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The Criterion Collection

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Criterion Collection with us! Enjoy a fantastic 40% off.
Start date: 1st November 2024 | End date: 1st December 2024
Since its inception in 1984, the Criterion Collection has served as a revered sanctuary for cinephiles, passionately curating classic films and hidden treasures with unwavering dedication. Meticulously selecting each addition to its catalogue, Criterion ensures that every film represents a significant contribution to the cinematic landscape. Through their dedication to restoration and presentation, these films are not only preserved but also elevated to a higher plane of appreciation, enriched further by an abundance of extras and additional content. Over the decades, Criterion has transcended mere collection status to become a cultural institution, a beacon of excellence, and a boundless source of inspiration for movie buffs and aspiring filmmakers alike.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

 

A classic tale is reborn through the inspired imagination of cinematic dream-weaver Guillermo del Toro, directing alongside Mark Gustafson. Realized through boundary-pushing, breathtakingly intricate stop-motion animation, this dark rendering of the fable of the puppet boy and his maker—which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature—daringly transfers the story to Fascist Italy, where the irrepressible Pinocchio gradually learns what it means to be human through his experiences of war, death, and sacrifice. Featuring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and Christoph Waltz, this Pinocchio imbues the oft-told tale with a bold new resonance about living with courage and compassion.

 

  • 4K digital master, supervised by directors Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, with Dolby Atmos
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Handcarved Cinema, a new documentary featuring del Toro, Gustafson, and cast and crew, including the film’s puppet creators, production designers, and animation supervisor
  • Directing Stop-Motion, a new program featuring del Toro and Gustafson
  • New conversation between del Toro and film critic Farran Smith Nehme
  • New interview with curator Ron Magliozzi on The Museum of Modern Art’s 2022 exhibition devoted to the film
  • New program on the eight rules of animation that informed the film’s production
  • Panel discussion featuring del Toro, Gustafson, production designer Guy Davis, composer Alexandre Desplat, and sound designer Scott Martin Gershin, moderated by filmmaker James Cameron

The Last Picture Show

 

One of the key films of the American seventies cinema renaissance, The Last Picture Show is set in the early fifties, in the loneliest Texas nowheresville to ever dust up a movie screen. This aching portrait of a dying West, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, focuses on the daily shuffles of three futureless teens—enigmatic Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), wayward jock Duane (Jeff Bridges), and desperate-to-be-adored rich girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd)—and the aging lost souls who bump up against them in the night like drifting tumbleweeds. Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal work in the career of invaluable film historian and director Peter Bogdanovich.

 

  • 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Two audio commentaries, featuring Bogdanovich and actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman, and Frank Marshall
  • Three documentaries about the making of the film
  • Screen tests and location footage
  • Excerpts from a 1972 television interview with filmmaker François Truffaut about the New Hollywood
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by film critic Graham Fuller

One False Move

 

A small-town police chief (Bill Paxton) concealing an explosive secret. A pair of ruthless drug dealers (cowriter 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 film 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.

 

  • New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Carl Franklin, with 2.0 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 from 1999 featuring Franklin
  • New conversation between Franklin and cowriter-actor Billy Bob Thornton
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by author William Boyle

Le Samourai

 

In a career-defining performance, ALAIN DELON (Purple Noon) plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armour of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE (Army of Shadows), Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone warrior mythology.

 

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interviews with Rui Nogueira, editor of Melville on Melville, and Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean Pierre Melville: An American in Paris
  • Archival interviews with Melville and actors Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, and Cathy Rosier
  • Melville-Delon: D’Honneur et de nuit (2011), a short documentary exploring the friendship between the director and the actor and their iconic collaboration on this film
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Thomson. The Blu-ray also features an appreciation by filmmaker John Woo and excerpts from Melville on Melville

Dazed and Confused

 

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.

