series.

1959 • 73 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio 

COMANCHE STATION

The last collaboration between Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott brings the Ranown westerns full circle, reexamining many of the films’ key themes and tropes: greed, loyalty, hidden motivations, and the fine moral line that separates heroes from villains. Scott stars as the enigmatic Jefferson Cody, who rescues a woman kidnapped by Comanches for reasons that may have nothing to do with the bounty offered for her return. But before he can bring her to safety, he’ll have to contend with the dangers of the Comanche warpath and a trio of bounty hunters who have designs on the reward.

1960 • 73 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio 

SIX-DISC 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• Five feature films: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station.

• New 4K digital restorations by Sony Pictures Entertainment, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• Three 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and three Blu-rays with the films and special features

• Introductions to the films by filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Taylor Hackford 

• New introduction by film critic Farran Smith Nehme on actor Randolph Scott

• Three audio commentaries, featuring film scholar Jeanine Basinger on The Tall T, film critic Jeremy Arnold on Ride Lonesome, and Hackford on Comanche Station

• Archival programs featuring interviews with director Budd Boetticher

• Audio conversation with Boetticher and film scholar Jim Kitses

• Super 8 home-movie version of Comanche Station

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tom Gunning

And finally on July 25 is Carl Franklin's One False Move on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray as well as Blu-ray.

A small-town police chief (Bill Paxton) concealing an explosive secret. A pair of ruthless drug dealers (coscreenwriter Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach) who leave a bloody trail in their wake as they make their way from Los Angeles to Arkansas. And an enigmatic woman (Cynda Williams) caught in the middle. The way these desperate lives converge becomes a masterclass in slow-burn tension thanks to the nuanced direction of Carl Franklin, whose haunting debut feature travels a crooked road across America’s most fraught divisions—urban and rural, Black and white—while imbuing noir conventions with a wrenching emotional depth.

1992 • 105 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

One False Move - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray - The Criterion Collection
 

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

Preorders should be available in the next week or so.

Coming this summer are The Rules of the Game and Time Bandits on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, as well as The Servant, Medicine for Melancholy, and Pasolini 101 on Blu-ray.

Coming in June: Medicine for Melancholy, the sublime San Francisco–set feature debut of love and connection by Barry Jenkins, rubs shoulders with The Servant, Joseph Losey's savagely witty British class-war classic, while two favorites—The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir's merciless critique of French society, and Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam's fantastic odyssey to the limits of the imagination—arrive on 4K UHD. Plus, our recently announced nine-film box set Pasolini 101!

First up on June 6 is a 4K UHD upgrade of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game coming June 6th

The Rules of the Game - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’s country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the audience at its 1939 premiere, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here.

1939 • 106 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

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

• Introduction to the film by director Jean Renoir

• Audio commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich

• Comparison of the film’s two endings

• Selected-scene analysis by Renoir historian Chris Faulkner

• Excerpts from a 1966 French television program by filmmaker Jacques Rivette

• Part one of Jean Renoir, a two-part 1993 documentary by film critic David Thompson

• Video essay about the film’s production, release, and 1959 reconstruction

• Interview with film critic Olivier Curchod

• Interview from a 1965 episode of the French television series Les écrans de la ville with Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand

• Interviews with set designer Max Douy; Renoir’s son, Alain; and actor Mila Parély

• PLUS: An essay by Sesonske; writings by Jean Renoir, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bertrand Tavernier, and François Truffaut; and tributes to the film by J. Hoberman, Kent Jones, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, and others

Following that is a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray edition of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits on June 13.

Time Bandits - The Criterion Collection
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time travelers. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), they plunder treasure from Napoleon (Ian Holm) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery)—but the Evil Genius (David Warner) is watching their every move. Featuring a darkly playful script by Gilliam and his Monty Python cohort Michael Palin (who also appears in the film), Time Bandits is at once a giddy fairy tale, a revisionist history lesson, and a satire of technology gone awry.

1981 • 116 minutes • Color • Stereo • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

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

• New 4K restoration, supervised by director Terry Gilliam, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack

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

• Audio commentary featuring Gilliam, cowriter-actor Michael Palin, and actors John Cleese, David Warner, and Craig Warnock

• Program on the creation of the film’s various historical periods and fantasy worlds, narrated by film writer David Morgan and featuring production designer Milly Burns and costume designer James Acheson

• Conversation between Gilliam and film scholar Peter von Bagh, recorded at the 1998 Midnight Sun Film Festival

• Appearance by actor Shelley Duvall on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show from 1981

• Gallery of rare photographs from the set

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt

On June 20 is a Blu-ray release of Joseph Losey's The Servant.

The Servant - The Criterion Collection

The prolific, ever provocative Joseph Losey, blacklisted from Hollywood and living in England, delivered a coolly modernist shock to the system of that nation’s cinema with this mesmerizing dissection of class, sexuality, and power. A dissolute scion of the upper crust (James Fox) finds the seemingly perfect manservant (a diabolical Dirk Bogarde, during his transition from matinee idol to art-house icon) to oversee his new London town house. But not all is as it seems, as traditional social hierarchies are gradually, disturbingly destabilized. Lustrously disorienting cinematography and a masterful script by playwright Harold Pinter merge in The Servant, a tour de force of mounting psychosexual menace.

1963 • 115 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• New program on director Joseph Losey by film critic Imogen Sara Smith

• Rare interview from 1976 with Losey by critic Michel Ciment

• Interview from 1996 with screenwriter Harold Pinter

• Interviews with actors Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles, and Wendy Craig

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by author Colm Tóibín

Also on June 20 comes Medicine for Melancholy from filmmaker Barry Jenkins on Blu-ray.

Medicine for Melancholy - The Criterion Collection

One of the great debut features of the twenty-first century, Barry Jenkins’s captivating, lo-fi romance Medicine for Melancholy unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, where a one-night stand between two young bohemians, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), spins off into a woozy daylong affair marked by moments of tenderness, friction, joy, and intellectual sparring as they explore their relationships to each other, the city, and their own Blackness. Shooting on desaturated video, Jenkins crafts an intimate exploration of alienation and connection graced with the evocative visual palette and empathetic emotional charge that has come to define his work.

2008 • 88 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.78:1 aspect ratio

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New high-definition digital master, approved by director Barry Jenkins and director of photography James Laxton, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• New audio commentary featuring Jenkins

• Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Jenkins, producers Justin Barber and Cherie Saulter, and editor Nat Sanders

• New program about the making of the film, featuring Sanders and actor Wyatt Cenac

• Camera test footage and blooper reel

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Danielle Amir Jackson

And finally at the end of the month on June 27 arrives the Blu-ray boxed set, Pasolini 101, in celebration of the 101th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's birth.  

Pasolini 101 - The Criterion Collection

We've already covered Pasolini 101 in this article and as always, we will update with preorder links as soon as they are available.

.

Nine films from controversial Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini will be available in a Blu-ray boxed set from the Criterion Collection on June 27.

One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.

Pasolini 101 - Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Featuring

Accatone, 1961

Mamma Roma, 1962

Love Meetings, 1964

The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964

The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966

Oedipus Rex, 1967

Teorema, 1968*

Porcile, 1969

Madea, 1969

*All discs are new to Blu-Ray with the exception of this title

NINE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of seven films and 2K digital restorations of Teorema and Medea, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks 
• Two shorts made by director Pier Paolo Pasolini for anthology films: La ricotta (1963) and The Sequence of the Paper Flower (1969) 
• Two documentaries made by Pasolini during his travels
• New program on Pasolini’s visual style as told through his personal writing, narrated by actor Tilda Swinton and writer Rachel Kushner
• Audio commentaries on Accattone and Teorema
• Documentaries on Pasolini’s life and career featuring archival interviews with the director and his close collaborators
• Episode from 1966 of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps
• Interviews with filmmakers and scholars
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including a 100-page book featuring an essay and notes on the films by critic James Quandt, and writings and drawings by Pasolini

ACCATTONE

Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.

1961 • 117 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

MAMMA ROMA

Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Highlighting director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed, Mamma Roma offers an unflinching, neorealistic look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy. Though initially banned in the country for obscenity, today the film remains a classic, featuring a powerhouse performance by one of cinema’s greatest actors and offering a glimpse at Pasolini in the process of finding his style.

