Best of Criterion’s New Releases: August 2024
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, August 2024:
Brief Encounters
Year: 1967
Director: Kira Muratova
Stars: Nina Ruslanova, Vladimir Vysotskiy, Kira Muratova, Yelena Bazilskaya, Olga Vikland, Aleksey Glazyrin
Rating: NR
Kira Muratova stars in, directs and writes (alongside Leonid Zhukhovitsky) Brief Encounters, a class-conscious love triangle dominated by inspired camera placements and a dashing performance from Soviet cultural icon Vladimir Vysotsky. Vysotsky plays the rakish geologist Maxim, the object of affection for both government employee Valentina (Muratova) and her young housekeeper Nadia (Nina Ruslanova). As Maxim follows his mining fortune and strums folks songs, reflecting the street-poet tradition of Vysotsky’s real career as a bard, the romantic entanglements collide with discussions of wealth, power, and…construction permits. Only a year after Brief Encounters’ release, the Soviet powers that be began a smear campaign against Vysotsky’s down-to-earth lyricism for being too realistic about common vices (and a little too free with antigovernmental sentiment). You get a sense of this, somewhat, through Muratova’s stark frames and intense lighting, though its her rambling conversations and nonlinear story structure that give the film its New Wave vibe. This all culminated in the film being censored and suppressed for decades, deemed dangerously defiant of social realist tradition.—Jacob Oller
The Long Farewell
Year: 1971
Director: Kira Muratova
Stars: Zinaida Sharko, Oleg Vladimirsky, Yuri Kayurov
Rating: NR
Cut through with teen angst, filmmaker Kira Muratova’s long-censored story of a young man named Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) attempting to break away from his larger-than-life single mom (Zinaida Sharko) is one of compromise, rebellion and discontent. With raucous, disjoined sound and overlapping dialogue (not to mention some of Muratova’s dreamy experiments with repetition and visual illogic), The Long Farewell is a modern slice of chaotic life, pushing back against the family unit as Sasha yearns for a freedom he can’t quite wrap his mind around. It’s not surprising that the Soviets shelved the film for almost two decades—regardless of its sentimental ending, this is an individualist film, focused on selfishness, ennui and disregard for the smooth operations of society at large. Sasha’s Oedipal struggle, drawn back to a preening mother who is , at times, less mature than Sasha’s playful peers, plays out discomfortingly, driven forward by Sharko’s fascinating, bubbly-sad performance. Vladimirsky, her foil, hides behind his barricade of dour glares and smug silence. Beneath both are depths soon to be explored: Sasha’s got a big, poetic heart inside his stupid-teen body; his mother’s babbling belies her compassion. As Muratova whirls her techniques around the pair, we fly haphazardly with her, the only grounding familiarity being our own relationships with those we left behind.—Jacob Oller
Not a Pretty Picture
Year: 1976
Director: Martha Coolidge
Stars: Michelle Manenti, Jim Carrington, Anne Mundstuk
Rating: NR
Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Rambling Rose) made her narrative debut with Not a Pretty Picture, evolving her nonfiction film work into a docudrama which interweaves a fictionalization of Coolidge’s own school-age date rape with the making-of process of that fictionalization. Michele Manenti plays young Martha, Jim Carrington plays her rapist, and assorted actors fill out the fringes of the friend group. The closest link to reality is Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s friend from the time, who plays herself. The fiction sections of the film are realist school drama, ’50s-inflected and full of snide teen talk. The moments where Manenti, Carrington and Coolidge negotiate how the rape scene will play out, how they will act and what their thought processes have been or will be, are phenomenally raw and revealing. Not only do Coolidge and Manenti (herself a rape survivor) show their steel through dramatizing this assault in all its grim detail, but Carrington—fumbling around his own ingrained rape apologia—must consider his own capacity for the assault in question. Culminating in a long, excruciating rehearsal scene where the attack is reenacted and reality pushes hard against unreality, Not a Pretty Picture makes its mark as a searing, insightful piece of feminist filmmaking. As Coolidge expresses her own fears, hurt, and disappointment around rape culture’s continuation in the time since her traumatic experience, we too are shaken by its persistence, perfectly recognizable all these decades later.—Jacob Oller
Real Life
Year: 1979
Director: Albert Brooks
Stars: Charles Grodin, Frances Lee McCain, J. A. Preston, Matthew Tobin, Albert Brooks
Rating: PG
