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, January 2024:
The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apur Sansar
Year: 1955, 1956, 1959
Director: Satyajit Ray
Stars: Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee; Pinaki Sengupta, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Smaran Ghosal, Ramani Ranjan Sengupta, Charaprakash Ghosh, Subodh Ganguly; Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee
Runtime: 125 minutes; 110 minutes; 106 minutes
Pather Panchali feels like a product from an amateur. There is something very raw about it, with many of the actors appearing on screen for the first time and a lack of experience from the crew. For example, his cinematographer Subrata Mitra was a still photographer that Ray convinced to join the production. Great filmmaking sometimes occurs from great risk, and in this case a masterpiece was made. Apur Sansar actor Soumitra Chatterjee said during a Criterion Channel interview, “Experts will perhaps say that all of Satyajit Ray’s other films are technically superior…but Pather Panchali’s vitality and intensity are like an eagle swooping down and carrying our hearts up to the sky.” Each of the films explore different aspects of Apu’s life. Pather Panchali explores the village lifestyle and Apu’s relationship with his sister, Aparajito finds Apu and his family moving to Varanasi and Apur Sansar shows an adult Apu making his own family. Each of the films focus not only on the physical and mental growth of Apu, but also the brief time he shares with his relatives over his life. What makes The Apu Trilogy so memorable is how the lives of Apu and his family become part of us as the movies roll on. Roger Ebert once spoke about how movies are the great “empathy machine” that allow audiences to inhabit the lives of others. Even if you can’t initially imagine relating to this family from a small village, the great power of The Apu Trilogy magically brings us into a world and features life changes that all can relate to. That is the true secret of Ray’s cinema.—Max Covill
Blood Simple
Year: 1955
Director: Joel Coen
Stars: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams, M. Emmet Walsh
Runtime: 96 minutes
Blood Simple introduced the world to the cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen, and the world has been a better place ever since. The brothers, of course, went on to bigger budgets, Oscar victories and a variety of genres, but their writing and directing were already in top form when they made this stylish noir thriller. John Getz, Frances McDormand and Dan Hedaya are all excellent in the story of an increasingly bloody romantic entanglement, and M. Emmet Walsh steals the show as a sleazy private detective. But the real stars are the Coens, as they build on a nightmare scenario with taut suspense and a cheeky sense of humor. —Jeremy Mathews
Lone Star
Year: 1996
Director: John Sayles
Stars: Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Elizabeth Peña
Runtime: 135 minutes
John Sayles weaves a slow-burning, incredibly intricate reckoning in the Texas border locale of Rio County. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), struggling to escape the shadow of his late father, Buddy (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey), stumbles upon human remains and with it a 40-year-old murder mystery that spotlights racial tensions and suspicions of institutional corruption. As the sins of much hated Sheriff Charlie Wade (a menacing Kris Kristofferson) are laid bare, Sam wonders if his dear old dad was involved in the offing. In the meantime, he reconnects with the high school sweetheart (Elizabeth Peña)—fittingly, she’s a history teacher—he had been separated from because of their ethnic differences. In a town where blacks, whites, Mexican Americans and Seminole Indians have different takes on what precipitated the raging bigot Wade’s demise, Lone Star considers the extent to which cultures, politics and generations coexist, how they “come together in both negative and positive ways,” in Peña’s words, an upside-down societal fabric in which the majority is still oppressed by the minority. It’s intelligent, gracefully nuanced and resonant. —A.S.
Saute ma ville
Year: 1968
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Chantal Akerman
Runtime: 13 minutes
Chantal Akerman’s first film, Saute ma ville, is best understood in relation to one of the director’s feature films. A 13-minute black-and-white film she made while only in her teens, it looks rather like any other amateur experimental film from the ’60s and ’70s except when put alongside its big sister Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. An explosion is in fact exactly what Akerman infused into Saute ma ville, which came seven years before Jeanne Dielman and attacks the same problem but in a very different way. The literal English translation of its title is “Blow Up My Town,” so its end shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. But until its main character, played by Akerman herself, blows up a room at its end, the short is set in a remarkably similar-looking kitchen to Jeanne’s and she is tasked with making herself dinner. Without Jeanne’s need for rituals, the main character finds even this small task to be too much for her and gradually demolishes the kitchen. This fun can’t last, though, and she decides to clean up her mess…but she also can’t change her personality, and soon she’s back to trashing the joint again before setting a fire and putting her head on a gas stove. Akerman described Saute ma ville as “the mirror image of Jeanne Dielman” in which this person who doesn’t need rules to govern her own life blows its rituals to bits. But because of its end, Saute ma ville, is not a description of a positive way to live life, rather than Jeanne’s existentially loathsome one. It in fact ends just as badly, with self-destruction just as inherent in completely abiding by these rules as it is in trying to destroy them. Akerman also looks at the film as “the next generation,” where the character in Saute ma ville refuses to live the way her predecessors did and thus throws out all of these rules. It’s easy to see a parallel between the hard-nosed ’50s in America and the ’60s’ response to this in these films, though that’s probably reading a bit too far. A bit more derivative than her later works, Saute ma ville was largely inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierret le fou and didn’t yet have the formalist bent of her later works, which mostly is to say that it doesn’t look a whole lot like the rest of her films. It also doesn’t look homemade, though, and while it doesn’t have the kind of time put into composition that the rest of her works did, its way of aligning the audience with the protagonist against the kitchen through claustrophobic framing manages to make the short fairly effective nonetheless. The experiments with asynchronous sound, mostly made up of a weird sing-song thing, are typically sophomoric for short avant-garde films from the era, but isn’t too annoying. Though calling Jeanne Dielman a remake of Saute ma ville as Rosenbaum does is quite an exaggeration, the two films do work beautifully together to comprise a fuller view of day-to-day work in general and the kitchens women can be forced into in particular.–Paste Staff