1962 • 106 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

LOVE MEETINGS

Let’s talk about sex. In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday citizens’ thoughts on a host of hot-button subjects, including sex work, gender equality, homosexuality, and divorce (then illegal in Italy). What emerges is both a kaleidoscopic cross section of faces and places—from the industrialized cities of the North to the rural villages of the South—and an incisive portrait of a society where, despite the rapid modernization brought on by the postwar “economic miracle,” hypocrisy, repression, and conformism still hold sway.

1964 • 92 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW

A biblical epic that only the Marxist dissident Pier Paolo Pasolini could make, this intensely faithful adaptation of Saint Matthew’s Gospel depicts the life and teachings of Jesus Christ (Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish economics student and Communist activist), whose unwavering compassion for the poor and defiant condemnation of moral hypocrisy make him a perhaps unexpected embodiment of the director’s own worldview. Stunningly shot amid the timeless landscapes of southern Italy and set to a soundtrack that encompasses everything from Bach to Black spirituals, The Gospel According to Matthew cuts past dogma and straight to the core of Jesus’s radical humanism.

1964 • 137 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS

While wandering the countryside, a pair of father-and-son vagabonds (played respectively by Italian cinema legend Totò, in his final major film role, and Ninetto Davoli) happen upon a talking crow who spouts philosophy and launches them on a freewheeling picaresque through time, space, and the margins of a rapidly modernizing Italy. A comic Marxist fable that balances heady ideas about religion, poverty, and class struggle with irreverent slapstick sight gags, The Hawks and the Sparrows finds Pasolini at his lightest yet as stingingly subversive as ever.

1966 • 89 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

OEDIPUS REX

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s tragedy blends eras and cultures to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves. Shot amid the stark, elemental landscapes of the Moroccan desert, and set in an indefinable ancient past, this bold reimagining casts the filmmaker’s frequent collaborator Franco Citti as the eponymous foundling, whose willful blindness to his own nature unleashes a cataclysmic reckoning. With a prologue and epilogue set in twentieth-century Italy, Pasolini connects the story to his own upbringing, daring to bare his soul on-screen.

1967 • 104 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

TEOREMA

With Teorema, a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.

1968 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

PORCILE

“I killed my father. I ate human flesh. I quiver with joy.” Provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini is at his most incendiary in this double-edged allegory on fascism, consumerism, and resistance. In one story, a defiant man (Pierre Clémenti) perpetrates increasingly barbaric acts while wandering a mythic, volcanic landscape. In the other, the scion (Jean-Pierre Léaud) of a wealthy, ex-Nazi industrial family conceals a shocking proclivity. Taken together, these stories of transgression form a scathing commentary on postwar European moral rot and the meaning of rebellion in the face of a corrupt world.

1969 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

MEDEA

In this hypnotic adaptation of Euripides’s immortal tragedy, Pier Paolo Pasolini casts opera diva Maria Callas (utterly arresting in her only film role) as the sorceress of Greek legend, whose separation from her homeland of Colchis and betrayal by her lover, Jason, lead her down a path of shocking vengeance. Melding Western myth with aesthetic and musical influences from numerous world cultures, Pasolini fashions a mesmerizing cinematic pageant that gathers in force until it explodes in rage and a stunningly nihilistic condemnation of injustice.

1969 • 110 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1:85:1 aspect ratio

SRP for this Special Edition Collector's Set is $249.95.

Preorders should be available in the coming days

    Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise hits the Criterion road in May with a Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release. The month's slate also includes Targets as well as Petite Mama on Blu-ray and 4K releases of both Wings of Desire and Branded to Kill.

Once again The Criterion Collection expands its content with a mix of old and new titles seeing some extra TLC on physical media. With Wings of Desire already getting an excellent EU 4K release it was only a matter of time before Criterion would update theirs, but there are some other pleasant surprises for their May slate. Lets take a look at what's getting added to our shelves:

Up first on May 2 is Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Wings of Desire - The Criterion Collection
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Wings of Desire is one of cinema’s loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, forever made the name of director Wim Wenders' synonymous with film art.

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

• 4K restoration, supervised and approved by director Wim Wenders, with 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
• Audio commentary featuring Wenders and actor Peter Falk
• The Angels Among Us (2003), a documentary featuring interviews with Wenders, Falk, actors Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander, writer Peter Handke, and composer Jürgen Knieper
• Episode of Cinéma cinémas from 1987, featuring on-set footage
• Interview with director of photography Henri Alekan
• Deleted scenes and outtakes
• Excerpts from the film Alekan la lumière (1985) and from Ganz and Sander’s 1982 film about actor Curt Bois
• Notes and photos by art directors Heidi and Toni Lüdi
• Trailers
• PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Atkinson and writings by Handke and Wenders
• Cover by Michael Boland

Seijun Suzuki's 1967 New Wave Branded to Kill will also be available on 4K UHD on May 9

Branded to Kill - The Criterion Collection
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme—the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.

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
• Interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
• Interview with Suzuki from 1997
• Interview with actor Joe Shishido
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns
• Cover by Eric Skillman

Peter Bogdanovich's Targets starring the legendary Boris Karloff arrives on Blu-ray on May 16 

Targets - The Criterion Collection

Old Hollywood collides with New Hollywood, and screen horror with real-life horror, in the startling debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Produced by Roger Corman, this chillingly prescient vision of American-made carnage casts Boris Karloff as a version of himself: an aging horror-movie icon whose fate intersects with that of a seemingly ordinary young man (Tim O’Kelly) on a psychotic shooting spree around Los Angeles. Charged with provocative ideas about the relationship between mass media and mass violence, Targets is a model of maximally effective filmmaking on a minimal budget and a potent first statement from one of the defining voices of the American New Wave.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Peter Bogdanovich, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary from 2003 featuring Bogdanovich
• New interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater
• Introduction to the film from 2003 by Bogdanovich
• Excerpts from a 1983 interview with production designer Polly Platt
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Adam Nayman and excerpts from an interview with Bogdanovich from Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin’s 1969 book The Director’s Event: Interviews with Five American Film-Maker
• New cover by Drusilla Adeline/Sister Hyde

Céline Sciamma’s 2021 film Petite Maman is due on Blu-ray on May 23 

Petite Maman - The Criterion Collection

Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire transcends time and space to weave a delicately emotional fable about grief, family, and connection across generations. In the wake of her grandmother’s death, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her distraught mother (Nina Meurisse) to her childhood home. There, Nelly’s encounter with another young girl (Gabrielle Sanz) brings mother and daughter together in a way neither could have ever imagined. Evoking childhood’s perpetual state of wonder through luminous, richly textured images, Petite maman takes viewers on a journey inward for a quietly miraculous tale of emotional time travel.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• New conversation between director Céline Sciamma and filmmaker Joachim Trier
• Trailers
• PLUS: An essay by author So Mayer
• New cover by Carson Ellis

 Lastly on May 29 is Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.

Thelma & Louise - The Criterion Collection
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Two women, a turquoise Thunderbird, the ride of a lifetime. With this pop-culture landmark, screenwriter Callie Khouri and action auteur Ridley Scott rewrote the rules of the road movie, telling the story of two best friends who find themselves transformed into accidental fugitives during a weekend getaway gone wrong—leading them on a high-speed Southwest odyssey as they elude police and discover freedom on their own terms. Propelled by irresistible performances from Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis (plus Brad Pitt in a sexy, star-making turn)—and nominated for six Academy Awards, winning one for Khouri—the exhilaratingly cathartic Thelma & Louise stands as cinema’s ultimate ode to ride-or-die female friendship.

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

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Ridley Scott, with 5.1 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
• Two audio commentaries, featuring Scott, screenwriter Callie Khouri, and actors Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon
• New interviews with Scott and Khouri
• Documentary featuring Davis, Khouri, Sarandon, Scott, actors Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, and Stephen Tobolowsky, and other members of the cast and crew
• Boy and Bicycle (1965), Scott’s first short film
• Original theatrical featurette
• Storyboards and deleted and extended scenes, including an extended ending with director’s commentary
• Music video for Glenn Frey’s “Part of Me, Part of You,” from the film’s soundtrack
• Trailers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by critics Jessica Kiang and Rachel Syme and journalist Rebecca Traister
• New cover by Sam Hadley

Preorders for Criterion's May releases should be available soon!