 

  • Behind the scenes
  • Bonus footage
  • Commentary: Richard Linklater (director)
  • Deleted scenes
  • On-set interviews
  • Making-of documentary
  • Footage from the ten-year anniversary celebration
  • Audition footage
  • Essays by critics Kent Jones, Jim DeRogatis, and Chuck Klosterman
  • Reprinted recollections of the filming from cast and crew
  • Character profiles from the Dazed and Confused companion book
  • Original film poster by Frank Kozik
  • Trailers

Dogfight

 

An ineffably bittersweet portrait of youth in the 1960s, Nancy Savoca’s funny, sensitive tale of love and war etches two vividly alive characters: aspiring San Francisco folk singer Rose (Lili Taylor) and hotheaded, Vietnam-bound marine Eddie (River Phoenix), who meet on the occasion of a cruelly misogynistic party where men compete to bring the most unattractive dates they can find. But what begins as a night to forget unexpectedly develops into something far more meaningful. Featuring music by folk legends Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, Dogfight captures the miracle of human connection while gracefully subverting ideas surrounding machismo, patriotic duty, and the very meaning of America itself.

 

  • New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Nancy Savoca, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • Audio commentary featuring Savoca and producer Richard Guay
  • New interview with Savoca and actor Lili Taylor conducted by filmmaker Mary Harron
  • New interviews with cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, production designer Lester Cohen, script supervisor Mary Cybulski, music supervisor Jeff Kimball, supervising sound editor Tim Squyres, and editor John Tintori
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland
  • New cover inspired by an original theatrical poster

Midnight cowboy

 

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight star in this iconic drama directed by John Schlesinger. Texan dishwasher Joe Buck (Voight) moves to New York in the hopes of making his fortune as a male prostitute. However, his initial attempts are quickly foiled and the naive Texan finds himself struggling to adjust to life on the merciless streets of Manhattan. An encounter with street hustler Enrico ‘Ratso’ Rizzo (Hoffman) leads to an unlikely friendship developing between the pair, but as their bond strengthens their hopes of making it big appear more and more unlikely.

 

  • Audio commentary by director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
  • Selected scene commentary by cinematographer Adam Holender
  • The Crowd Around the Cowboy short film
  • Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey
  • Interviews with actor Jon Voight from 1970
  • Interviews with director John Schlesinger from 2000
  • Essay by critic Mark Harris
  • Trailers

Badlands

 

Badlands announced the arrival of a major talent: Terrence Malick. His impressionistic take on the notorious Charles Starkweather killing spree of the late 1950s uses a serial-killer narrative as a springboard for an oblique teenage romance, lovingly and idiosyncratically enacted by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The film introduced many of the elements that would earn Malick his passionate following: the enigmatic approach to narrative and character, the unusual use of voice-over, the juxtaposition of human violence with natural beauty, the poetic investigation of American dreams and nightmares. This debut has spawned countless imitations, but none have equaled its strange sublimity.

 

  • Restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Terrence Malick, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Making “Badlands,” a 2012 documentary featuring actors Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek and art director Jack Fisk
  • Interviews from 2012 with associate editor Billy Weber and executive producer Edward Pressman
  • “Charles Starkweather,” a 1993 episode of the television program American Justice, about the real-life story on which the film was loosely based
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda

12 angry men

 

Adapted from Reginald Rose’s television play, this film marks the directorial debut of Sidney Lumet. At the end of a murder trial in New York City, the jurors retire to consider their verdict. The man in the dock is a young Puerto Rican accused of killing his father, and eleven of the jurors do not hesitate in finding him guilty. However, one of the jurors (Henry Fonda), reluctant to send the youngster to his death without any debate, returns a vote of not guilty. From this single event, the jurors begin to re-evaluate the case, as they look at the murder – and themselves – in a fresh light. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Director (Lumet), Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay Based On Material from Another Medium (Rose).

 

  • 12 Angry Men: From Television to the Big Screen documentary
  • Tragedy in a Temporary Town documentary
  • Archival interviews with Sidney Lumet
  • Interview about the director with Walter Bernstein
  • Interview with Ron Simon about writer Reginald Rose
  • Interview with cinematographer John Bailey
  • Frank Schaffner’s 1955 television version with introduction by Ron Simon
  • Trailers

after hours

 

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.

