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, February 2024:
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Year: 1971
Director: Robert Altman
Stars: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois
Runtime: 120 minutes
Robert Altman turns his creative powers to the Western genre, and the results are remarkable. Not only is the movie one of the finest post-classical Westerns, it’s also one of the best American movies of the 1970s and arguably Altman’s greatest work. Warren Beatty plays a saloonkeeper in love with a newly arrived British prostitute (Julie Christie). The two open up a brothel for the locals, and as profits soar, outside investors arrive to buy out Beatty’s business. He declines their offer and subsequently has to contend with assassins sent to finalize the deal and take Beatty’s business and the town by force. Altman’s usual cast of character actors all hit the right notes, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s sepia-tinged cinematography brilliantly evokes pictures of the time, dusty and hazy as if the images have been preserved within an opium dream. Leonard Cohen’s songs heighten the melancholic proceedings, tantalizing us with their lyrical insights into the inner lives of these lost souls. —D.H.
A Tale of Springtime
Year: 1990
Director: Eric Rohmer
Stars: Anne Teyssèdre, Florence Darel, Hugues Quester, Eloïse Bennett
Runtime: 107 minutes
Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series begins with the tensions of novelty. Spring — captured in pastel colors, blooming flowers and light jackets — unfolds alongside the uncomfortable positions one finds themselves in when ennui shifts into movement and, eventually, connection. Like once-dormant seeds struggling to penetrate their shells, the stifled characters in A Tale of Springtime poke and prod at one another in hopes of breaking through. The only reason Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), adrift in her own life, strikes up a friendship with the younger Natacha (Florence Darel) is because they wind up feeling isolated on the same party’s couch at the same time. The only reason Natacha, similarly alone, decides to set Jeanne up with her wishy-washy dad (Hugues Quester) is because she doesn’t care for his current girlfriend (Eloïse Bennett). As these selfish machinations unfold — as the group flits between lonely city apartments, filled with nothing but memories, and the verdant excitement of the countryside — their entanglement becomes all the more bittersweet. Teyssèdre plays the quintessential Rohmer protagonist with ease, her fluctuating desires and philosophical musings dancing easily out of her expressions. Her emotional whims and romantic feints are measured and realistic, growing not only from the amusement in her face, but the discomfort in her body. And, naturally, it’s all completely French. Lovely Parisian flats crammed with the art, music, clothing of life. Piano music, played from Natacha’s old recordings. Natacha is dating an older guy, because her dad is dating someone her age; her dad and Jeanne have a romantic encounter more focused on Natacha than each other. Their foibles and inelegant solutions aren’t big or desperate enough to fall apart, but they sting and sour familiarly — with just enough warmth left over to see them off to summer. —Jacob Oller
A Tale of Winter
Year: 1992
Director: Eric Rohmer
Stars: Frédéric van den Driessche, Charlotte Véry, Hervé Furic, Michel Voletti
Runtime: 114 minutes
Both the saddest and most fantastically romantic of Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons comes in the heart of winter. A Tale of Winter buries Félicie (Charlotte Véry) in compromises. After spending five years raising the child of her once-in-a-lifetime love — the chef/sailor Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) whom she accidentally gave the wrong address after their unforgettable romp — Félicie holds onto hope that he’ll return. Naturally the two men she’s dating, egghead librarian Loïc (Hervé Furic) and burly hairdresser Maxence (Michel Voletti), would rather she faced facts. While still deeply invested in the hallmarks of Rohmer (quietly walking, driving, debating, deciding between lovers), A Tale of Winter is uniquely literary among his seasonal tales. A mid-movie performance of A Winter’s Tale shakes Félicie to her core as she sees the Shakespearean connections to her predicament. Compared to the endless blathering of Loïc, the heightened drama of Queen Hermione speaks to the naivety still sequestered in Félicie’s heart: Why settle for anything less than magic? Véry’s earnestness keeps Félicie from being too annoying a character, her smile never betraying cruelty even when she’s irrationally jerking her lackluster lovers around. Practicality collapses in the face of faith, and the church looks most inviting during the dark, frozen days of winter. But Rohmer’s heroine doesn’t pray to God, despite clearly being moved after taking her daughter inside a cathedral. She prays to her own belief in a grand sense of love, persistent and bigger than books, businesses and the washed-out doldrums of “real life.” In her heart, the embers of her summer romance still keep her warm.—Jacob Oller