It's not an April Fool's joke - Criterion's April releases include three 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray of titles. The titles include: The Fisher King (4K UHD Blu-ray), The Seventh Seal (4K UHD), Small Axe - Five Films by Steve McQueen (Blu-ray), and Triangle of Sadness (both 4K UHD and Blu-ray).

Up first on April 11 comes Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. 

The Fisher King - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

A fairy tale grounded in poignant reality, Terry Gilliam’s magnificent, Manhattan-set The Fisher King features Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams in two of their most brilliant roles. Bridges plays a former radio shock jock reconstructing his life after a scandal, and Williams a homeless man on a quest for the Holy Grail—which he believes to be hidden somewhere on the Upper East Side. Unknowingly linked by their pasts, the two men aid each other on a fanciful journey toward their own humanity. This singular American odyssey features a witty script by Richard LaGravenese, evocative cinematography by Roger Pratt, and superb supporting performances by Amanda Plummer and an Oscar-winning Mercedes Ruehl, all harnessed by Gilliam into a compassionate, funny modern-day myth.

 1991 • 138 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

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

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Terry Gilliam, 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 Gilliam

• Interviews with Gilliam, producer Lynda Obst, screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and actors Jeff Bridges, Amanda Plummer, and Mercedes Ruehl

• Interviews with artists Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds on the creation of the film’s Red Knight

• Interview from 2006 with actor Robin Williams

• Video essay featuring Bridges’s on-set photographs

• Footage from 1991 of Bridges training as a radio personality with acting coach Stephen W. Bridgewater

• Deleted scenes, with audio commentary by Gilliam

• Costume tests

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri

 Next on April 18, Ingmar Bergman's classic tale The Seventh Seal starring Max von Sydow gets a 4K upgrade as well. 

The Seventh Seal - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Ingmar Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

 1957 • 97 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Swedish with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 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 from 2003 by director Ingmar Bergman

• Audio commentary and video afterword by Bergman expert Peter Cowie

• Bergman Island (2006), a feature-length documentary on Bergman by Marie Nyreröd

• Audio interview from 1998 with actor Max von Sydow

• Tribute to Bergman from 1989 by filmmaker Woody Allen

• Bergman 101, a selected video filmography tracing Bergman’s career, narrated by Cowie 

• Trailer

• Optional English-dubbed soundtrack

• PLUS: An essay by critic Gary Giddins

 Arriving on April 25 comes Small Axe - a collection of five films by Steve McQueen only on Blu-ray. 

Small Axe - Five Films by Steve McQueen 

With the five films that make up his Small Axe anthology, director Steve McQueen offers a richly evocative panorama of West Indian life in London from the 1960s through the ’80s—a time defined for the community by the terror of police violence, the empowering awakening of political consciousness, and the ecstatic escape of a vibrant reggae scene. Ranging in tone from the tenderly impressionistic to the devastatingly clear-eyed, these powerfully performed portraits of Black resistance, joy, creativity, and collective action—all sumptuously shot by Shabier Kirchner—form a revolutionary counterhistory of mid-twentieth-century Britain at a transformational moment.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New high-definition masters of all five films, approved by director Steve McQueen, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks

• New conversation between McQueen and writer and professor Paul Gilroy

• Behind-the-scenes featurettes including interviews with McQueen, executive producer Tracey Scoffield, writing consultant Alex Wheatle, and members of the Small Axe cast

• Uprising (2021), a three-part documentary codirected by McQueen and James Rogan about the tragic 1981 New Cross house fire

• Audio conversation among McQueen, music producer Dennis Bovell, and Beastie Boys member Mike D

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Ashley Clark

 MANGROVE

 Steve McQueen’s multistrand anthology of West Indian immigrant life in London opens in the late 1960s with this stirring ensemble film. In a Caribbean restaurant, a group of Black activists, intellectuals, and ordinary people converge and unite in struggle against incessant police harassment, leading to an explosive showdown on the streets and a courtroom drama that challenges the racist power structures of British society. Based on real events, this is a passionate vision of community as a form of resistance, performed by a dynamic cast (led by Shaun Parkes, Letitia Wright, and Malachi Kirby) and bolstered by McQueen’s eye for vivid sensory detail.

2020 • 133 minutes • Color/B&W • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

LOVERS ROCK 

Suffused with the intoxicating sounds of reggae, dub, and lovers rock, the second installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series unfolds over the course of one rapturous night into dawn in early-1980s West London, as a young woman (the luminous Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) sneaks out to attend a house party. As the alternately languorous and ecstatic rhythms pulse from a homemade sound system, romance sparks on the dance floor, small human dramas play out, and, for a moment, this gathering is a safe haven from the outside world. Aided by the sensuous cinematography of Shabier Kirchner, McQueen captures an exhilarating expression of Black joy in a society often intent on stifling it.

2020 • 73 minutes • Color/B&W • 5.1 surround • 1.78:1 aspect ratio

RED, WHITE AND BLUE

Both a hard-hitting indictment of structural injustice and a penetrating portrait of a complex man, Red, White and Blueboasts a passionate, multilayered performance from John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a Black research scientist whose decision to join the notoriously racist London police force, in hopes of reforming it from the inside, brings him into conflict with his family, community, and very sense of self. Based on a true story, this nuanced exploration of Margaret Thatcher–era racial tensions powerfully portrays the psychic struggle of a lone man going up against a system designed to crush him.

2020 • 84 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

ALEX WHEATLE

An intimate account of a decisive moment in British history unfolds via the true story of one man’s awakening Black consciousness. Raised in cold, oppressive children’s homes that have left him estranged from his West Indian roots, the eponymous orphan Alex Wheatle (Sheyi Cole) gradually finds his voice as an artist, activist, and writer on the streets of Brixton—a transformation that intersects with the 1981 uprising in which the neighborhood’s mainly Black youth erupt in protest against police violence. Interwoven with the vibrant reggae that inspired its subject’s journey, Alex Wheatlecrackles with the heady political and cultural energy of a singular time and place.

2020 • 69 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.00:1 aspect ratio

EDUCATION

A Black boy’s journey through an ineffectual public school system reveals the racial inequities built into everyday British life. Young Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy) is a spirited aspiring astronaut with a love of drawing whose life is turned upside down when he is thrust into a new school for the “educationally subnormal”—a harrowing experience that gradually awakens his mother (Sharlene Whyte) to the institutional mistreatment of the children of West Indian immigrants. Shot on Super 16 mm to evoke BBC television dramas from the 1970s, the final Small Axe film concludes the pentalogy with a hopeful vision of the power of Black-led collective action.

2020 • 66 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

 And finally, also due on April 25 comes Ruben Östlund's Palme d’Or–winner Triangle of Sadness on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. 

Triangle of Sadness - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 

Master of social discomfort Ruben Östlund trains his unsparing lens on the world of wealth, beauty, and privilege in this audacious, Palme d’Or–winning satire of our status-obsessed culture. A model-influencer couple (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) get a ticket to the luxe life when they’re invited aboard an all-expenses-paid cruise alongside a coterie of the rich and ghoulish—but an act of fate turns their Insta-perfect world upside down. Pushing each provocative set piece to its outré extreme, Östlund maps the shifting social hierarchies with the irreverence of a modern-day Luis Buñuel and the incisiveness of a cinematic anthropologist.

2022 • 147 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital master, approved by director Ruben Östlund, 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 interview with Östlund and filmmaker and actor Johan Jonason

• Two new programs: one about the film’s special effects and one about a challenging day on set 

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing 

As usual with The Criterion Collection, preorders should be available within the next few days - Happy Collecting!

Joining the upgrade of Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce to 4K Ultra HD is John Woo's Last Hurrah for Chivalry, David Lynch's Inland Empire, and Joan Micklin Silver's Chilly Scenes of Winter on Blu-ray. 

First out of the gate is the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray starring Joan Crawford on March 7th.

