Here we are with The Criterion Collection announcing their September 2022 releases! How great to see another out of print title come back, and to see a new volume from the Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project series! See them all below!
The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.
September 6, 2022
Blow Out (1981)
d. Brian De Palma
From The Criterion Collection:
In the enthralling Blow Out, brilliantly crafted by Brian De Palma, John Travolta gives one of his greatest performances, as a film sound-effects man who believes he has accidentally recorded a political assassination. To uncover the truth, he enlists the help of a possible eyewitness to the crime (Nancy Allen), who may be in danger herself. With its jolting stylistic flourishes, intricate plot, profoundly felt characterizations, and gritty evocation of early-1980s Philadelphia, Blow Out is an American paranoia thriller unlike any other, as well as a devilish reflection on moviemaking.
September 13, 2022
Take Out (2004)
d. Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou
From The Criterion Collection:
The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in the raw, vérité Take Out, by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggling to get by on the margins of post-9/11 New York City. Facing violent retaliation from a loan shark, restaurant deliveryman Ming Ding (Charles Jang) has until nightfall to pay back the money he owes, and he encounters both crushing setbacks and moments of unexpected humanity as he races against time to earn enough in tips over the course of a frantic day. From this simple setup, Baker and Tsou fashion a kind of neorealist survival thriller of the everyday, shedding compassionate light on the too often overlooked lives and labor that keep New York running.
September 20, 2022
Exotica (1994)
d. Atom Egoyan
From The Criterion Collection:
One of the defining independent films of the 1990s, Atom Egoyan’s mesmerizing international breakthrough Exotica takes the conventions of the psychological thriller into bold new territory—unsettling, dreamlike, and empathetic. At the neon-drenched Toronto strip club of the film’s title, a coterie of lost and damaged souls—including a man haunted by grief (Bruce Greenwood), a young woman with whom he shares an enigmatic bond (Mia Kirshner), an obsessive emcee (Elias Koteas), and a smuggler of rare bird eggs (Don McKellar)—search for redemption as they work through the traumas of their mysteriously interconnected histories in an obsessive cycle of sex, pain, jealousy, and catharsis. Masterfully weaving together past and present, Egoyan constructs a spellbinding narrative puzzle, the full emotional impact of which doesn’t hit until the last piece is in place.
September 20, 2022
Le Corbeau (1943)
d. Henri-Georges Clouzot
From The Criterion Collection:
A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a provincial French town, exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s calm surface. Made during the Nazi occupation of France, this film by Henri-Georges Clouzot was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, and the Catholic Church, and was banned after the country’s liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable and worked to rehabilitate his directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeaubrilliantly captures the spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing that turns an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem.
September 27, 2022
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 4
-Sambizanga (1972), d. Sarah Maldoror
-Prisioneros de la tierra (1939), d. Mario Soffici
-Chess of the Wind (1976), d. Mohammad Reza Aslani
-Muna moto (1975), d. Dikongué-Pipa
-Two Girls in the Street (1939), d. André de Toth
-Kalpana (1948), d. Uday Shankar
From The Criterion Collection:
Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of dozens of restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often overlooked areas of cinema history. This collector’s set gathers six important works, from Angola (Sambizanga), Argentina (Prisioneros de la tierra), Iran (Chess of the Wind), Cameroon (Muna moto), Hungary (Two Girls on the Street), and India (Kalpana). Each title is an essential contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
September 27, 2022
Sound of Metal (2019)
d. Darius Marder
From The Criterion Collection:
In Sound of Metal, a tale of sound, fury, and self-discovery, Riz Ahmed delivers an intensely committed performance as the volatile Ruben, who has found new purpose as a drummer in a noise-metal duo, playing blistering live shows with his singer girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). When Ruben suddenly loses much of his hearing, he is launched on a profound odyssey—through denial, anger, grief, and, gradually, acceptance—as he comes to understand what it means to live as a deaf person and to discover deafness as not a disability but a rich culture and community. Through stunningly immersive, Academy Award–winning sound design, director Darius Marder invites us to experience the world as Ruben does, capturing a sonic spectrum in which silence comes in a thousand shades.
Please consider purchasing through my affiliate links below
Leave a Reply