 

    • New 4K digital restoration, approved by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
    • In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
    • New conversation between director Martin Scorsese and writer Fran Lebowitz
    • Audio commentary featuring Scorsese, Schoonmaker, director of photography Michael Ballhaus, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson
    • Documentary about the making of the film featuring Dunne, Robinson, Schoonmaker, and Scorsese
    • New program on the look of the film featuring costume designer Rita Ryack and production designer Jeffrey Townsend
    • PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley

mudbound

 

In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families—one of white landholders, one of Black tenant farmers—are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart. Writer-director Dee Rees, with cowriter Virgil Williams, crafts a uniquely American tragedy, imbuing bitter historical realities with a timeless weight. Featuring bone-deep performances from her ensemble cast—including Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, and Jonathan Banks—and backed by Rachel Morrison’s darkly burnished cinematography, Mudbound is a searing humanist study of inheritance based upon Hillary Jordan’s novel.

 

      • New 2K digital master, supervised by director Dee Rees and director of photography Rachel Morrison, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
      • New audio commentary featuring Rees
      • New documentary featuring Rees, composer Tamar-kali, editor Mako Kamitsuna, and makeup artist Angie Wells
      • New documentary made on set, featuring members of the cast and crew
      • Interview with Morrison
      • New interview with production designer David J. Bomba
      • Trailer and teaser
      • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio

pink flamingos

 

JOHN WATERS (Hairspray) made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva DIVINE (Female Trouble) 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.

 

  • 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
  • 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

raging bull

 

With this stunningly visceral portrait of self-destructive machismo, Martin Scorsese created one of the truly great and visionary works of modern cinema. Robert De Niro pours his blood, sweat, and brute physicality into the Oscar-winning role of Jake La Motta, the rising middleweight boxer from the Bronx whose furious ambition propels him to success within the ring but whose unbridled paranoia and jealousy tatter his relationships with everyone in his orbit, including his brother and manager (Joe Pesci) and his gorgeous, streetwise wife (Cathy Moriarty). Thelma Schoonmaker’s Oscar-winning editing, Michael Chapman’s extraordinarily tactile black-and-white cinematography, and Frank Warner’s ingenious sound design combine to make Raging Bull a uniquely powerful exploration of violence on multiple levels—physical, emotional, psychic, and spiritual.

 

  • New 4K digital master, approved by director Martin Scorsese, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Three audio commentaries, featuring Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker; director of photography Michael Chapman, producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, casting director Cis Corman, music consultant Robbie Robertson, and others; and boxer Jake La Motta and screenwriters Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader
  • New video essays by film critics Geoffrey O’Brien and Sheila O’Malley
  • Fight Night, a making-of program featuring Scorsese and key members of the cast and crew
  • Three short programs highlighting the collaboration between Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro
  • Television interview from 1981 with actor Cathy Moriarty and the real Vikki La Motta

slacker

 

Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater, presents a day in the life of a loose-knit Austin, Texas, subculture populated by eccentric and overeducated young people. Shooting on 16 mm for a mere $23,000, writer-producer-director Linklater and his crew of friends threw out any idea of a traditional plot, choosing instead to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as compelling as the last. Slacker is a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants, and one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.

 

  • New, restored high-definition digital film transfer, supervised by director Richard Linklater and director of photo­graphy Lee Daniel, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • Three audio commentaries, featuring Linklater and members of the cast and crew
  • It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater’s first full-length feature, with commentary by the director
  • Woodshock, a 1985 16 mm short by Linklater and Daniel
  • Casting tapes featuring select “auditions” from the more-than-100-member cast
  • Deleted scenes and alternate takes
  • Footage from the Slacker tenth-anniversary reunion
  • Ten-minute trailer for a 2005 documentary about the landmark Austin café Les Amis
  • PLUS: An essay by author and film­maker John Pierson, an introduction to It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books by director Monte Hellman, an essay by Michael Barker, reviews by critics Ron Rosenbaum and Chris Walters, and production notes by Linklater
  • New cover by Marc English

the breakfast club

 

Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald star in this US comedy drama written and directed by John Hughes. Five mismatched teenagers are stuck with each other for the day when they are forced to spend Saturday at school on detention. Gradually though, despite their different backgrounds, unlikely friendships begin to form. The cast also includes Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and Paul Gleason.