With things like Albert Brooks’s Famous School for Comedians and his Saturday Night Live shorts, Brooks was already playing around with the mockumentary format, but he took things to new heights with Real Life, his first feature as a director. Works like This Is Spinal Tap or Modern Family, even The Truman Show or edTV, would likely never exist without Brooks’ story of a documentary film producer (Brooks, playing himself) who puts together a radical series that will follow a totally ordinary American family for an entire year. A spoof of the 1973 television program An American Family, Brooks’ film had its finger on the pulse before nearly anyone else, not only predicting that following real people would be vastly more interesting to audiences than following fictional people, but that by doing so show business would become so obsessed with making this “entertaining” that they’d turn it into something completely unreal. Real Life understood what reality television would become today. It rips open the artificiality of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Real Housewives of our modern world, and it did so back in 1979. Brooks recognizes that the second you put “real life” on screen it becomes something else entirely. We instantly see not only how this producer and his team warp the truth of this average family, but how the family themselves are also prone to manipulating their lives beyond any shred of authenticity. As the father of the family, Charles Grodin has sensational comedic timing, with his sandpaper-dry rhythm expertly utilized by Brooks, whose own performance is on the polar opposite end as his most manic and frenzied of his career. Somehow only ever released on a bare-bones DVD and rarely discussed, Real Life is one of our true undersung comedy masterpieces. If it was more readily available, scenes like Grodin’s veterinarian character being recorded killing a horse because he’s too aware of the cameras—and then essentially being tricked by Brooks into letting it stay in the show—would be regularly cited as some of the greatest comedy ever put to film. We’ve reached a point in our reality-saturated culture where things have probably teetered so far into meta territory that this approach has lost any sense of magic, but Real Life is meta in the very best of ways. The laughs all still play, from the broad jokes, like Brooks going to the gynecologist of the family’s matriarch (an ace Frances Lee McCain) and recognizing her doctor as the notorious “Baby Broker,” to the simple recurring sight gag of the documentary cameramen’s massive new-age cameras, which are essentially helmets placed over their heads that they have to hold up with both hands at all times. Watching these men hauling around such awkward equipment as they follow the family and try to duck out of view of the other cameramen will never fail to please.—Mitchell Beaupre
Mother
Year: 1996
Director: Albert Brooks
Stars: Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow
Rating: PG-13
Many of Albert Brooks’ early pictures center around his characters’ romantic relationships with women, and Mother starts off in a similar place. After finalizing his second divorce, John Henderson (Brooks) returns to his sad, empty home and—in a classic extended Brooks gag—meticulously maneuvers his one pathetic recliner and dreary little side table around his vacant living room, trying to find the spot for them that’ll somehow fix the hole in his heart. Seeking answers elsewhere, Henderson recognizes that perhaps the failures of his relationships comes from deeper down, something ingrained in his core. For the first time in Brooks’ career, he takes the opportunity to probe the dynamic with his mother. After being away from the acting game for over 20 years, Debbie Reynolds portrays Beatrice Henderson, with the film centering around John’s attempts to unpack his damaging history with his mother by moving back in with her. In the documentary Defending My Life, Brooks tells Rob Reiner how his own mother was an incredible singer who starred in movies with his father, but then put her career aside to raise children. Whenever he would talk to his mother about his work, particularly his appearances on Johnny Carson, he found himself wanting more of a response from her. Eventually it dawned on him that maybe she didn’t want to talk about that stuff because she always harbored some resentment towards him and his siblings. You can feel that personal conflict surging through Brooks as he directs and co-writes (with Monica Johnson) this story of a son attempting to use his mother to understand himself, only to realize that for the first time he’s able to see his mother as her own person—one with just as many, if not more, shattered dreams as him. Lest I make things sound too morose, Mother is also packed with some hysterical bits. Reynolds pulls out a several-years-old block of cheese from her freezer that seems to weigh 30 pounds, yet she insists it’s still in good condition because she froze it—just like the cheap container of ice cream she pulls out and the “protective layer of ice” that keeps it fresh. Like Brooks’ best work, there’s an aura of comfort and familiarity, of warmth amidst the neuroses, but there’s self-effacing acidity underneath.—Mitchell Beaupre
The Last Emperor
Year: 1987
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Stars: John Lone, Peter O’Toole, Joan Chen, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Vivian Wu, Lisa Lu, Ryuichi Sakamoto
Rating: PG-13
The last emperor of China, Puyi, spends his youth and young-adulthood in unparalleled luxury, is imprisoned by the Red Army, and becomes a gardener under Mao’s regime in a dazzling epic by director Bernardo Bertolucci. The photography is breathtaking, the subject is exotic and intriguing, and the history lesson is subtle as this film comes full circle, beginning and ending at the Forbidden City. —J.R.