Another month, another array of Criterion Collection releases, and it’s a particularly great month of releases. First up, a crown jewel from the Howard Hawks’ oeuvre, the legendary screwball comedy “Bringing Up Baby” with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Audio commentary comes from one of the premiere Hawks-o-philes, Peter Bogdanovich, so that alone is probably worth the price of admission. It’s a classic you should know, and if it’s passed you by for whatever reason, now’s the time to rectify that mistake.
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Next up, the classic 1990s film noir “Deep Cover” starring Lawrence Fishburne, Jeff Goldblum, and Charles Martin Smith, from actor/director Bill Dukes. Another big coup for Criterion is the gorgeous-to-look-at 1969 psychological thriller “La Piscene,” directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin. It is a captivating tale of sexual jealousy and possessiveness, and 2003’s “Swimming Pool” by François Ozon was always seen as a film directly influenced by it (oh, and its essay is written by Playlist contributor Jessica Kiang so that rules too).
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Another major auteur adds another important title to the collection, too: Russian helmer Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” comes to Criterion, and in typical Tarkovsky-ian fashion, the movie is hypnotic, slow, and trance-like in its mesmerizing qualities. Finally, the collection adds director Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film “Working Girls,” which depicts a day in the life of modern prostitutes in a small Manhattan brothel (not to be mistaken with “Working Girl” with Melanie Griffin). Start saving now; details below.
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BRINGING UP BABY
Screwball sparks fly when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn let loose in one of the fastest and funniest films ever made—a high-wire act of invention that took American screen comedy to new heights of absurdity. Hoping to procure a million-dollar endowment from a wealthy society matron for his museum, a hapless paleontologist (Grant) finds himself entangled with a dizzy heiress (Hepburn) as the manic misadventures pile up—a missing dinosaur bone, a leopard on the loose, and plenty of gender-bending mayhem among them. Bringing Up Baby’s sophisticated dialogue, spontaneous performances, and giddy innuendo come together in a whirlwind of comic chaos captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brio by director Howard Hawks.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• New video essay on actor Cary Grant by author Scott Eyman
• New interview about cinematographer Russell Metty with cinematographer John Bailey
• New interview with film scholar Craig Barron on special-effects pioneer Linwood Dunn
• New selected-scene commentary about costume designer Howard Greer with costume historian Shelly Foote
• Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, a 1977 documentary by Hans-Christoph Blumenberg featuring the director’s last filmed interview
• Audio interview from 1969 with Grant
• Audio excerpts from a 1972 conversation between Hawks and Bogdanovich
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley
1938 • 102 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
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DEEP COVER
Film noir hits the mean streets of 1990s Los Angeles in this stylish and subversive underworld odyssey from veteran actor-director Bill Duke. Laurence Fishburne stars as Russell Stevens/John Hull, a police officer who goes undercover as the partner of a dangerously ambitious cocaine trafficker (Jeff Goldblum) in order to infiltrate and bring down a powerful Latin American drug ring operating in LA. But the further Stevens descends into this ruthless world of money, violence, and power, the more disillusioned he becomes—and the harder to make out the line between right and wrong, crime and justice. Steeped in shadowy, neon-soaked atmosphere and featuring Dr. Dre’s debut solo single, this unsung gem of the nineties’ Black cinema explosion delivers a riveting character study and sleek action thrills alongside a furious moral indictment of America and the devastating failures of the war on drugs.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with director Bill Duke
• New conversation between film scholars Racquel J. Gates and Michael B. Gillespie about Deep Cover’s place within both the Black film boom of the early 1990s and the noir genre
• New conversation between scholar Claudrena N. Harold and professor, DJ, and podcaster Oliver Wang about the film’s title track and its importance to the history of hip-hop
• Panel discussion from 2018 featuring Duke and Fishburne and moderated by film critic Elvis Mitchell
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by Gillespie
1992 • 107 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
LA PISCINE
The bright sun of the French Riviera is deceptive in this languorously alluring exercise in slow-burn suspense from thriller specialist Jacques Deray and legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. Ten years after their breakup, one of European cinema’s most iconic real-life couples, Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, reunited for this film, bringing a palpable erotic chemistry to their performances as the bronzed and beautiful vacationers whose blissed-out summer holiday on the Côte d’Azur is interrupted by the arrival of an old acquaintance (Maurice Ronet) and his eighteen-year-old daughter (Jane Birkin)—unleashing a gathering tidal wave of sexual tension, jealousy, and sudden violence. A paragon of 1960s modernist cool thanks to effortlessly chic clothes and a loungy Michel Legrand score, La piscine dives deep to reveal sinister undercurrents roiling beneath its seductive surfaces.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• The Swimming Pool: “First Love Never Dies,” the English-language version of the film
• Fifty Years Later, a 2019 documentary by Agnès Vincent-Deray featuring actors Alain Delon and Jane Birkin, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and novelist Jean-Emmanuel Conil
• New interview with scholar Nick Rees-Roberts on the film’s cinematic and aesthetic legacy
• Archival footage featuring Delon, Birkin, actors Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet, and director Jacques Deray
• Alternate ending
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang
1969 • 122 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
MIRROR
A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer, a 2019 documentary about the director by his son Andrei A. Tarkovsky
• The Dream in the Mirror, a new documentary by Louise Milne and Seán Martin
• New interview with composer Eduard Artemyev
• Islands: Georgy Rerberg, a 2007 documentary about the cinematographer
• Archival interviews with Tarkovsky and screenwriter Alexander Misharin
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray and, for the Blu-ray, the 1968 film proposal and literary script by Tarkovsky and Misharin that they ultimately developed into Mirror
1975 • 106 minutes • Color/Black & White • Monaural • In Russian with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
WORKING GIRLS
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances nurturing relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Lizzie Borden, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2007 featuring Borden, director of photography Judy Irola, and actor Amanda Goodwin
• New conversation between Borden and filmmaker Bette Gordon
• New conversation with actors Louise Smith and Amanda Goodwin, producer Andi Gladstone, and first assistant director Vicky Funari
• New conversation with sex workers Antonia Crane, Daphne Nguyen, Selena the Stripper, and Jo Weldon
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author So Mayer and excerpts from a 1987 interview with Borden by film critic Scott MacDonald