 

  • Bonus footage
  • Commentary by Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson
  • Deleted scenes
  • Interviews with Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and John Hughes
  • Video essay read by Judd Nelson featuring John Hughes’ production notes
  • Promotional and archival footage
  • Excerpts from a 1985 American Film Institute seminar with John Hughes
  • Segment from a 1995 episode of NBC’s Today show featuring the cast
  • Essay by critic David Kamp
  • Trailers

solaris

 

Psychological drama from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, adapted from the Stanislaw Lem novel of the same name. The film charts the strange events which befall a group of young cosmonauts who work on a space station orbiting the ocean-covered planet Solaris. Fellow cosmonaut Chris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to investigate the occurrences, and soon begins encountering a variety of supernatural phenomena, including the physical manifestation of his own painful memories of his late wife. Kelvin tries to get to the bottom of the mystery and begins looking for a way to communicate with the powerful forces of Solaris.

 

  • Booklet
  • Bonus footage
  • Deleted scenes
  • Excerpt from a documentary about Stanislaw Lem
  • Interviews with actress Natalya Bondarchuk, cinematographer Vadim Yusov, art director Mikhail Romadin, and composer Eduard Artemyev
  • Audio essay by Andrei Tarkovsky

stalker

 

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.

 

  • Interview with Geoff Dyer, author of Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
  • Interview with cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky
  • Interview with set designer Rashit Safiullin
  • Interview with composer Eduard Artemyev
  • Essay by critic Mark Le Fanu

the velvet underground

 

Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York’s 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, TODD HAYNES (Velvet Goldmine) vividly evokes the band’s incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries LOU REED and JOHN CALE, ANDY WARHOL’s fabled Factory, and the explosive tension between pop and the avant-garde that propelled the group and ultimately consumed it. Never-before-seen performances, interviews, rare recordings, and mind-blowing transmissions from the era’s avant-garde cinema scene come together in an ecstatic swirl of sound and image that is to the traditional music documentary what the Velvets were to rock: utterly revolutionary.

 

  • New 4K digital master, approved by director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
  • Audio commentary featuring Haynes and editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz
  • Outtakes of interviews shot for the film with musicians Jonathan Richman, filmmaker Jonas Mekas and actor Mary Woronov
  • Haynes and musicians John Cale and Maureen Tucker in conversation with writer Jenn Pelly in 2021.
  • Complete versions of some of the avant-garde films excerpted in the movie
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: A 2021 essay by critic Greil Marcus

the roaring twenties

 

Ripped from the headlines of the turbulent era between the Great War and the Great Depression, this dynamic, nostalgia-tinged crime drama balances tommy-gun action with epic historical sweep. Legends James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart star as army buddies whose fortunes rise and fall as their fates intersect, first in a foxhole on the front lines of World War I, then in Manhattan’s Prohibition-era underworld. Directed by Hollywood master Raoul Walsh, and based on a story by prolific journalist turned screenwriter and producer Mark Hellinger, The Roaring Twenties brought to a close the celebrated Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s, and it remains one of the greatest and most influential crime films of all time.

 

  • Bonus footage
  • Commentary by film historian Lincoln Hurst
  • Interviews with critic Gary Giddins
  • Excerpt from a 1973 interview with director Raoul Walsh
  • Essay by film critic Mark Asch
  • Trailers

the Infernal Affairs Trilogy

 

The explosively stylish, gripping saga of two rival moles that jolted the Hong Kong crime drama to new life is now available in one box set. The Hong Kong crime drama was jolted to new life with the release of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a bracing, explosively stylish critical and commercial triumph that introduced a dazzling level of narrative and thematic complexity to the genre with its gripping saga of two rival moles—played by superstars TONY LEUNG CHIU-WAI (In the Mood for Love) and ANDY LAU TAK-WAH (As Tears Go By)— who navigate slippery moral choices as they move between the intersecting territories of Hong Kong’s police force and its criminal underworld. Set during the uncertainty of the city-state’s handover from Britain to China and steeped in Buddhist philosophy, these ingeniously crafted tales of self-deception and betrayal mirror Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and the psychic schisms of life in a postcolonial purgatory.

