Today The Criterion Collection announced their April 2017 line-up. No upgrades yet again, though they are breaking up the Jacques Demy boxset so you can pick up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort on their own on April 11.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

April 18, 2017

Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
d. Wim Wenders

From The Criterion Collection:

Traveling from the streets of Havana to the stage of Carnegie Hall, this revelatory documentary captures a forgotten generation of Cuba’s brightest musical talents as they enjoy an unexpected brush with world fame. The veteran vocalists and instrumentalists collaborated with American guitarist and roots-music champion Ry Cooder to form the Buena Vista Social Club, playing a jazz-inflected mix of cha-cha, mambo, bolero, and other traditional Latin American styles, and recording an album that won a Grammy and made them an international phenomenon. In the wake of this success, director Wim Wenders filmed the ensemble’s members—including golden-voiced Ibrahim Ferrer and piano virtuoso Rubén González—in a series of illuminating interviews and live performances. The result is one of the most beloved music documentaries of the 1990s, and an infectious ode to a neglected corner of Cuba’s prerevolutionary heritage.

April 18, 2017

Woman of the Year (1942)
d. George Cukor

From The Criterion Collection:

Before Katharine Hepburn ever met Spencer Tracy, she wanted him as her costar in this film. George Stevens’s Woman of the Year, conceived to build on the smashing comeback Hepburn had made in The Philadelphia Story, is the story of rival newspaper reporters who wed only to find that their careers aren’t so compatible, and in it the pair forged a fresh and realistic vision of what marriage could be. The freewheeling but pinpoint-sharp screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin won an Academy Award, and Hepburn was nominated for best actress. Woman of the Year marks the beginning of the personal and professional union between Hepburn and Tracy, who would go on to make eight more films together, and it stands as a dazzling, funny, and sometimes rueful observation of what it takes for men and women to get along—both in the workplace and out of it.

April 25, 2017

Tampopo (1985)
d. Juzo Itami

From The Criterion Collection:

The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe, this rapturous “ramen western” by Japanese director Juzo Itami is an entertaining, genre-bending adventure underpinned by a deft satire of the way social conventions distort the most natural of human urges, our appetites. Interspersing the efforts of Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) and friends to make her café a success with the erotic exploits of a gastronome gangster and glimpses of food culture both high and low, the sweet, sexy, and surreal Tampopo is a lavishly inclusive paean to the sensual joys of nourishment, and one of the most mouthwatering examples of food on film ever made.

April 25, 2017

Rumble Fish (1983)
d. Francis Ford Coppola

From The Criterion Collection:

In this deeply personal tale of estrangement and reconciliation between two rebellious brothers, set in a dreamlike and timeless Tulsa, Francis Ford Coppola gives mythic dimensions to intimate, painful emotions. After releasing the classically styled The Outsiders earlier the same year, the director returned to the work of S. E. Hinton, this time with a self-described “art film for teenagers.” Graced with a remarkable cast headed by Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, and Diane Lane; haunting black-and-white visuals that hark back to German expressionism and forward to Coppola’s own Tetro; and a powerful, percussive score by Stewart Copeland that underscores the movie’s romantic fatalism, Rumble Fish pulsates throughout with genuine love and dread.