From pristine new 4K rereleases to complete compendiums of classic queer filmmakers, there’s a lot to blow your money on over the next 24 hours.
It’s that most wonderful time of year — the leaves are changing, the wind’s getting chillier, and the scent of pumpkin spice fills the air. Oh, and for dyed-in-the-wool cinephiles like us, there’s the biannual Criterion Collection flash sale. The boutique outlet entices us every six months or so with a 24-hour flash sale on their website, which is currently going from now till 12pm ET on Wednesday, October 18th; during this period, you can lay claim to DVDs, Blu-rays, and 4K Ultra HD disks from their entire collection for 50% off.
In an age where streaming is contracting its libraries (or just not featuring anything before the 1980s at all), collecting physical media is more important than ever. But with more than 1,500 titles to choose from in their regular line (plus spinoff runs like the Eclipse series or their recent slate of new releases, Janus Contemporaries), it can be a little daunting to scroll down that intimidating list of important classic and contemporary films to see what might be a good investment (or, even scarier, a blind buy). We’ve got you covered for the Criterion October flash sale, though; here are some of the most exciting releases Criterion’s put out over the last six months.
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
While Akira Kurosawa is best known in the West for his pioneering black-and-white samurai pictures, or twisty crime dramas like High and Low, his late-career work is so innately interesting. Take Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, a vignette film split into eight parts and ripped from the aging filmmaker’s vivid imagination. Executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, Dreams feels like a great artist expressing every last sketch in his head, for fear they’ll never see the light of day otherwise.
Whether it’s reckonings with WWII and the nuclear anxieties of postwar Japan, or a bright, bucolic visit with Vincent van Gogh (played whimsically by Martin Scorsese, another admirer of Kurosawa’s). Criterion just upgraded the film with a gorgeous 4K restoration that takes advantage of all of the film’s painterly colors, so it’s well worth a purchase.
Buy it here.
La Bamba
Director Luis Valdez’s account of the life (and untimely death) of Latin pop sensation Richie Valens both elevates and captures the rhythms of the traditional music biopic. There’s the firebrand lead performance (a beautiful, soulful breakout turn from Lou Diamond Phillips), the push and pull between art and family, the supportive girlfriend, the jealous brother (Esai Morales, all blustering jealousy and misplaced machismo), the stumbling upon the career-defining hit song — it’s all there. But it’s presented with such sincerity that it never feels like homework, and the Los Lobos and Carlos Santana-fueled soundtrack glides you through Valens’ heartbreaking nosedive into tragedy.
Buy it here.
Drylongso
A graceful gem from the 1900s DIY-filmmaking era, the long-forgotten Drylongso gets the full Criterion treatment, and deservedly so. Elegant in its craft and potent in its racial politics, Cauleen Smith’s film follows two Black women building a friendship among societal chaos: one woman (April Barnett) suffers from an abusive relationship, the other (Toby Smith) sees the violence ripping young Black men from their world and chooses to keep them alive through the power of images. Despite its grim backdrop, it remains funny and imaginative, and visually creative — it charts a kind of holocaust America sets out for Black people, and counters it with the ways they, especially Black women, fight to preserve themselves.
Buy it here.
One False Move
Blissfully, Carl Franklin’s lean, vivid thrillers have already graced the Criterion Collection – see his stunning Devil in a Blue Dress for starters. But One False Move is almost as rich and incredibly potent on its own, a Southern gothic neo-noir about a trio of criminals (Michael Beach, Billy Bob Thornton, and a staggering Cynda Williams) whose paths intersect at a small Arkansas town — where a dogged sheriff (Bill Paxton) awaits them.
Fueling the trappings of the crime road movie and the neo-noir with America’s embattled history with race and power, One False Move is a pulse-pounder of a thriller as only Franklin can deliver. And the cast imbue their characters with remarkable complexity, a group of wounded people hurting and clinging to each other the only ways they know how.
Buy it here.
Pasolini 101
On the occasion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 101st birthday, Criterion saw fit to release a gargantuan primer on the Italian queer fantasist, and it’s one for the books. Charting all of his earliest films before his controversial Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini 101 takes a chronological look at the man’s many rebellions — against society, politics, normativity, heterosexuality, orthodoxy, and even myth. With each film, Pasolini cycles between the sacred and the profane: the working-class amorality of Accattone, the frank discussions of sex in Love Meetings, neorealist depictions of Christ in The Gospel According to Matthew, the transgressions of Teorema and Porcile. It’s a beautiful introduction to one of cinema’s greatest agents provocateur, easing you into the man’s obsession with religion, sexuality, and folklore.
Buy it here.
Petite maman
An unassuming but heartwarming modern fairytale, Céline Sciamma’s Petite maman spends a mere 72 minutes rolling your heart up into a little ball and ripping it to pieces. The film channels the grief of a mother (Nina Meurisse) losing her grandmother through the imagination and play of her 8-year-old daughter Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), who steps through a forest and suddenly finds herself face-to-face with her mother when she was her age (played by Joséphine’s real-life sister, Gabrielle). Powerful in the simplicity of its emotions and tender for days. (Bonus: Criterion’s release also comes with the similarly family-friendly stop-motion delight My Life as a Zucchini, which Sciamma co-wrote.)
Buy it here.
Thelma & Louise
The ending of Ridley Scott’s 1991 feminist road movie is already seared into the collective pop culture consciousness: Two women at the end of their rope (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon), frozen in time after driving their turquoise Thunderbird off a cliff. By rights, they should die; but Scott’s film doesn’t show us that. Instead, he and Oscar-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri let them die as they lived — on the run from bad husbands and the prison of an America that saw little else for them but homemaking and menial work. Instead, they became the Bonnie and Clyde of the ’90s, aided capably by an early Brad Pitt supporting turn and Adrian Biddle’s sumptuous cinematography. Even at the end of the road, these two women get to fly.
Buy it here.
The Trial
Fed up with the creative prison of Hollywood, Orson Welles found his late-career home in Europe, where he chose to adapt Franz Kafka’s swirling novel of corruption and bureaucracy, The Trial, in which a man named Josef K (Anthony Perkins, beautifully self-effacing here) gets accused of a crime no one ever identifies. With the same lover for deep focus and Expressionistic angles (master DP Edmond Richard aids him here), Welles imbues The Trial with all the workaday horrors of modernity — surrealistic and nihilistic in equal measure, a belly laugh in the face of oblivion. What a perfect time to restore this film and put it out, when modern life feels as inscrutable as ever.
Buy it here.
Walkabout
In the opening minutes of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, a pair of affluent white children (Jenny Agutter, Roeg’s son Luc) are suddenly left in the Australian outback by their unhinged father. From there, Roeg takes them on a dreamlike, nightmarish odyssey as the two struggle to survive, with the help of an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) who is himself on a journey of discovery — the titular walkabout. A symphony of gorgeous frontier cinematography and the beauty and terror of nature, it’s one of Criterion’s original spine numbers, now wonderfully updated for 4K.
Buy it here.
The Watermelon Woman
One of the great pillars of Black queer cinema, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman channels the filmmaker’s love of documentary storytelling and queer advocacy through a self-insert (Dunye) struggling to juggle her new white girlfriend (Guinevere Turner) and her investigations into the early days of Black queer women on screen. It thrums with ’90s-indie charm, peppered with Dunye’s signature “Dunyementary” inclinations and deeply interested in the process of making your own history. (Plus, the Criterion disk features a bevy of Dunye’s previous shorts, which are all well worth watching.)
Buy it here.