Mildred Pierce - The Criterion Collection 

Melodrama casts noirish shadows in this portrait of maternal sacrifice from Hollywood master Michael Curtiz. Joan Crawford’s iconic performance as Mildred, a single mother hell-bent on freeing her children from the stigma of economic hardship, solidified Crawford’s career comeback and gave the actor her only Oscar. But as Mildred pulls herself up by her bootstraps, first as an unflappable waitress and eventually as the well-heeled owner of a successful restaurant chain, the ingratitude of her materialistic firstborn (a diabolical Ann Blyth) becomes a venomous serpent’s tooth, setting in motion an endless cycle of desperate overtures and heartless recriminations. Recasting James M. Cain’s rich psychological novel as a murder mystery, this bitter cocktail of blind parental love and all-American ambition is both unremittingly hard-boiled and sumptuously emotional.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

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

• Conversation with critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito

• Excerpt from a 1970 episode of The David Frost Show featuring actor Joan Crawford

• Joan Craw­ford: The Ultimate Movie Star, a 2002 feature-length documentary

• Q&A with actor Ann Blyth from 2006, presented by filmmaker Marc Huestis and conducted by film historian Eddie Muller

• Segment from a 1969 episode of the Today show featuring Mildred Pierce novelist James M. Cain

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith

1945 • 111 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Next on March 14th comes John Woo's Last Hurrah For Chivalry on Blu-ray. 

Last Hurrah for Chivalry - The Criterion Collection 

Before he became known as the master of the bullet-riddled heroic tragedy, John Woo sharpened his trademark themes and kinetic action choreography with this whirlwind wuxia spectacle. Unaware they are caught in a deadly game of deception, a pair of rambunctious swordsmen (Wai Pak and Damian Lau) join forces to help a nobleman (Lau Kong) in his quest for vengeance. Paying thrilling homage to his mentor, martial-arts innovator Chang Cheh, Woo delivers both bravura swordplay set pieces and a bloodstained interrogation of the meaning of brotherhood and honor in a world in which loyalty is bought and sold.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed monaural soundtracks

• Alternate English-dubbed tracks

• Audio interview with director John Woo

• New interview with Grady Hendrix, author of These Fists Break Bricks

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

1979 • 106 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

 Fans of David Lynch will be pleased that Inland Empire will be joining the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray on March 21st.  

Inland Empire - The Criterion Collection

“Strange, what love does.” The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble . . . David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless series of unfathomably interconnected rabbit holes as it takes viewers on a hallucinatory odyssey into the deepest realms of the unconscious mind.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New HD digital master, made from the 4K restoration supervised by director David Lynch, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed stereo soundtracks, newly remastered by Lynch and original rerecording mixers Dean Hurley and Ron Eng

• Two films from 2007, LYNCH (one) and LYNCH2, by blackANDwhite, the makers of David Lynch: The Art Life

• New conversation between actors Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan

• More Things That Happened, seventy-five minutes of extra scenes

• Ballerina, a 2007 short film by Lynch

• Reading by Lynch of excerpts from Room to Dream, his 2018 book with critic Kristine McKenna

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: Excerpts from Richard A. Barney’s book David Lynch: Interviews

2006 • 180 minutes • Color/Black & White • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

 And finally, on March 28th we have Joan Micklin Silver's Chilly Scenes of Winter starring John Heard and Mary Beth Hurt on Blu-ray. 

Chilly Scenes of Winter - The Criterion Collection

The trailblazing Joan Micklin Silver—one of only five women to direct a film for a Hollywood studio in the 1970s—digs fearlessly into the psychology of a thorny relationship in this anti–romantic comedy, based on Ann Beattie’s best-selling novel, about lovelorn civil servant Charles (John Heard) and his married-but-separated coworker Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). Months after their affair has ended, Charles is haunted by memories as he desperately attempts to rekindle a love that perhaps never was. Switching deftly between past and present, Micklin Silver guides this piercing deconstruction of male wish-fulfillment fantasy beyond standard movie-romance tropes into something more complicated and cuttingly truthful.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• New program featuring producers Griffin Dunne, Mark Metcalf, and Amy Robinson

• Documentary from 1983 by Katja Raganelli about director Joan Micklin Silver

• Excerpts of a 2005 interview with Micklin Silver

• Original ending of the film, cut by Micklin Silver for its rerelease in 1982

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by scholar Shonni Enelow

1979 • 95 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

Pre-order info has yet to be published but as always we'll be sure to update as soon as they become available. 

Criterion isn't taking any time off in 2023 with five releases oncluding Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused and Krzysztof Kielowski's Three Colors trilogy on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Two Films By Marguerit wth Duras, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1967) and Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle. 

Starting things off on February 7, is a trio of films in Kieślowski's Three Colors  on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.

This boldly cinematic trio of stories about love and loss, from Krzysztof Kieślowski, was a defining event of the art-house boom of the 1990s. The films are named for the colors of the French flag and stand for the tenets of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—but that hardly begins to explain their enigmatic beauty and rich humanity. Set in Paris, Warsaw, and Geneva, and ranging from tragedy to comedy, Blue, White, and Red (Kieślowski’s final film) examine with artistic clarity a group of ambiguously interconnected people experiencing profound personal disruptions. Marked by intoxicating cinematography and stirring performances by Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Irène Jacob, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, Kieślowski’s Three Colors is a benchmark of contemporary cinema.

BLUE
In the devastating first film of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Juliette Binoche gives a tour de force performance as Julie, a woman reeling from the tragic death of her husband and young daughter. But Blue is more than just a blistering study of grief; it’s also a tale of liberation, as Julie attempts to free herself from the past while confronting truths about the life of her late husband, a composer. Shot in sapphire tones by Sławomir Idziak, and set to an extraordinary operatic score by Zbigniew Preisner, Blue is an overwhelming sensory experience.

1993 • 98 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

WHITE

The most playful and also the grittiest of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors films follows the adventures of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant living in France. The hapless hairdresser opts to leave Paris for his native Warsaw when his wife (Julie Delpy) sues him for divorce (her reason: their marriage was never consummated) and then frames him for arson after setting her own salon ablaze. White, which goes on to chronicle Karol’s elaborate revenge plot, manages to be both a ticklish dark comedy about the economic inequalities of Eastern and Western Europe and a sublime reverie on twisted love.

1994 • 91 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French and Polish with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

RED

Krzysztof Kieślowski closes his Three Colors trilogy in grand fashion, with an incandescent meditation on fate and chance, starring Irène Jacob as a sweet-souled yet somber runway model in Geneva whose life dramatically intersects with that of a bitter retired judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Meanwhile, just down the street, a seemingly unrelated story of jealousy and betrayal unfolds. Red is an intimate look at forged connections and a splendid final statement from a remarkable filmmaker at the height of his powers.

1994 • 99 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
• One 4K UHD disc of each film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray of each film with special features
• Three cinema lessons with director Krzysztof Kieślowski
• Interviews with cowriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, composer Zbigniew Preisner, and actors Julie Delpy, Irène Jacob, and Zbigniew Zamachowski
• Selected-scene commentary featuring actor Juliette Binoche
• Video essays by film critics Annette Insdorf, Tony Rayns, and Dennis Lim
• Documentary from 1995 featuring Kieślowski
• Three short films by Kieślowski—The Tram (1966), Seven Women of Different Ages (1978), and Talking Heads (1980)—plus the short film The Face (1966), starring Kieślowski
• Interview programs on Kieślowski’s life and work, featuring Binoche, Insdorf, Jacob, film critic Geoff Andrew, filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, cinematographer Sławomir Idziak, producer Marin Karmitz, and editor Jacques Witta
• Behind-the-scenes programs for White and Red, and a short documentary on Red’s world premiere
• Trailers
• PLUS: Essays by film critics Colin MacCabe, Nick James, Stuart Klawans, and Georgina Evans; an excerpt from Kieślowski on Kieślowski; and reprinted interviews with cinematographers Idziak, Edward Kłosiński, and Piotr Sobociński 

Next hitting stores on the 14th is the 1968 adaptation of  Romeo and Juliet  from Franco Zeffirelli.

One of the great Shakespeare adaptations, this sublime take on the Bard’s immortal romantic tragedy by Franco Zeffirelli breathed new life into the oft-told tale by casting actual teenagers in the title roles. As the young lovers whose affair threatens to inflame the tensions between their feuding families in Renaissance Verona, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting vividly capture the mix of adolescent ardor and turmoil that fuels their destiny-driven liaison. A sensory banquet thanks to Nino Rota’s delicate score and the exquisite, Oscar-winning costumes and cinematography, Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare at its most deeply felt and passionately alive.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Excerpt from the 2018 documentary Franco Zeffirelli: Directing from Life
• Interviews with actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting from 1967 and 2016
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by scholar Ramona Wray

1968 • 138 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A week later on the 21st comes  Dazed and Confused  on the 4K UHD Blu-ray format.

