Every six months, The Criterion Collection conspires to steal money from the wallets of hard-working cinephiles everywhere, as they serve up a 24 hour flash sale of 50% off all 4K UHDs, Blu-rays, and DVDs. Whether you’ve obsessed over their Criterion Closet videos, or had the rare chance to pop into one of their mobile Criterion Closet vans at one film festival or another this past year (including Chicago’s own Chicago International Film Festival!), there’s a chance you already have your wishlist handy. Even so, here are a few titles from the last few months that have dropped since last sale we think you should consider snatching up.

Birth

Between Eyes Wide Shut, To Die For, and this, the second film from Under the Skin provocateur Jonathan Glazer, Nicole Kidman’s messed-up-wife catalog is getting a lot of firm representation in the Criterion Collection. But Birth‘s out-there premise — a wealthy widow comes to believe that a ten-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) might well be the reincarnation of her dead husband — explores its taboos with incredible sincerity and richness. The Criterion set features a boatload of extras on top of its pristine 4K restoration, including a program on the film’s painterly cinematography by Harris Savides (RIP, one of the best in the biz).

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Burden of Dreams

We’ve all known Werner Herzog to be one of cinema’s most thoughtful, eccentric auteurs (that is, of course, when he’s not trying to learn TikTok dances or menacing Baby Yodas). As crazy as his films seem, especially his early collaborations with star/certified maniac Klaus Kinski, Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams cements that they were just as crazy to make as they are to watch. Charting the insane process of making Fitzcarraldo, Blank’s probing, curious doc soaks you in the sweat and heat and stress of its Amazon jungle setting, as spats between Herzog and Kinski combine with the gargantuan efforts of a crowd of Indigenous locals to hail a 320-ton steamship up a mountain and back down again.

The Criterion set itself is an ambitious effort, including a commentary with Blank, Herzog, and editor Maureen Gosling, deleted scenes, and more. The chery on top? You get more than the disk: you also get a book of excerpts from Blank and Gosling’s production journals, giving you even more context into the nightmare of this production.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Dead Man

Jim Jarmusch’s strange anti-Western is one of the man’s most idiosyncratic works (which is saying something), starring Johnny Depp as a hapless accountant who finds himself on the run out in the Old West. Running into Gary Farmer’s outcast Native, Nobody, he embarks on a spiritual journey that, combined with Neil Young’s oddball score, feels decidedly Jarmusch in its quirks and meditative nature. The Criterion disk features a 4K restoration that captures every grain of Robby Müller’s black and white cinematography, as well as featurettes like a Q&A with Jarmusch, Neil Young composing the score, an interview with Farmer, and (curiously enough) a series of William Blake petry readings from members of the cast.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Él

Luis Buñuel has gotten lots of love from the Collection recently, but a pair of recent restorations have allowed them to flesh out the catalog of the Spanish surrealist. First is 1953’s Él, which adapts Mercedes Pinto’s autobigraphical novel into a lover’s quarrel between a beleaguered woman (Delia Garcés) and her rich, but possessive husband (Arturo de Córdova). The auteur’s style is out in nightmarish force, and features the man’s signature blend of social critique at the vagaries of the bourgeois — not to mention a hefty dose of domestic melodrama.

In addition to the gorgeous recent 4K restoration, the Criterion disk includes a Jordi Xifra video essay on Buñuel, a featurette where Guillermo del Toro waxes rhapsodic on the man, interviews with Buñuel in 1981 and 2009, and an effusive essay from Fernanda Solórzano.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

House Party

Reginald Hudlin’s breezy, effervescent hip-hop comedy started a much-derided franchise (I believe we got four House Party movies, as well as two remakes?), but the original is way sweeter and more stylistically interesting than we gave it credit for at the time. Kid ‘N Play are a delight as a pair of best friends prepping for a big old, you guessed it, house party, and all of the hijinks they get into along the way. Will Kid successfully charm Tisha Campbell into bed? Will they evade the bullying bluster of rivals played by fellow hip-hop group Full Force? Will you be able to stop yourself from dancing to the killer soundtrack? Yes, Yes, and no.

The Criterion set leans hard into its dedication to introducing this cult fave into the Canon with enough features to blow the roof off: an audio commentary with Hudlin, new conversations and cast reunions, the original 1981 short that Hudlin expanded into the film, and an essay by Michael Harriot.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Killers of the Flower Moon

For a good long time, we didn’t think that Martin Scorsese’s most recent film to date, the three-and-a-half-hour epic adaptation of David Grann’s novel about the Osage Murders of 1920s Oklahoma, would ever get a physical release. But Criterion has saved it from Apple TV purgatory with a robust release that honors the film and its immense cultural impact (still steamed that Lily Gladstone didn’t receive a statue for her turn here). Killers of the Flower Moon is as powerful and impactful now as it was then, Scorsese leveraging all his powers as a veteran filmmaker to dive deep into the banality of evil. Whether it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s blinkered Ernest Berkhart, or Robert De Niro’s duplicitous William Hale, we get a front row seat to the ways White people convinced themselves that their theft of Native lives, resources, and land was divine right.

The Criterion set is incredible, with extras including a documentary on the making of the film, a documentary on the film’s final shot specifically, archival interviews and press conferences, and even a program on the cover art from Osage artist Noah Kemohah.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

PlayTime

Jacques Tati’s magnum opus, which took three years and heaps of money from the French comedy genius, finally gets its own standalone 4K upgrade for those who don’t want to shell out for the Complete Jacques Tati box set. This, of course, lets us luxuriate in every moment of Tati’s whirlwind, elegantly choreographed journey of his Monsieur Hulot through a perplexingly technologified Paris. Mid-century modern offices, television sets, raucously designed nightclubs, all of it is fodder for Tati’s wordless brand of whimsy. It’s a timeless classic for a reason, and the 4K set keeps all the features from the Blu-ray, and adds no new ones. But still, between the Jonathan Rosenbaum booklet essay, scene commentaries, the short film “Cours du Soir,” and more, it’s all well worth your money if you don’t already own the film.

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Salaam Bombay!

Filmmaker (and mother of NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani) Mira Nair’s debut feature finally gets the Criterion treatment (her followup, Monsoon Wedding, has been in the collection for some time, as has Mississippi Masala). Salaam Bombay! is a colorful ode to the titular city’s bustling street life, centered around a young boy (Shafiq Syed) who wanders around the city after being outcast from his family. It’s a beautifully humanist feature that shows us Nair’s innate empathy for her subjects, especially the young children cast in the film. The Criterion disk features audio commentaries (plural!), a convo between Nair and her composer, L. Subramaniam, archival interviews, and a program about the Salaam Bambak Trust (which supports the street children of Mumbai like those featured here).

You can order from the Criterion website here.

Viridiana

Buñuel rears his head a second time here, this time with the film that the Vatican denounced when it was released — likely due to its blasphemous take of a young nun (Silvia Pinal) whose faith is tested by the lurid designs of her uncle (Fernando Rey) and the poor people she is ostensibly supposed to dedicate her life to help. Buñuel’s films are always about the limits of idealism, whether political or ideological or religious, and Viridiana is one of his most well-known provocations. The extras are sparse here, just an interview, and an excerpt from a 1964 French TV show on Buñuel’s early career. But the film itself is still worth it.

You can order from the Criterion website here.