A Tale of Summer
Year: 1996
Director: Eric Rohmer
Stars: Melvil Poupaud, Amanda Langlet, Gwenaëlle Simon, Aurélia Nolin
Runtime: 114 minutes
Rarely has there been a dumb young guy who fumbled the bag as badly as the dumb young guy noodling his way through a summer vacation in A Tale of Summer. Apparently based on Eric Rohmer’s own experiences being a dumb young guy juggling multiple beautiful women on a scenic beach, this stunning, sun-drenched, hazy and lazy entry into the filmmaker’s Tales of the Four Seasons is one of his most relatable (and therefore, most frustrating). It’s not that the people and emotions explored in the other films in Rohmer’s quartet are far-fetched, but that the self-absorption of math grad/guitarist Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) is so painfully honest. As he attempts to have it all while denying that he wants anything, really, Gaspard is lost in a sea of emotions and logistics. Planning different dates and getaways with the different women in his life — his flirty friendship with local waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, gorgeous), his flighty pre-vacation lover Léna (Aurelia Nolin) and his musical fling Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon) — casts his would-be easy summer into a duplicitous chaos of his own making. If he could just choose, just articulate his desires and treat any of these women as human beings, it would all fall into place. It might be painful, but at least it would be honest. But Gaspard, gangly and brooding and dressed in dark colors, is almost a caricature of a younger man’s flaws, brought to life by an older man’s regrets. His frustrating wanderings along the idyllic Brittany beachfront, looking for something real — though he can’t articulate it, we understand that’s what his fascination with old sea shanties really is — are doomed to bake and burn, seared into his memory as he ages. Each of the women plays their idealized role perfectly, each inhabiting the version of themselves that will one day live on in Gaspard’s mind as he remembers that one fateful summertime. Summer loving, happened so fast.—Jacob Oller
A Tale of Autumn
Year: 1998
Director: Eric Rohmer
Stars: Béatrice Romand, Alexia Portal, Didier Sandre, Marie Rivière, Alain Libolt
Runtime: 111 minutes
Despite the romances running through Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, A Tale of Autumn is the only one that ever threatens to devolve into a rom-com farce. It never does, rather using the influence of the subgenre to add depth to its mature story of connection. Like a well-aged wine ready to be uncorked, its middle-aged lovebirds are warm, endearing and old enough to have developed into their own. Widowed winegrower Magali (Béatrice Romand) isn’t alone, but her grown children have left her to tend her vines; her closest relationships are with an old friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her own son’s girlfriend Rosine (Alexia Portal). The latter two independently scheme to set Magali up with a man her own age, their plots eventually colliding at a bright, crowded outdoor wedding in the country (perhaps the most tense scene Rohmer shot over the course of his tetralogy). Isabelle tries out personal ads, while Rosine goes for a quintessentially French tactic: Setting her boyfriend’s mom up with her ex-lover, an older man who happens to be her old philosophy professor. Naturally. The former is by far the most endearing, as romantic subterfuge begets a complex connection between Isabelle and the lonely, earnest Gérald (Alain Libolt). Rivière and Libolt have staggering conversational chemistry, and it’s not until the finale that Romand steals the show with her complex, wounded-yet-flattered reaction to what the women in her life have been up to. It’s funny, it’s romantic, it’s all a little wistful and jealous — if these characters were twenty years younger, it’d be a sitcom episode. As they are now, in the autumn of their lives, A Tale of Autumn flourishes as a well-earned tale of love, one made all the deeper by the uneasy baggage carried by those bravely still baring their hearts.—Jacob Oller
The Heroic Trio
Year: 1993
Director: Johnnie To
Stars: Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, Damian Lau
Runtime: 83 minutes
