‘Anatomy of a Fall,’ ‘All That Breathes,’ ‘Girlfight,’ ‘Peeping Tom,’ and Sets from Ozu and Sembène Make the Criterion Collection for May 2024
As we are about to enter the heat of summer, the Criterion Collection additions for this month offer a wide range of options for film lovers who want to stay home and stay cool. The biggest title announced was Neon’s recent Oscar winner hit Anatomy of a Fall, from writer-director Justine Triet, which follows Sandra Voyter, a writer who must defend herself when she is put on trial for the death of her husband after his body is found lying the snow right outside their house. As the trial goes on, Sandra’s marriage and professional career is picked apart as we try to discover is she did kill him or not, with her son Daniel holding vital information that could swing the trail in either direction. Led by the fearless performances from Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado-Graner, Anatomy of a Fall explores a mystery that is ultimately less about the death of person and more about the hidden lives we lead, and how those secrets can come into the light to be our downfall. Winner of the 2023 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the winner of Best Original Screenplay at the 2024 Oscars, Anatomy of a Fall was one of the best films of the year in 2023 and should be in the conversation for one of the best of the decade so far.
Released in the year 2022 is our next film in the collection – part of the Janus Contemporaries – is Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, an environmental documentary that is willing to reinvent itself by blending lyrical storytelling while examining the reciprocal influence of animals and humans. Sen shadowed brothers Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad as they rescued birds from the increasingly destructive effects of urban pollution. By showcasing their efforts to save these birds, Sen was able to explore the brother’s work reflected humankind’s relationship to the environment, and that can bring dangerous and joyous results. Debuting at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, All That Breathes was considered one of the best documentaries of the year and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
The next two entries come from auteurs at their most raw or brutal, with Karyn Kusama Girlfight and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Girlfight, which premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, follows Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez), a young girl who feels like an outcast to the world around her that finds refuge in a rundown boxing gym. By finding this new sense of purpose, she trains day after day, channeling her strength, discovering a community that supports her and falling in love with a rival fighter. Rodriguez busted on the scene with this breakout role in Kusama’s captivating directorial debut that is an uncompromising, violent story of self-realization. Speaking of a movie that explores our relationship with violence, Michael Powell took a dark detour in his celebrated career in 1960 to deliver an endlessly analyzed, still-shocking piece of cinema in Peeping Tom. The film follows Mark Lewis (an excellent Carl Boehm), a photographer and filmmaker by day, and a serial killer by night who kills women and records their deaths. When he falls in love with his downstairs neighbor, Lewis’s world starts to unravel, as his past traumas come to the surface and he struggles to keep his darkness at bay. Peeping Tom is not for the faint of heart, but it is a brilliant examination of our obsession with trauma and the pain we can conflict on others as well as ourselves.
The two collections for this month come dive into some of the most powerful, personal work of acclaimed directors Yasujiro Ozu and Ousmane Sembène. In the late 1950s, Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds, this time in glorious technicolor and changing the film’s central location to a seaside paradise. By doing this, Floating Weeds elevates Ozu’s original classic beyond its original purpose, to make it more than just a romance but rather a tragedy within a slice of everyday life. In having both films together in this set, audiences will be able to see the creative evolution of one of cinema’s greatest directors as he uses the same intellectual property to develop into the singular voices we’ve come to know when we think of Ozu. Moving across the world, our second set takes of us to Senegal for three films by Sembène that were passion projects that tied his whole career together. With Emitaï, Xala, and Ceddo, Sembène used his name within cinema to create a trio of films about the urgent need for social change in his country, critiquing colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination within a resistance piece, a biting satire, and a controversial historical epic. By telling the truth, Sembène beautifully used the art form the way it should be; to entertain an audience and provoke them to fight for change.
Below are the special features for each other films from the May 2024 Criterion Collection releases.
ANATOMY OF A FALL Director-Approved Special Edition Features:
- 2K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New interview with director Justine Triet
- Deleted and alternate scenes with commentary by Triet
- Audition footage of actors Milo Machado Graner and Antoine Reinartz and rehearsal footage of Machado Graner and actor Sandra Hüller
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Alexandra Schwartz
ALL THAT BREATHES Special Edition Features:
- New Meet the Filmmaker, a new interview with director Shaunak Sen
- Trailer
GIRLFIGHT Director-Approved Special Edition Features:
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Karyn Kusama and director of photography Patrick Cady, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Kusama
- New interviews with Kusama, editor Plummy Tucker, and composer Theodore Shapiro
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Carmen Maria Machado
PEEPING TOM Special Edition Features:
- New 4K digital restoration, 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
- Two audio commentaries, one featuring film scholar Laura Mulvey and one featuring film historian Ian Christie
- Introduction by filmmaker Martin Scorsese
- Interview with editor Thelma Schoonmaker
- Documentary about the film’s history, featuring interviews with Schoonmaker, Scorsese, and actor Carl Boehm
- Documentary about screenwriter Leo Marks
- Program on the film’s restoration
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS / FLOATING WEEDS: TWO FILMS BY YASUJIRO OZU Blu-Ray Special Edition Features:
- 4K digital master of Floating Weeds, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- High-definition digital master of A Story of Floating Weeds, featuring a score by composer Donald Sosin,presented in 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio
- Audio commentary for A Story of Floating Weeds by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie and for Floating Weeds by film critic Roger Ebert
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation for A Story of Floating Weeds and English subtitle translation by Richie for Floating Weeds
- PLUS: An essay by Richie
THREE REVOLUTIONARY FILMS BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE Three Disc Special Edition Features:
- New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
- New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and film writer Amy Sall
- The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
- New English subtitle translations
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price
- Director Watch Podcast Ep. 75 – ‘The Parent Trap’ (Nancy Meyers, 1998) - December 13, 2024
- Interview: ‘Nickel Boys’ Writer/Director RaMell Ross on Reshaping Visual Language, Transferring Love, and Generational Storytelling - December 10, 2024
- AwardsWatch Podcast Ep. 265: LAFCA Thoughts and Golden Globe Nomination Reactions - December 9, 2024
2024 Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA) Winners: ‘Nickel Boys’ Named Best Picture, RaMell Ross Wins Best Director 
2024 St. Louis Film Critics Association (StLFCA) Winners: ‘Dune: Part Two’ is Best Film 
2024 San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) Winners: ‘Anora,’ ‘The Brutalist,’ ‘Sing Sing’ Earn Top Awards 
2024 Boston Online Film Critics Association (BOFCA) Winners: ‘The Brutalist’ Takes Five