The leaves are falling, the weather’s getting chillier, and those cable-knit sweaters are crying out for us to wear them — that can only mean two things: Fall and fall movie watching season. And with all of us spending a bit more time indoors, it’s time to fire up our 4K players and give them something to practice on. Luckily, The Criterion Collection hears our clarion call each fall and puts on their biannual flash sale, in which all 4K UHDs, Blu-rays, and DVDs are 50% off.

Many a hardened cinephile saves up for and plans out their flash sale carts (Lord knows I do, and I salivate every time they send Criterion Channel subscribers one of those vaunted coupon codes). But in case you’re still stumped for selections, here are a few of their most exciting new releases (and some re-releases, and one big box in some fancy packaging) to choose them:

Altered States

Ken Russell is no stranger to the abject and the strange, but perhaps one of his most psychedelic works just got a new 4K treatment this month — Altered States, his 1980 head-trip about a researcher (William Hurt) who begins to test his own psychological experiments on himself. Cue the crazy surrealist imagery, unconventional sexual politics, and heart-on-sleeve emotional register that Russell and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky are known for.

Order here.

Born in Flames

A rebel yell of DIY Afrofuturist imagery, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames positions queer Black women as the vanguard of a resistance against a post-apocalyptic American dystopia, and tells the story through a wild mix of real footage and news broadcasts. Its presentation is thought-provoking, radical, and deeply feminist, and touches on ideas of surveillance and revolution that, as we watch our own social fabric crumble in record time, becomes more relevant than ever.

Order here.

Sorcerer

William Friedkin’s rain-soaked remake of The Wages of Fear is one of the tensest, most ticking-clock journeys into hell the New Hollywood era gave us, and it’s thrilling to see Criterion give us a haunting new restoration in 4K. Underappreciated in its time (sucks to open across Star Wars) but building a cult appreciation in subsequent years, Sorcerer benefits from the ratchet-tight tension Friedkin infuses in every frame, the taut, desperate performances of its cast (led by a beautifully intense Roy Scheider), and Tangerine Dream’s waking-nightmare synth score. It’s a forgotten classic for a reason, and the Criterion set — with the full doc Friedkin Uncut from 2018, convos with Friedkin and other filmmakers like James Gray and Nicolas Winding Refn, archival interviews, and a killer essay by the great Justin Chang — is a must-buy for all you Friedheads.

Order here.

This Is Spinal Tap

It’s always a treat for one of the earliest spine numbers to finally make its way to Blu-ray, and Rob Reiner’s gut-busting, pioneering “rockumentary” This is Spinal Tap comes our way in 4K just in time for the sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, to release earlier this year. Even if that one feels like a bit of a middling victory lap, it’s a good excuse to return to the ’80s classic, which kicked off a cottage industry for Christopher Guest et al.’s style of deadpan yuks. Even without the features, which include 98 minutes of outtakes and a bevy of interviews and concert footage (all with Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer in character as Tap), the disk would still be worth it for the joke-a-minute gags of the film itself.

Order here.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

While Twin Peaks is arguably the late, great David Lynch’s magnum opus, its interstitial film, the prequel Fire Walk With Me, is often considered by some to be his most mournful, humanist work, and the crowning chapter of the series (which spanned two seasons in the 1990s and one follow-up on Showtime in 2017). Here, Lynch charts the tragic final days of Laura Palmer, the victim whose murder kicks off the series proper, with a suitably surrealistic tale that transforms her deeply human search for meaning into a waking nightmare. While the Blu-ray isn’t that old, this new 4K transfer makes the work feel hazier yet crisper than ever, and all of the original disk’s features, from interviews to the entirety of The Missing Pieces, are here. A must for Lynch completists.

Order here.

The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years

Okay, any Criterion collector worth their salt likely has more than a few of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre in their collection already. But if you have a lot of them to catch up on, or you just want to spend money on a suitably mannered box set befitting the filmmaker’s precise, quirky aesthetic (or there’s a film fan you just want to treat for the holidays), this whopping 20-disk set is full of everything from new 4K masters of each film (from Bottle Rocket to The French Dispatch). No Phoenician Scheme, but I guess that’ll be for the next big set twenty-five years from now.

Order here.

Withnail & I / How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Bruce Robinson’s one-two punch of British cultural anxieties number among my favorite films, most of all the ribald, anarchic Withnail & I — a classic of counterculture dialogue and teeming with English class tensions. The central pair (Richard E. Grant, in a career-defining role and even more iconic long coat; Paul McGann, offering the hyperventilating perspective of Robinson’s own life experience) are a joy to watch, even as they try to corral bulls and fill the bare cupboards of their country getaway, each line immensely quotable in their Shakespearean vulgarity.

Add to that Robinson’s lesser-regarded, but still inventive, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, which sends Grant down a Cronenbergian misadventure as an ad exec whose nervous breakdown manifests as a tiny boil of a second head that grows on his neck. Both are great indictments of the end of the hippie counterculture of the ’70s, and the vagaries of the Reaganite ’80s, and it’s a joy to see them return to the collection in beautiful Blu-rays that are comparatively sparse, but worth the bucks anyways.

Order Withnail & I here and Advertising here.