While the movie industry seemingly buckles, Disney’s seemingly cutting back on any physical media anymore, and Best Buy is apparently ending its run of selling DVDs and Blu-Rays, companies like the Criterion Collection are staying the course. As usual, the boutique, cinephile-friendly company always aims to release and rediscover classic movies in the annals of film history, and they’re doing much the same with their May 2024 announcements.
READ MORE: Criterion Adds ‘I Am Cuba,’ ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ & More For April 2024
Celebrated Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène, known for 1966’s “Black Girl,” is getting his further due with “Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène, “a three-disc box set featuring powerful 1970s works by the trailblazing Senegalese auteur. Also on the way, Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated crime/courtroom/family thriller and North American breakthrough film “Anatomy Of A Fall” is getting a release, and so is Karyn Kusama’s “Girlfight,” a singular tale of a young woman’s path to self-realization starring Michelle Rodriguez in her breakthrough role.
Also coming in May: a Blu-ray upgrade of “A Story of Floating Weeds” / “Floating Weeds”: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu, a silent classic from one of cinema’s greatest directors alongside his color remake, and Martin Scorsese favorite “Peeping Tom,” Michael Powell’s still-shocking masterpiece of British cinema, now on 4K UHD.
Details on each disc are below.
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS / FLOATING WEEDS: TWO FILMS BY YASUJIRO OZU
In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds in color with celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and their son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. Together, the films offer a unique glimpse into the evolution of one of cinema’s greatest directors. A Story of Floating Weeds finds Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; Floating Weeds reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness of everyday life.
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
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS
1934 • 86 minutes • Black & White • Silent • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
Rich in backstage atmosphere and class-conscious insight, A Story of Floating Weeds was one of Yasujiro Ozu’s final silent films, and it displays his complete mastery of the form. With a vivid sense of character and the world of rural Japan, he sketches a poignant tale of family secrets, jealousy, and creative community, buoyed by grace notes of humanist observation and by luminous black-and-white cinematography that shows his spare yet lyrical visuals at their most soulful.
FLOATING WEEDS
1959 • 119 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
One of six sublime color masterworks that Yasujiro Ozu produced late in his career, the director’s second filming of his own 1934 silent triumph A Story of Floating Weeds represents the mature flowering of his style. Harnessing the full expressive potential of color, sound, music, and his exquisite compositional sense, he brings new depths of bittersweet feeling—tinged with an aging artist’s melancholic nostalgia—as well as a new air of expansiveness, to a story with enduring resonance.
PEEPING TOM
Having brought British cinema into exalted realms of fantasy and imagination, Michael Powell took a dark detour into obsession, voyeurism, and violence with this groundbreaking metacinematic investigation into the mechanics of fear. Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths—until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking Peeping Tom dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen.
1960 • 101 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
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
THREE REVOLUTIONARY FILMS BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE
Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms.
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
EMITAÏ
1971 • 101 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Diola and French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe’s patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army’s wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.
XALA
1975 • 123 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French and Wolof with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
An adaptation of Ousmane Sembène’s own 1973 novel, Xala is a hilarious, caustic satire of political corruption under an inept patriarchy. On the night of his wedding to his third bride, government official El Hadji (Thierno Leye) is rendered impotent and begins to suspect that one of his other wives has placed a curse on him. After seeking a cure from a local marabout, El Hadji must face the possibility that he deserves the infliction for his part in embezzling public funds and for helping to keep Senegal under French control. Adeptly combining elements of African folklore and popular cinema, Sembène indicts the hubris, entitlement, and opportunism of male authority figures.
CEDDO
1977 • 116 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Wolof with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.
ANATOMY OF A FALL
The closer we look, the less we know in Justine Triet’s masterful Palme d’Or–winning Anatomy of a Fall, an eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter (a transfixing Sandra Hüller), a writer who turns the material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration—or was it suicide?—of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. Tapping into the minimalist intensity of a chamber drama—and using intricate, elliptical editing—Triet constructs a mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead.
2023 • 151 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In French and English with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
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
GIRLFIGHT
Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity and deep wells of vulnerability as a young woman hitting back at society’s expectations and her own personal demons. Capturing the full emotional weight of Diana’s journey and the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion, Kusama crafts a singularly uncompromising story of self-realization.
2000 • 111 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY 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
