Each month, Paste brings you a look at the best new selections from the Criterion Collection. Much beloved by casual fans and cinephiles alike, Criterion has presented special editions of important classic and contemporary films for over three decades. You can explore the complete collection here.
In the meantime, because chances are you may be looking for something, anything, to discover, find all of our Criterion picks here, and if you’d rather dig into things on the streaming side (because who’s got the money to invest in all these beautiful physical editions?) we’ve got our list of the best films on the Criterion Channel. But you’re here for what’s new, and we’ve got you covered.
Here are all the new releases from Criterion, March 2024:
The Devil and Daniel Webster
Year: 1941
Director: William Dieterle
Stars: Edward Arnold, Walter Huston, James Craig, Anne Shirley, Jane Darwell, Simone Simon
Runtime: 107 minutes
The devil is wily, and always ready to argue that you deserve the ill-gotten gains he’s offering. That Faustian narrative has been revisited in all sorts of contexts in the long history of Satan’s fictional intercessions on Earth, and it receives the 19th Century Nor’eastern treatment in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Jabez Stone (James Craig) is a young farmer fallen on hard times in 1840 New Hampshire, and his idle cursing summons up Mr. Scratch, (a plain-looking Walter Huston) whose emergence from eerily lit smoke and the panicked howling of barn animals leaves no doubt to his true identity. Jabez signs his name in Mr. Scratch’s book, and soon enough tears up his debt notes and becomes the richest man in the state. But when the devil comes to collect, Jabez wants out. It’s no good, of course—a hurled axe at Mr. Scratch’s head simply disintegrates into flames. When Jabez’s longtime family friend and politician Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) argues for the nullification of the contract, he tries to argue an American can’t be held to a foreign prince’s agreement. Who has a better right to American citizenship, Scratch argues: “When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck.” We’re all susceptible to evil, Dieterle argues. Its agent on earth is Mr. Scratch, ready to offer up a loan or a jug of rum to the unwary, and willing to bring it to a jury trial—as long as that jury includes Benedict Arnold and Captain Kidd, and is presided over by a Salem witch trials judge, of course. —Kenneth Lowe
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Release Date: March 17, 2023
Director: Laura Poitras
Rating: NR
Runtime: 117 minutes
Nan Goldin’s fingerprints are everywhere. The idiosyncratic photographer, activist and subject of Laura Poitras’ first feature documentary in six years is equal parts icon and iconoclast, an embodiment of what it means to hold two truths—wonderful and terrible—in balance: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Similarly, the film is structured into two intersplicing sections charging forward at a rate of devastation your tear ducts absolutely cannot keep up with. One section gives Goldin a platform to chronologically tell her life story. The other follows her years-long fight against the pharmaceutical reign of terror that is the appallingly inhumane Sackler/Purdue Pharma operation. They are essentially the same story, Goldin’s story, but one starts at the beginning and looks ahead while the other starts in recent history and looks back, the two colliding and bringing us into the present, where the Goldin-founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) is slowly but surely ripping the Sacklers’ mouth from the teat of the art world it so desperately clings to for influence. Goldin is narrating. An open book, sadistic charmer and seasoned storyteller, she has a dry, frank, true way with words, the kind of person that doesn’t need many to tell you what it means, a master in the art of phrasing. (“I brought him out and he named me Nan, so we liberated each other,” she says summarily of her connection to a dear, lifelong friend.) Known best for her slideshows, Goldin flips through hundreds of pictures and tells story after story—each one gripping, culminating, well-delivered, giving way to an eagerness for the next—often returning to her most famous collection of over 700 photos on 35mm from 1983-2022, titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Overflowing with candor, the photography presents a life fully lived, aiming to capture the universal impossibility in the push-pull relationship between autonomy and dependency. In between stories, Poitras builds out the generation-spanning criminality of the Sacklers through well-researched talking heads that illuminate the family’s cruelty. As Nan describes herself and her family—whom she defiantly defines as friends, the people whom she’s lived and learned alongside, not a romantic partner or biological family—they were “rebels running from America, living out the life they needed to live.” She says it of herself in the past, but All the Beauty and the Bloodshed shows that spirit still thriving, still moving, still turning the world around it upside-down. —Luke Hicks
The Runner
Year: 1984
Director: Amir Naderi
Stars: Abbas Nazeri, Majid Niroumand, Musa Torkizadeh
Runtime: 94 minutes