America, 1976. The last day of school. Bongs blaze, bell bottoms ring, and rock and roll rocks. Among the best teen films ever made, Dazed and Confused eavesdrops on a group of seniors-to-be and incoming freshmen. A launching pad for a number of future stars, the first studio effort by Richard Linklater also features endlessly quotable dialogue and a blasting, stadium-ready soundtrack. Sidestepping nostalgia, Dazed and Confused is less about “the best years of our lives” than the boredom, angst, and excitement of teenagers waiting . . . for something to happen.

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

• New 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, supervised and approved by director Richard Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniel, 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 of the film with special features
• Audio commentary by Linklater
• Making “Dazed,” a documentary by Kahane Cooperman
• Rare on-set interviews and behind-the-scenes footage
• Footage from the ten-year-anniversary celebration
• Audition footage and deleted scenes
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by critics Kent Jones, Jim DeRogatis, and Chuck Klosterman; reprinted recollections of the filming from cast and crew; and character profiles from the Dazed and Confused companion book; as well as the original film poster by Frank Kozik

1993 • 102 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

 Two Films By Marguerite Duras  will be available on Blu-ray on the 24th.

Marguerite Duras had already established herself as one of the major figures of postwar French literature when she launched an equally fascinating and unclassifiable career in cinema, translating her elliptical, experimental style to the screen through an unprecedented fusion of hypnotic, highly stylized imagery and radically disjunctive sound. Boldly reimagining the possibilities of dialogue, music, silence, and architectural space, the tantalizing, sphinxlike evocations of soul-deep female malaise India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter embody Duras’s singular multisensory approach, with each opening up new spaces for the expression of women’s interior worlds.

INDIA SONG
Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, with India Song Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other.

1975 • 119 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

BAXTER, VERA BAXTER
Marguerite Duras reunited with India Song collaborators Delphine Seyrig and composer Carlos d’Alessio for Baxter, Vera Baxter, a hypnotically unsettling journey into one woman’s existential emptiness. Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger (Seyrig) to whom she recounts a shocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise. Setting her languid images to d’Alessio’s incongruously breezy, endlessly looping score, Duras fashions a quietly shattering portrait of marriage as a kind of prison.

1977 • 95 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
• Marguerite as She Was, a 2003 portrait of director Marguerite Duras
• Interview from 1977 with Duras
• Excerpt from a 1977 documentary on actor Delphine Seyrig
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ivone Margulies

Finally and also on the 28th is the satire  Hollywood Shuffle  on Blu-ray.

This debut feature by Robert Townsend is an ingenious guerrilla satire that takes riotous aim at the typecasting of Black actors in 1980s Hollywood. The writer-director-star’s megawatt charisma propels Hollywood Shuffle, the hilarious tale of a struggling actor attempting to break into an industry where the only roles available to Black performers seem to be hustlers, butlers, slaves, and “Eddie Murphy types”—forcing him to choose between selling out and maintaining his self-respect. Lampooning everything from film noir to zombie flicks to Siskel and Ebert, Townsend and cowriter Keenen Ivory Wayans cannily turn the frustrations of the Black artist into a subversively funny pop-culture critique.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by writer-director-actor Robert Townsend, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• New audio commentary featuring Townsend 
• New interviews with actors Rusty Cundieff, Anne-Marie Johnson, and Bobby McGee
• Radio program featuring Townsend in conversation with film critic Elvis Mitchell
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Aisha Harris

1987 • 81 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

We will update links on the site as soon as pre-orders become available or if there are any release date changes.

Besides Gilliam's comedy classic, this assortment of films include Bergman Island, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, Imitation of Life, and Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy. 

Leading the charge on January 3 is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen  on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and Blu-ray.

The boundless imagination of Terry Gilliam yields a dazzling fantasy of epic proportions. Inspired by the extravagant exploits of the fabled Baron Munchausen, this spectacle—born of a famously turbulent production—follows the whimsical eighteenth-century nobleman (John Neville) as he embarks on an outlandish quest that takes him from faraway lands to the moon to the belly of a sea monster and beyond, meanwhile waging battle against a vengeful sultan and the tyranny of logic. Packed frame to frame with special effects, mischievous wit, and colorful performances—including a young Sarah Polley as the Baron’s no-nonsense sidekick—the Oscar-nominated The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a lavish celebration of the triumph of make-believe over reality.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by writer-director Terry Gilliam, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• For 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 featuring Gilliam and his coscreenwriter, Charles McKeown
• Documentary on the making of the film
• New video essay by critic and filmmaker David Cairns about the history of the Baron Munchausen character
• Behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s special effects, narrated by Gilliam
• Deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam
• Storyboards for unfilmed scenes, narrated by Gilliam and McKeown
• Original marketing materials including a trailer and electronic-press-kit featurettes, as well as preview cards and advertising proposals read by Gilliam
• Miracle of Flight (1974), an animated short film by Gilliam
• Episode of The South Bank Show from 1991 on Gilliam
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic and author Michael Koresky

1988 • 126 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

On the 10th comes the 1934 melodrama  Imitation of Life  from Director John M. Stahl.

Melodrama master John M. Stahl brings his exquisite restraint and almost spiritually pure visual style to this devastating, enduringly relevant story of mothers and daughters. Imitation of Life explores the friendship between two struggling single mothers: one (Claudette Colbert) a working-class white woman who ascends to the top of the business world, the other (Louise Beavers) her Black housekeeper, whose life is shattered by the rejection of her rebellious, white-passing daughter (Fredi Washington). It is this latter relationship—attuned to America’s bitter racial realities and heartbreakingly enacted by trailblazing Black performers Beavers and Washington—that lends the film its transcendent emotional power. This first adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s best-selling novel boldly confronts the complexities and contradictions of racial identity, economic exploitation, and the limits of the American dream.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 

• 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with Miriam J. Petty, author of Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood, about the resonance of Louise Beavers’s and Fredi Washington’s performances
• New interview with Imogen Sara Smith, contributor to The Call of the Heart: John M. Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama, about director John M. Stahl and his work with actor Claudette Colbert and others
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by Petty

1934 • 110 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

A three-film set arrives on the 17th -  Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy .

With his dazzling first three features, Lars von Trier sought nothing less than to map the soul of Europe—its troubled past, anxious present, and uncertain future. Linked by a fascination with hypnotic states and the mesmeric possibilities of cinema, the films that make up the Europe Trilogy—The Element of Crime, Epidemic, and Europa—filter the continent’s turbulent history, guilt, and traumas through the Danish provocateur’s audacious deconstructions of genres including film noir, melodrama, horror, and science fiction. Above all, they are bravura showcases for von Trier’s hallucinatory visuals, with each shot a tour de force of technical invention and dark imagination.

THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 

• 4K digital restoration of Europa, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack, and 3K digital restorations of The Element of Crime and Epidemic, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• Audio commentaries featuring director Lars von Trier and others
• Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997), a documentary by Stig Björkman
• Interview from 2005 with von Trier about the Europe Trilogy 
• Making-of documentaries for all three films
• Programs on the films featuring interviews with many of von Trier’s collaborators
• Two short student films by von Trier: Nocturne (1980) and Images of Liberation (1982)
• Danish television interview with von Trier from 1994
• Trailers 
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Howard Hampton

THE ELEMENT OF CRIME

1984 • 103 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.89:1 aspect ratio

Lars von Trier’s stunning debut feature is a grungily expressionistic hallucination—a trancelike trawl through fractured memories, a murder mystery, and the psychic limbo of cultural displacement. From his exile in Cairo, a former police investigator (Michael Elphick) undergoes hypnosis in order to relive his memories of Europe and his last case, for which he went to dangerous lengths to enter into the mind of and catch a serial killer targeting children. Bathed in a sulfurous yellow glow pierced only by startling flashes of electric blue and red, The Element of Crime combines hard-boiled noir, dystopian science fiction, and dazzling operatic flourishes to yield a celluloid nightmare of terrifying beauty.

EPIDEMIC

1987 • 106 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • In English and Danish with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

A jet-black comedy of contagion, a subversive medical-horror freak-out, and a sly metacinematic prank, Lars von Trier’s sophomore feature—born from a bet that he couldn’t make a film for less than $150,000—finds the director channeling his singular thematic obsessions into an evocatively lo-fi, perversely self-reflexive provocation. The filmmaker himself stars as a harried screenwriter whose efforts to complete a script about the outbreak of a deadly disease coincide with a grisly real-life plague. A twisted reflection on Europe’s haunted past—from the Black Death to World War II—and its scarred present, Epidemic is von Trier at his most idiosyncratic and audaciously experimental.

