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:
ALL THAT BREATHES Special Edition Features:
GIRLFIGHT Director-Approved Special Edition Features:
PEEPING TOM Special Edition Features:
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS / FLOATING WEEDS: TWO FILMS BY YASUJIRO OZU Blu-Ray Special Edition Features:
THREE REVOLUTIONARY FILMS BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE Three Disc Special Edition Features:
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