An absolutely deranged fusion of science fiction, martial arts, fantasy and comic book superhero tropes all mashed up into one unforgettable genre stew, early ’90s Hong Kong actioner The Heroic Trio isn’t quite like anything else. Newly minted Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh stars as an invisible, baby-snatching henchwoman who turns against her evil master, joined by Anita Mui as “Wonder Woman”–no relation to the DC mainstay–and Police Story series co-star Maggie Cheung as the shotgun-toting “Thief Catcher.” Look no further than Cheung’s costuming and character–fishnets and leather, Tank Girl goggles, chomping a cigar as she fires a double-barreled shotgun–to illustrate the level of campy parody being executed here. The comic book comparisons are inevitable, as the three protagonists possess undeniable superpowers, but the balletic martial arts and dreamy, unrealistic wirework recall wuxia classics more than anything in the Western superhero arcana, albeit transplanted into a modern cityscape evocative of something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This film is simply ludicrous in all the right ways–Yeoh even has a full fight scene at one point while holding a crying infant. You can’t go wrong. —Jim Vorel
Executioners
Year: 1993
Director: Johnnie To, Ching Siu-tung
Stars: Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh
Runtime: 97 minutes
A sequel to The Heroic Trio, Executioners pits the ragtag supergroup of Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui and Michelle Yeoh against nuclear apocalypse. Directors Johnnie To and Ching Siu-tung muddy both the plot and aesthetic of their grittier follow-up, blotting out any optimism with dirty gray-browns and obscuring any clarity with subplots and conspiracy. Like a good Aussie nailbiter, this one’s all about water access: After the bombs dropped, the water was all tainted, which means that the one company cleaning it up has nearly limitless power. The cartoonish wuxia nonsense has been toned down (until a final battle with the big bad whiplashes us back into completely silly territory) and Mui’s music drags the whole thing down to a slo-mo slog. The energy of The Heroic Trio‘s introductions and deceptions has worn off completely: Despite the return of Cheung’s rogue, Yeoh’s repentant killer and Mui’s martial arts master (now a new mom of an annoying little girl), their characters have lost some of their wild mystique simply by sticking around too long. There’s an anti-corporate critique running through the punkish film, but Executioners is a far less exciting watch than its predecessor — even if folks are still getting their arms ripped off. —Jacob Oller
Nothing but a Man
Year: 1964
Director: Michael Roemer
Stars: Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris
Runtime: 91 minutes
Michael Roemer’s era-defining masterpiece Nothing but a Man captures the realities of racial segregation in the Jim Crow South. The highly influential film centers around Black rail worker Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) as he confronts oppression in his personal and professional life. Major studios originally declined to distribute the film due to its unsanitized portrayal of racism, but a national re-release in the ‘90s brought more attention to the film, which famously became cited as Malcom X’s favorite movie. The strife felt by Duff often becomes visible in his relationship with Josie (Abbey Lincoln), a schoolteacher he woos at her father’s church. Accented by Roemer’s tight, intimate camerawork, the profound look at their marriage represents the weight of their societal surroundings on their partnership. Roemer’s own experience of fleeing persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany informed his storytelling, and his success in capturing such a vivid portrait of Black life in the American South stands a testament to his thorough research and his connection to inequality. —Sage Dunlap
The Roaring Twenties
Year: 1939
Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart
Runtime: 106 minutes
Created on the other side of the Great Depression, The Roaring Twenties comes at its time period with a humorous tenor, a breathless love triangle and, naturally, a bootlegging business as its central crime. Centered around three men who meet in combat during World War I, the film fulfills the same beats and intensity as most crime thrillers, but its extensive drama is more than commendable. Intertwined into one breathless noir, the sheer amount of subplots—some criminal, some romantic, some otherwise melodramatic—result in a timeless feat of entertainment. An underrated noir of the era, The Roaring Twenties‘ thrilling character dynamics and gang skirmishes remain intriguing almost 90 years later. At times, the film captures the Gatsby-esque glamor of the ’20s while shining light on its dark underbelly, not only through the literal crimes themselves, but in its commentary on post-WWI disillusionment and the roots of the Depression. —Sage Dunlap