The Criterion Collection has announced its releases for September 2018, which includes a couple of new release and three upgrades, including one — Andrei Rublev — that is particularly overdue and very welcome!

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

September 4, 2018

Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
d. Ingmar Bergman

From The Criterion Collection:

Scenes from a Marriage chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne and Johan, tracking their relationship through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partnerships. Originally conceived by director Ingmar Bergman as a five-hour, six-part television miniseries, the film is also presented in its three-hour theatrical cut. Shot largely in intense, intimate close-ups by cinematographer Sven Nykvist and featuring flawless performances by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, Bergman’s emotional X-ray reveals the deep joys and pains of a complex bond.

September 11, 2018

Cold Water (1994)
d. Olivier Assayas

From The Criterion Collection:

An acclaimed early work by Olivier Assayas, the long-unavailable, deeply felt coming-of-age drama Cold Water can at last be seen in the United States. Drawing from his own youthful experiences, Assayas revisits the outskirts of Paris in the early 1970s, telling the story of teenage lovers Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), whose rebellions against family and society threaten to tear them apart. The visceral realism of the movie’s narrative and the near experimentalism of its camera work come together effortlessly thanks to a rock soundtrack that vividly evokes the period. With one of the most memorable party sequences ever committed to film as a centerpiece, Cold Wateris a heartbreaking immersion in the emotional tumult of being young.

August 21, 2018

My Man Godfrey (1936)
d. Gregory La Cava

From The Criterion Collection:

Carole Lombard and William Powell dazzle in this definitive screwball comedy, directed by Gregory La Cava—a potent cocktail of romantic repartee and Depression-era social critique. Irene (Lombard), an eccentric Manhattan socialite, wins a society-ball scavenger hunt after finding one of the “items” on the list, a “lost man” (Powell), at a dump. She gives the man she believes to be a down-and-out drifter work as the family butler, and soon falls head over heels in love. Her attempts to both woo Godfrey and indoctrinate him in the dysfunctional ways of the household make for an unbeatable series of madcap hijinks. La Cava’s deft film was the first to garner Oscar nominations in all four acting categories, and it is one of Hollywood’s greatest commentaries on class and the social unrest of its time.

September 25, 2018

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
d. Daniel Petrie

From The Criterion Collection:

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be on Broadway and is now an immortal part of the theatrical canon. Two years after its premiere, the production came to the screen, directed by Daniel Petrie. The original stars—including Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee—reprise their roles as members of an African American family living in a cramped Chicago apartment, in this deeply resonant tale of dreams deferred. Following the death of their patriarch, the Youngers await a life insurance check they hope will change their circumstances, but tensions arise over how best to use the money. Vividly rendering Hansberry’s intimate observations on generational conflict and housing discrimination, Petrie’s film captures the high stakes, shifting currents, and varieties of experience within black life in midcentury America.

September 25, 2018

Andrei Rublev (1966)
d. Andrei Tarkovsky

From The Criterion Collection:

Tracing the life of a renowned icon painter, the second feature by Andrei Tarkovsky vividly conjures the murky world of medieval Russia. This dreamlike and remarkably tactile film follows Andrei Rublev as he passes through a series of poetically linked scenes—snow falls inside an unfinished church, naked pagans stream through a thicket during a torchlit ritual, a boy oversees the clearing away of muddy earth for the forging of a gigantic bell—gradually emerging as a man struggling mightily to preserve his creative and religious integrity. Appearing here in the director’s preferred 185-minute cut as well as the version that was originally suppressed by Soviet authorities, the masterwork Andrei Rublev is one of Tarkovsky’s most revered films, an arresting meditation on art, faith, and endurance.