EUROPA

1991 • 112 minutes • Color/Black & White • Stereo • In English and German with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

“You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa.” The ominous, hypnotic induction by Max von Sydow inaugurates the entrancing final installment of Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy. An idealistic American (Jean-Marc Barr) travels to postwar Germany to take a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways—and finds himself plunged into a murky, Kafkaesque world of intrigue and betrayal where the shadow of Nazism hovers menacingly over everything. With its ravishing cinematography (in black and white, color, and at times a stunning mix of both), dreamlike use of rear projections, and lush fusion of melodrama and noir conventions, Europa is a sublimely stylized cinematic fugue.  

 This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection  will be available on the 24th.

With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcendent elegy for what is lost in the name of progress. Grieving and alone following the deaths of her husband and children, elderly Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo, in a soul-shaking end-of-life performance) prepares for her own death and to be buried alongside her ancestors. When plans for a new dam near her village in the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho threaten to literally wash away all she holds dear, Mantoa takes a last stand, mobilizing her neighbors to fight for their land and their way of life. The experience of watching Mosese’s visionary, much-lauded This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is as timeless and elemental as the land itself.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 

• 2K digital master, approved by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New audio commentary featuring Mosese and producer Cait Pansegrouw
• Mosese’s short films Mosonngoa (2014) and Behemoth: Or the Game of God (2016), along with his 2019 essay film Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You., with a new introduction by Mosese
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by novelist and playwright Zakes Mda

2019 • 122 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Sesotho with English subtitles • 1.40:1 aspect ratio

And finally on the 31st arrives  Bergman Island  on Blu-ray.

Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve embarks on a luminous summertime odyssey to the home of Ingmar Bergman for her seventh feature, a graceful, shape-shifting tale about the interplay of life and art and the ways in which stories are born. In search of inspiration for their current filmmaking projects, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and her partner (Tim Roth) travel to the remote island of Fårö, Sweden, where Bergman lived and worked for decades. There, the spirit of the cinema master looms as Chris confronts her complicated relationships to work, men, motherhood, and her artistic influences. Also featuring radiant performances from Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie, Bergman Island is a rich deconstruction of the mysteries of the creative process and the journey that every film takes from thought to page to screen.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL FEATURES 

• 2K digital master, approved by director Mia Hansen-Løve, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with Hansen-Løve
• New interview with actor Vicky Krieps
• Bergman’s Ghosts (2021), a short film made during the filming of Bergman Island by actor Gabe Klinger
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Devika Girish

 2021 • 113 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

As soon as pre-orders become available we'll be sure to update the links on the site.

The big news of the day is Andrew Stanton's Oscar-winning animated feature film is getting an upgraded 4K UHD release courtesy of The Criterion Collection on November 22nd.

WALL•E - The Criterion Collection - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
 

A high-water mark of digital animation, this prescient vision of a dystopian future is packaged within a dazzling pop-science-fiction love story, making for an urgent fable for our troubled millennium. It’s the twenty-ninth century, and humans have long since fled Earth for outer space, leaving WALL•E, the last functioning trash-compacting robot, to go about the work of cleaning up a pollution-choked planet, one piece of garbage at a time. When he meets EVE, a fellow automaton sent to detect plant life, the pair are launched on an intergalactic quest to return humanity to Earth. Transporting us simultaneously back to cinema’s silent origins and forward light-years into the future, WALL•E is a soaring ode to the power of love and art to heal a dying world.

The release features a 4K master approved by Director Andrew Stanton and will include Dolby Vision/HDR10+ as well as a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. The 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo pack will also come packed with supplements:

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

We will keep you posted as soon as we know more and when pre-orders go live. 

Happy collecting!

The Criterion Collection has announced their June release slate that includes Gordon Parks blaxploitation classic starring Richard Roundtree on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. 

Leading the way is Shaft, which will be getting a 4K UHD and Blu-ray release on June 21.

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss (Moses Gunn) from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war. A vivid time capsule of seventies Manhattan in all its gritty glory that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements—from Roundtree’s sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack remastered with creative input from Isaac Hayes III

• 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

• Shaft’s Big Score!, the 1972 follow-up to Shaft by director Gordon Parks

• New documentary on the making of Shaft featuring curator Rhea L. Combs, film scholar Racquel J. Gates, filmmaker Nelson George, and music scholar Shana L. Redmond

• Behind-the-scenes program featuring Parks, actor Richard Roundtree, and musician Isaac Hayes

• Archival interviews with Hayes, Parks, and Roundtree

• New interview with costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi

• New program on the Black detective and the legacy of John Shaft, featuring scholar Kinohi Nishikawa and novelist Walter Mosley

• A Complicated Man: The “Shaft” Legacy (2019)

• Behind-the-scenes footage from Shaft’s Big Score!

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri

 1971 • 100 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Arriving on June 7 on Blu-ray is The Tales of Hoffmann, the fantasy opera by Jacques Offenbach.

Michael Powell And Emeric Pressburger create a phantasmagoric marriage of cinema and opera in this one-of-a-kind take on a classic story. In Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a poet dreams of three women—a mechanical performing doll, a bejeweled siren, and the consumptive daughter of a famous composer—all of whom break his heart in different ways. Powell and Pressburger’s feverishly romantic adaptation is a feast of music, dance, and visual effects, and one of the most exhilarating opera films ever produced.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Michael Powell And Emeric Pressburger create a phantasmagoric marriage of cinema and opera in this one-of-a-kind take on a classic story. In Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a poet dreams of three women—a mechanical performing doll, a bejeweled siren, and the consumptive daughter of a famous composer—all of whom break his heart in different ways. Powell and Pressburger’s feverishly romantic adaptation is a feast of music, dance, and visual effects, and one of the most exhilarating opera films ever produced.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive, in association with STUDIOCANAL, featuring newly rediscovered footage and with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Audio commentary from 1992 by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Bruce Eder, newly updated by Eder

• Interview with filmmaker George A. Romero from 2005

• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1956), a short musical film based on the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe story and directed by Michael Powell 

• Collection of production designer Hein Heckroth’s design sketches and paintings

• Gallery of production and publicity photographs

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• Plus: An essay by film historian Ian Christie

 1951 • 133 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Available on June 14th Farewell Amor from Alain Delon.

In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil war in Angola, a New York taxi driver (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is reunited with his now devoutly religious wife (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter (Jayme Lawson) when they are finally able to follow him to America. But after living thousands of miles apart for so long, the three find they must discover one another’s strengths, forgive one another’s weaknesses, and bridge cultural and generational divides in order to build a life together. Told in three perspective-shifting chapters that honor the multitude of struggles and emotions that make up the immigrant experience, Farewell Amor is a bittersweet, compassionate evocation of how it feels when your heart and your home are in different places.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K master, approved by director Ekwa Msangi, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray

• New audio commentary featuring Msangi and cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole

• Three short films by Msangi: Suspense (2011); The Market King (2014); and Farewell Meu Amor (2016), a prequel to Farewell Amor 

• New interviews with actors Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, and Jayme Lawson

• Deleted scenes

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by scholar Tiana Reid

 2020 • 102 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

On the 21st comes Stanley Kwan's Rouge on Blu-ray.

Cantopop superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung display the androgynous magnetism that made them icons as doomed lovers in this emblematic film of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave, directed by pioneering queer melodrama master Stanley Kwan. Rouge bridges past and present in its tragic romance between a humble courtesan and the wayward scion of a wealthy family, who embrace death by suicide pact amid the opulent teahouses of 1930s Hong Kong. Fifty years later, she returns to the city-state to find him, drawing a young contemporary couple (Alex Man and Emily Chu) into her quest to rekindle a passion that may be as illusory as time itself. With its lush mise-en-scène and transcendently melancholy mood, this sensuous ghost story is an exquisite, enduringly resonant elegy for both lost love and vanishing history.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Stanley Kwan, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

• Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray

• New conversation between Kwan and filmmaker Sasha Chuk

• Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, a 1997 documentary by Kwan exploring the representation of queerness and LGBT identity in Chinese film

• Still Love You After All These, a 1997 memoir film by Kwan about his Hong Kong identity

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation 

• PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim 

1987 • 96 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

John Waters' totally outlandish Pink Flamingos starring Divine, Mink Stole, and David Lochary will arrive on Blu-ray on June 28.