 

  • New 4K digital restorations with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
  • Audio commentaries for Infernal Affairs and Infernal Affairs II featuring codirectors Andrew Lau Wai-keung, Alan Mak, and screenwriter Felix Chong Man-keung
  • Alternate ending for Infernal Affairs
  • New interview with Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
  • Archival interviews with Andrew Lau, Alan Mak, Felix Chong, and actors Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong, Kelly Chen, Edison Chen, Eric Tsang, and Chapman To
  • Making-of programmes
  • Behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, and outtakes
  • New English subtitle translations
  • Essay by film critic Justin Chang

Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

 

Unfolding in a series of eight mythic vignettes, this late work by Akira Kurosawa was inspired by the beloved director’s own night time visions, along with stories from Japanese folklore. In a visually sumptuous journey through the master’s imagination, tales of childlike wonder give way to apocalyptic apparitions: a young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts the ghosts of the war dead; a power-plant meltdown smothers a seaside landscape in radioactive fumes. Interspersed with reflections on the redemptive power of creation, including a richly textured tribute to Vincent van Gogh (who is played by Martin Scorsese), Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is both a showcase for its maker’s artistry at its most unbridled and a deeply personal lament for a world at the mercy of human ignorance.

 

  • 4K digital restoration, supervised by cinematographer Shoji Ueda, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholar Stephen Prince
  • Feature-length documentary from 1990 shot on set and directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
  • Interviews with production manager Teruyo Nogami and assistant director Takashi Koizumi
  • Documentary from 2011 by director Akira Kurosawa’s longtime translator Catherine Cadou, featuring interviews with filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro G. Ińárritu, Hayao Miyazaki, Martin Scorsese, and others
  • Trailer

Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers

 

The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.

 

  • New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New 2K digital reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
  • New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
  • Audio commentaries on Freaks and The Unknown and an introduction to The Mystic by film scholar David J. Skal
  • New interview with author Megan Abbott about director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror
  • Archival documentary on Freaks
  • Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks
  • Reading by David J. Skal of Spurs, the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks is based
  • Prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film in 1947

Lone Star

 

A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border.

 

  • New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director John Sayles and director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, with 2.0 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
  • New conversation between Sayles and filmmaker Gregory Nava
  • New interview with Dryburgh
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by scholar Domino Renee Perez
  • New cover by Jacob Phillips

Risky Business

 

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

 

  • New 4K digital restorations of the director’s cut and the original theatrical release, supervised and approved by director Paul Brickman and producer Jon Avnet, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Audio commentary for the original theatrical release featuring Brickman, Avnet, and actor Tom Cruise
  • New interviews with Avnet and casting director Nancy Klopper
  • New conversation between editor Richard Chew and film historian Bobbie O’Steen
  • The Dream Is Always the Same: The Story of “Risky Business,” a program featuring interviews with Brickman, Avnet, cast members, and others
  • Screen tests with Cruise and actor Rebecca De Mornay
  • Trailer

Wanda

 

With her first and only film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—BARBARA LODEN turned in a ground-breaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft- spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. A difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.

 

  • New 2K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and Gucci, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • I Am Wanda, an hour-long documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring an interview with director Barbara Loden filmed in 1980
  • Audio recording of Loden speaking to students at the American Film Institute in 1971
  • Segment from a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett
  • Show featuring Loden
  • The Frontier Experience, a short educational film from 1975 about a pioneer woman’s struggle to survive, directed by and starring Loden
  • PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin

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