Nuclear Take: I like good movies! As such, I’m a huge fan of theCriterion Collection, that home video label devoted to taking the best and most eclectic fare in cinema and giving them beyond-handsome Blu-ray packages with perfect specs and special features (they also have an incrediblestreaming channel!). The company just announced their September 2020 slate, and I’m here for all of it.
David Lynch’sThe Elephant Manmight be the splashiest of the new releases, and this film joins other Criterion treatments of his work likeBlue Velvet,Mulholland Drive, andEraserhead. This black-and-white drama, only his second film, is a highly emotional, beautiful, and refreshingly mainstream-ish offering from the auteur, featuring a career-best performance fromJohn Hurt.Martin Scorsesehas also offered his third installment in his wonderfulWorld Cinema Project, collecting six remarkable films from across the globe. French provocateurClaire Denisgets a title, Italian political activist-filmmakerFrancesco Rosigets a title – and in my personal favorite one-two,Jules Dassingets two gritty, tough, procedural crime thrillers with two impeccable blu-ray transfers. You know Film Daddy’s buying those two day one! Also, sorry for that sentence.
Check out all the wonderful cover arts, official Criterion-penned synopses, and tech-nerdy specs for September 2020’s additions to the Criterion Collection below. For more on the best the film label has to offer, here’stheir free, essential movies from Black voices.
Beau travail (Available September 15)
With her ravishingly sensual take onHerman Melville’sBilly Budd, Sailor,Claire Denisfirmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains ofBenjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographerAgnès Godardfold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
The Elephant Man (Available September 29)
With this poignant second feature,David Lynchbrought his atmospheric visual and sonic palette to a notorious true story set in Victorian England. When the London surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) meets the freak-show performer John Merrick (John Hurt), who has severe skeletal and soft tissue deformities, he assumes that he must be intellectually disabled as well. As the two men spend more time together, though, Merrick reveals the intelligence, gentle nature, and profound sense of dignity that lie beneath his shocking appearance, and he and Treves develop a friendship. Shot in gorgeous black and white and boasting a stellar supporting cast that includesAnne Bancroft,John Gielgud, andWendy Hiller,The Elephant Manwas nominated for eight Academy Awards, cementing Lynch’s reputation as one of American cinema’s most visionary talents.
Christ Stopped at Eboli (Available September 22)
An elegy of exile and an epic immersion into the world of rural Italy during the Mussolini years,Francesco Rosi’s sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and political activistCarlo Levibrings a monument of twentieth-century autobiography to the screen with quiet grace and solemn beauty. Banished to a desolate southern town for his anti-Fascist views, the worldly Levi (Gian Maria Volontè) discovers an Italy he never knew existed, a place where ancient folkways and superstitions still hold sway and that gradually transforms his understanding of both himself and his country. Presented for the first time on home video in its original full-length, four-part cut,Christ Stopped at Eboliruminates profoundly on the political and philosophical rifts within Italian society—between north and south, tradition and modernity, fascism and freedom—and the essential humanity that transcends all.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 (Available September 29)
Established byMartin Scorsesein 2007, theWorld Cinema Projecthas maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than three dozen restorations that have introduced moviegoers to often-overlooked areas of cinema history. Presenting passionate stories of revolution, identity, agency, forgiveness, and exclusion, this collector’s set gathers six of those important works, from Brazil (Pixote), Cuba (Lucía), Indonesia (After the Curfew), Iran (Downpour), Mauritania (Soleil Ô), and Mexico (Dos monjes). Each title is a pathbreaking contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.
The Naked City (Available September 8)
“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film—and this is one of them. Master noir craftsmanJules Dassinand newspaperman-cum-producerMark Hellinger’s dazzling police procedural,The Naked City, was shot entirely on location in New York. Influenced as much by Italian neorealism as it is by American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir, living and breathing in the promises and perils of the Big Apple, from its lowest depths to its highest skyscrapers.
Brute Force (Available September 8)
As hard-hitting as its title,Brute Forcewas the first ofJules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well.Burt Lancasteris the timeworn Joe Collins, who, along with his fellow inmates, lives under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey (a rivetingHume Cronyn). Only Collins’s dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey’s chains? Matter-of-fact and ferocious,Brute Forcebuilds to an explosive climax that shows the lengths men will go to when fighting for their freedom.