John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole And David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word filthy. Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Waters, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack 

• Two audio commentaries featuring Waters, from the 1997 Criterion laserdisc and the 2001 DVD release

• New conversation between Waters and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch

• Tour of the film’s Baltimore locations, led by Waters

• Deleted scenes, alternate takes, and on-set footage

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• And more!

• PLUS: An essay by critic Howard Hampton and a piece by actor and author Cookie Mueller about the making of the film, from her 1990 book Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

 1972 • 92 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

Finally and also on the 28th comes Joachim Trier Academy Award-nominated romantic comedy The Worst Person in the World on Blu-ray.

Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for the revelatory, complex performance that anchors this sprawlingly novelistic film by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, an emotionally intricate and exhilarating character study of a woman entering her thirties. Amid the seemingly endless possibilities of the modern world, Julie (Reinsve) vacillates between artistic passions and professions, the question of motherhood, and relationships with two very different men: a successful comic-book artist (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) and a charismatic barista (Herbert Nordrum). Working with a team of longtime collaborators, Trier and his perennial cowriter Eskil Vogt construct in The Worst Person in the World, the Oscar-nominated third entry in their unofficial Oslo Trilogy, a liberating portrait of self-discovery and a bracingly contemporary spin on the romantic comedy.

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 Joachim Trier; coscreenwriter Eskil Vogt; actors Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, and Herbert Nordrum; cinematographer Kasper Tuxen; and sound designer Gisle Tveito 

• On-set footage from the creation of the film’s time-freezing sequence 

• Deleted scenes 

• PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley

 2021 • 127 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Norwegian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

All of these titles will likely be up for pre-order shortly and the website will be updated when they are available.

The Criterion Collection has revealed their May home video release slate that includes Billy Wilder's film-noir classic on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. 

Of course, the headliner is Double Indemnity which will be getting the 4K/Blu-ray combo treatment on May 31st.

Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously evil as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? Working with cowriter Raymond Chandler, director Billy Wilder launched himself onto the Hollywood A-list with this paragon of film-noir fatalism from James M. Cain’s pulp novel. When slick salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) walks into the swank home of dissatisfied housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck), he intends to sell her insurance, but he winds up becoming entangled with her in a far more sinister way. Featuring scene-stealing supporting work from Edward G. Robinson and the chiaroscuro of cinematographer John F. Seitz, Double Indemnity is one of the most wickedly perverse stories ever told and the cynical standard by which all noir must be measured.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY 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 two Blu-rays with the film and special features 

• Audio commentary featuring film critic Richard Schickel

• New interview with film scholar Noah Isenberg, editor of Billy Wilder on Assignment

• New conversation between film historians Eddie Muller and Imogen Sara Smith

• Billy, How Did You Do It?, a 1992 film by Volker Schlöndorff and Gisela Grischow featuring interviews with director Billy Wilder

• Shadows of Suspense, a 2006 documentary on the making of Double Indemnity

• Audio excerpts from 1971 and 1972 interviews with cinematographer John F. Seitz

• Radio adaptations from 1945 and 1950

• Trailer 

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

1944 • 108 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Also with a street date on the 31st is Wayne Wang's murder mystery Chan is Missing.

A mystery man, a murder, and a wad of missing cash—in his wryly offbeat breakthrough, Wayne Wang updates the ingredients of classic film noir for the streets of contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown. When their business partner disappears with the money they had planned to use for a cab license, driver Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) scour the city’s back alleys, waterfronts, and Chinese restaurants to track him down. But what begins as a search for a missing man gradually turns into a far deeper and more elusive investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Chinese American identity. The first feature by an Asian American filmmaker to play widely and get mainstream critical appreciation, Chan Is Missing is a continuously fresh and surprising landmark of indie invention that playfully flips decades of cinematic stereotypes on their heads.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• High-definition digital master, approved by director Wayne Wang, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack 

• Is Chan Still Missing?, a making-of documentary directed by Debbie Lum

• New conversations between Wang and critic Hua Hsu and Wang and filmmaker Ang Lee

• Conversation between Wang and film programmer Dennis Lim

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Oliver Wang

 1982 • 75 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In English, Cantonese, and Mandarin with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

Earlier in the month on the 10th comes the 1976 French thriller Mr. Klein from Alain Delon.

One of the crowning achievements of blacklisted Hollywood director Joseph Losey’s European exile, the spellbinding modernist mystery Mr. Klein puts a chilling twist on the wrong-man thriller. Alain Delon delivers a standout performance as Robert Klein, a decadent art dealer in Paris during World War II who makes a tidy profit buying up paintings from his desperate Jewish clients. As Klein searches for a Jewish man with the same name for whom he has been mistaken, he finds himself plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare in which his identity seems to dissolve and the forces of history to close in on him. Met with considerable controversy on its release for its portrayal of the real-life wrongdoings of the Vichy government, this haunting, disturbingly beautiful film shivers with existential dread as it traces a society’s descent into fascistic fear and inhumanity.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack 

• Interviews with critic Michel Ciment and editor Henri Lanoë

• Interviews from 1976 with director Joseph Losey and actor Alain Delon

• Story of a Day, a 1986 documentary on the real-life Vél d’Hiv Roundup, a central historical element of Mr. Klein

• Trailer

• New English subtitle translation

• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

 1976 • 123 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

On the 17th comes writer-director Juzo Itami's The Funeral on Blu-ray.

It’s death, Japanese style, in the rollicking and wistful first feature from maverick writer-director Juzo Itami. In the wake of her father’s sudden passing, a successful actor (Itami’s wife and frequent collaborator, Nobuko Miyamoto) and her lascivious husband (Tsutomu Yamazaki) leave Tokyo and return to her family home to oversee a traditional funeral. Over the course of three days of mourning that bring illicit escapades in the woods, a surprisingly materialistic priest (Chishu Ryu), and cinema’s most epic sandwich handoff, the tensions between public propriety and private hypocrisy are laid bare. Deftly weaving dark comedy with poignant family drama, The Funeral is a fearless satire of the clash between old and new in Japanese society in which nothing, not even the finality of death, is off-limits.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• High-definition restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

• New interviews with actors Nobuko Miyamoto and Manpei Ikeuchi

• Creative Marriages: Juzo Itami & Nobuko Miyamoto, a short program produced by the Criterion Channel 

• Commercials for Ichiroku Tart by director Juzo Itami 

• Trailers

• New English subtitle translation 

• PLUS: An essay by author Pico Iyer and, for the Blu-ray, excerpts from Itami’s 1985 book Diary of “The Funeral” and from a 2007 remembrance of Itami by actor Tsutomu Yamazaki

 1984 • 124 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

Finally on the 24th, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala starring Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington will arrive on Blu-ray format.

The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South come together in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, a luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot. Years after her Indian family was forced to flee their home in Uganda by the dictatorship of Idi Amin, twentysomething Mina (Sarita Choudhury) spends her days cleaning rooms in an Indian-run motel in Mississippi. When she falls for the charming Black carpet cleaner Demetrius (Denzel Washington), their passionate romance challenges the prejudices of both of their families and exposes the rifts between the region’s Indian and African American communities. Tackling thorny issues of racism, colorism, culture clash, and displacement with bighearted humor and keen insight, Nair serves up a sweet, sexy, and deeply satisfying celebration of love’s power.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Mira Nair and director of photography Ed Lachman, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray

• New audio commentary featuring Nair

• New conversation between actor Sarita Choudhury and film critic Devika Girish

• New interviews with Lachman, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and production designer and photographer Mitch Epstein

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing 

• PLUS: An essay by critic Bilal Qureshi and, for the Blu-ray, excerpts from Nair’s production journal

 1991 • 117 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • In English and Swahili with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

All of these titles should be up for pre-order soon and will be updated on the site here as soon as that information becomes available.  

Six titles will be available from The Criterion Collection this April featuring a 4K upgrade of "the best moon movie ever made". 

First up on the 4K front, For All Mankind - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray will be getting a 4K/Blu-ray combo release on April 26th.