The Runner is often recognized as one of the first and most important films from post-Revolution Iran to gain attention outside the country. Madjid Niroumand, only 11 years old at the time, accomplishes one of cinema’s best child performances as Amiro, a young boy surviving alone on the streets after losing his family in the Iran-Iraq War. A loosely autobiographical telling of director Amir Naderi’s childhood, The Runner sees Amiro confronts his circumstances with conviction and an optimistic spirit, teaching himself to read and finding odd jobs with the local boys in his seaside town. The film is set in Naderi’s home city of Abadan, though because the city was heavily bombed in the real-world conflict, shooting took place in various locations throughout Southern Iran. A visionary of Iranian New Wave cinema who made movies before and after the Revolution, Naderi brings a fluidity and impressionistic style to The Runner, though his kindred affection to Amiro, as well as his home, flushes The Runner with an unexpected warmth. The looming threat of war is not lost amid the film’s documentary-like showcase of Amiro’s everyday antics, but the boy’s unwavering resilience brings forth a contrasting narrative that explores themes of poverty and war through his innocent perspective.–Sage Dunlap
Saint Omer
Release Date: January 13, 2023
Director: Alice Diop
Stars: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Valérie Dréville, Salimata Kamate, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Canterella
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 122 minutes
In the largely white seaside commune of Berck-sur-Mer, nestled in France’s northernmost reaches, literature professor Rama (Kayije Kagame) stands out. This is primarily a matter of her skin color, a rich, flawless pecan in striking contrast to the town’s oatmeal-hued locals. But there’s also the fact of her dimension, her statuesque frame. When she first arrives in Berck, people turn their heads. In the best case scenario, Rama’s steely beauty leaves them stunned. In the worst, they simply see her for her Blackness. Rama’s outsider status is central to her role in Saint Omer, Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop’s latest film and departure from her traditional mode as a documentarian. Like Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, Saint Omer welds fiction with fact; it’s based on the awful case of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2016 was tried for leaving her 15-month-old child to her death on the beach at high tide. Diop attended the trial, and the experience clearly made an impression on her. Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other. Like Diop, Rama travels to Berck to witness the trial of a woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old; here, that figure is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a student and Senegalese immigrant. And like Diop, Rama intends to fashion Laurence’s transgression into narrative fiction, as a retelling of the tale of Medea. Not that Saint Omer treats Laurence as a monster, of course. Diop peels back layer after layer of humanity in the film, confronting Laurence’s awful deed head-on and clear-eyed all while sparing her judgments made through blinders. There is a version of Saint Omer where the horror of the subject gives way to horror as a genre; Diop has instead gone for a straight ahead interpretation of a nauseating tragedy, where the only thing harder to swallow than infanticide is the realization that there’s very little anyone burdened by Rama’s doubts can do but learn to live with them.–Andy Crump
To Die For
Year: 1995
Director: Gus Van Sant
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Matt Dillon, Illeana Douglas, Wayne Knight, Casey Affleck, Kurtwood Smith, Dan Hedaya, Alison Folland
Runtime: 106 minutes
Becoming an influencer, a reality competitor, a blockbuster actor, a stage starlet, a broadcast journalist — the allure of simply being seen on the biggest available platform at the time drives the over-ambitious to madness, and those documenting them to stylishly told satire. To Die For sees director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Buck Henry spin the real sordid crimes of Pamela Smart into a flashy takedown of those dreaming of being on TV at any cost. By turns silly and slick, the tale of would-be newswoman Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman in one of her steeliest, most menacingly vapid performances) and the murder she coaxes from her underage boyfriend flies at us like a special bulletin. Melding confessional-style commentary from Stone with direct-address, on-camera interviews from those who witnessed her rise-and-fall (including supporting stars like Wayne Knight and Illeana Douglas) and more conventional narrative filmmaking, To Die For is awfully playful for a crime thriller. But that’s in keeping with the nature of the beast: Stone’s childish understanding of fame, visibility and, most of all, reporting, filters down into the sensationalized story filmed by Van Sant. Kidman’s cold, sociopathic performance is balanced out by her goober husband (Matt Dillon) and delinquent documentary subjects (Casey Affleck, Alison Folland), but Joaquin Phoenix’s stunted high schooler performance of her romantic prey never quite clicks with the rest of the movie. He’s just a little too dumb, a little too blank and a little too driven by animal desire, especially when the rest of the movie is such a heightened, madcap examination of narcissism and the industries that encourage it.–Jacob Oller