In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Twenty years later, Al Reinert constructed a documentary that imparts the unforgettable story of the twenty-four astronauts who participated in the Apollo mission to land on the moon—told in their words and in their voices, using the images they captured. With its awe-inspiring, otherworldly footage and a haunting atmospheric soundtrack by Brian Eno, For All Mankind stirs us with a profound sense of compassion for the “pale blue dot” that is our home, and it is still the most radical, visually dazzling work of cinema that has been made about this earthshaking event.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• In the 4K UHD edition: New 4K digital restorations of the original 1.33:1 framing and the alternate 1.85:1 theatrical presentation, with 5.1 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
• In the Blu-ray and DVD editions: High-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by producer-director Al Reinert, with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring director Al Reinert and Apollo 17 commander Eugene A. Cernan, the last person to set foot on the moon
• An Accidental Gift: The Making of “For All Mankind,” a documentary featuring interviews with Reinert, Apollo 12 and Skylab astronaut Alan Bean, and NASA archive specialists
• Selection of excerpted interviews with fifteen of the Apollo astronauts
• Program about Bean’s artwork, accompanied by a gallery of his paintings
• NASA audio highlights and liftoff footage
• Optional on-screen identification of astronauts and mission-control specialists
• PLUS: Essays by film critic Terrence Rafferty and Reinert

The other five titles are Blu-ray only starting with the rock-and-roll 1950s musical The Girl Can't Help It starring Jayne Mansfield on April 19th.

In 1956, Frank Tashlin brought the talent for zany visual gags and absurdist pop-culture satire that he’d honed as a master of animation to the task of capturing, in glorious DeLuxe Color, a brand-new craze: rock and roll. This blissfully bonkers jukebox musical tells the story of a mobster’s bombshell girlfriend—the one and only Jayne Mansfield, in a showstopping first major film role—and the washed-up talent agent (Tom Ewell) who seeks to revive his career by turning her into a musical sensation. The only question is: Can she actually sing? A CinemaScope feast of eye-popping midcentury design, The Girl Can’t Help It bops along to a parade of performances by rock-and-roll trailblazers—including Little Richard, Fats Domino, Julie London, Eddie Cochran, the Platters, and Gene Vincent—who light up the screen with the uniquely American sound that was about to conquer the world.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring film scholar Toby Miller
• New interview with Eve Golden, biographer of actor Jayne Mansfield
• New video essay by film critic David Cairns
• Interview with filmmaker John Waters
• New conversation between WFMU DJs Dave “the Spazz” Abramson and Gaylord Fields about the music in the film
• On-set footage
• Interviews with Mansfield (1957) and musician Little Richard (1984)
• Episode of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This about Mansfield
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Rachel Syme and, for the Blu-ray, excerpts from director Frank Tashlin’s 1952 book How to Create Cartoons with a new introduction by Ethan de Seife, author of Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin
  
  New cover by Jaffa the Unknown

Also on the 19th comes the fantastical comedy Miracle in Milan  from director Vittorio De Sica.

Renowned filmmaker Vittorio De Sica followed up his international triumph Bicycle Thieves with this enchantingly playful neorealist fairy tale, in which he combines his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, however, it’s up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, adapting his own novel, craft a bighearted ode to the nobility of everyday people.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs
• Audio interview from the late 1960s in which director Vittorio De Sica looks back on his career, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann
• Interviews with actor Brunella Bovo and Manuel De Sica, the director’s son
• Feature-length documentary from 2019 on screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland and, on the Blu-ray, “Totò il buono,” a 1940 short story by Zavattini and stage actor Totò that is the earliest version of the narrative on which Miracle in Milan is based
  
  New cover by Manule Fior

On the 26th, the directorial debut of twins Arie and Chuko Esiri Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)  is set for a Blu-ray release.

This revelatory, award-winning debut feature from codirectors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nigeria. Shot on richly textured 16 mm film and infused with the spirit of neorealism, Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) traces the journeys of two distantly connected strangers—Mofe (Jude Akuwudike), an electrician dealing with the fallout of a family tragedy, and Rosa (Temi Ami-Williams), a hairdresser supporting her pregnant teenage sister—as they each pursue their dream of starting a new life in Europe while bumping up against the harsh economic realities of a world in which every interaction is a transaction. From these intimate stories emerges a vivid snapshot of life in contemporary Lagos, whose social fabric is captured in all its vibrancy and complexity.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital transfer, approved by directors Arie and Chuko Esiri, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New conversation between the directors, moderated by filmmaker Bette Gordon
• Interview with producer Melissa O. Adeyemo
• Deleted scenes featuring audio commentary by the directors
• Three short films: Goose (2017), directed by Arie and Chuko Esiri; Besida (2018), directed by Chuko Esiri; and Because Men in Silk Shirts on Lagos Nights (2018), directed by Arie Esiri
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by writer and filmmaker Maryam Kazeem
  
  New cover by Diana Ejaita

Next, Bertrand Tavernier directs Dexter Gordon in the critically-acclaimed jazz film ’Round Midnight which will be released on Blu-ray on April 26th.

’Round Midnight is a love letter from director Bertrand Tavernier to the heyday of bebop and to the Black American musicians who found refuge in the smoky underground jazz clubs of 1950s Paris. In a miraculous, sui generis fusion of performer and character that was nominated for an Oscar, legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays Dale Turner, a brilliant New York jazz veteran whose music aches with beauty but whose personal life is ravaged by addiction. Searching for a fresh start in Paris, Turner strikes up an unlikely friendship with a struggling single father and ardent jazz fan (François Cluzet) who finds his life transformed as he attempts to help the self-destructive musician. Herbie Hancock’s evocative, Oscar-winning score sets the mood for this definitive jazz film, a bittersweet opus that glows with lived-in, soulful authenticity.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, supervised by composer Herbie Hancock and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
• New interview with jazz and cultural critic Gary Giddins
• New conversation with music producer Michael Cuscuna and author Maxine Gordon, widow of musician Dexter Gordon
• Before Midnight, a 1986 behind-the-scenes documentary
• Panel discussion from 2014 featuring director Bertrand Tavernier, Cuscuna, Maxine Gordon, and jazz scholar John Szwed, moderated by jazz critic and broadcaster Mark Ruffin
• Performance from 1969 of “Fried Bananas” by Dexter Gordon, directed by Teit Jørgensen
• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by scholar Mark Anthony Neal
  
  New cover by F. Ron Miller

Finally, Alex Cox's blistering biopic Walker  leads off the month on April 12th.

A hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions, Walker, from British director Alex Cox, tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker (Ed Harris), who abandoned a series of careers in law, politics, journalism, and medicine to become a soldier of fortune and, for many months, the dictator of Nicaragua. Made with mad abandon and political acuity—and the support of the Sandinista army and government during the contra war—the film uses this true tale as a satirical attack on American ultrapatriotism and a freewheeling condemnation of “manifest destiny.” Featuring a powerful score by Joe Strummer and a performance of intense, repressed rage by Harris, Walker remains one of Cox’s most daring works.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• Restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Alex Cox, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary by Cox and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer
• Dispatches from Nicaragua, a documentary about the filming of Walker
• On Moviemaking and the Revolution, reminiscences about the production twenty years later from an extra on the film
• Walker 2008 and On the Origins of “Walker” (2016), two short films by Cox (Blu-ray only)
• Behind-the-scenes photos
• Trailer (Blu-ray only)
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by film critic Graham Fuller, Wurlitzer, and Linda Sandoval
  
  Blu-ray cover by Paul Mavrides (pictured); DVD cover by Marc English

These titles aren't available for pre-order yet but we will post an update when they are ASAP.  As always, thank you for your support and pre-orders! 

Films directed by George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Jean-Luc Godard, and Pedro Almodóvar are all in the works for Blu-ray.

Criterion's spine #1000 collects all 15 Godzilla films in one Blu-ray set this October! UPDATE: Trailer now available!

Films directed by Wim Wenders, Kelly Reichardt, Ronald Neame, and more are all in the works for Blu-ray.

Films directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Greg Mottola, Pawel Pawlikowski, and more are all in the works for Blu-ray.

Criterion's spine #1000 collects all 15 Godzilla films in one Blu-ray set this October!

Films directed by Josef von Sternberg, John Salyes, and more are all in the works for Blu-ray.

Films directed by Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, John Waters, and more are all in the works for Blu-ray.