L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée
Year: 1971
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Chantal Akerman, Claire Wauthion
Runtime: 32 minutes
Chantal Akerman’s first short, Saute ma ville, was an explosive enough take on female domesticity to earn actual funding for her second: L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée. Akerman sits around a French villa, listening to a young mother (Claire Wauthion) talk about her sex life, her evaluation of her own body, and other day-to-day topics while doing day-to-day things. Children and childishness is the thematic backbone of a film flirting with what will become Akerman’s quiet, dedicated formalism. “I Play at Being a Married Woman” is as revealing a title as the images within. Wauthion waxes hesitantly about her boyfriend, whom she feels motherly to both around the house and (perhaps unsurprisingly) in bed. Her child sings and counts and recounts fairy tales, maybe a more honest reflection of Wauthion’s character than the chores she’s stuck doing. Akerman is a sounding board, as much an object to stand in front of as the mirror that makes up the short film’s most effective scene. In fact, Akerman may have agreed on this point; she later clipped out the section where Wauthion, nude, critiques her physical form in a long unbroken take and created The Mirror. A languid movie uninterested in things like setting or narrative, L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée observes. Yet, placed in context with the future observations Akerman will make under more strict artistic conditions, her sophomore movie can feel like a limited proof of concept.—Jacob Oller
La Chambre
Year: 1972
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Chantal Akerman
Runtime: 11 minutes
Chantal Akerman’s relationship with studio apartments is legendary. Her first film in New York City, the short La Cambre encapsulates the isolation and intimacy of these one-room wonders in a 360-degree panoramic still life. The camera swivels in a full-circle pan, over and again, the only variable being Akerman herself, lounging in bed pounding an apple. The camera slows at time and hustles during others (even reversing course), but the unceasing movement is somehow more confining than a static shot. We’re always looking at the walls that keep us in, and the clutter that contains us. It’s lovely and personal, like any arrangement of a life’s goods, but our familiarity with the tiny home quickly breeds contempt.—Jacob Oller
Hotel Monterey
Year: 1972
Director: Chantal Akerman
Runtime: 62 minutes
Chantal Akerman’s first feature film, documentary Hotel Monterey expands upon her short-form examinations of location without sacrificing the intensity of its gaze. Akerman and her cinematographer Babette Mangolte explore all corners of the creepy, cheapy Manhattan hotel — from the rooftop to the basement to the rooms themselves (the occupants of which are filmed like stoic claymation ghouls — as they build out the personality of a place. And in looking so carefully, the women find ghosts in the hallways and spirits entering and exiting the elevator. It’s not dangerous, or even scary, but the film does feel haunted by the lives that’ve come in and out of this place built for temporary shelter. Silent and patient, Hotel Monterey breaks down the common into the uncommon — something the most effective horror movies bend over backwards to do. Akerman does so simply by looking, waiting, allowing us to bring our own experiences to the garish, lovely ’70s hotel. Like all good scary stories, this one has a hell of a kicker: The Hotel Monterey is now part of a chain, a spick-and-span Days Inn.—Jacob Oller
Le 15/8
Year: 1973
Director: Chantal Akerman, Samy Szlingerbaum
Stars: Chris Myllykoski
Runtime: 43 minutes
The droning, hesitant, English-as-a-second-language narration of Chris Myllykoski builds out an aural aesthetic of meandering monotony during Le 15/8. Chantal Akerman co-directs with Samy Szlingerbaum, capturing a fascinating portrait of depression where words melt into pure tones, and images of Myllykoski (mostly looking at the camera, smiling or crying) always seem in conflict with what we’re hearing. As the voiceover wanders in and out of ideas, half-telling stories or opening up about emotions, we are consumed by the drone—it’s almost as if the backwards speech in Twin Peaks‘ Black Lodge was being deployed to deaden us with its flat affect. And yet, there are thematic touchstones here close to Akerman’s heart. Her and Szlingerbaum’s subject is an ex-pat in a foreign city, getting by in a tongue that’s not her own (another angle to the clunky English) and feeling isolated from her peers. Where La Chambre and Hotel Monterey work through this international ennui through images of locations, confining and stared-at, Le 15/8 finally turns its gaze towards a disaffected woman out of place.—Jacob Oller
Je Tu Il Elle
Year: 1974
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Chantal Akerman
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Have you ever been left so devastatingly empty from a break up that you voluntarily lock yourself in a room, get rid of everything but your mattress and exist on a diet of sugar straight from the bag? A staple of avant-garde cinema, Je Tu Il Elle is a realist traipse through Julie’s (Chantal Akerman) season-spanning depression and desire that also happens to include one of the longest lesbian sex scenes in cinema history. Belgian director and star Akerman’s entire repertoire is baffling, hypnotic and singular, and this expectant, at times surprisingly earnest picture is one of her best at resisting any collapsing of one person into any one identifying genre.–Shayna Maci Warner
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Year: 1975
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Belgian director Chantal Akerman built a formidable edifice of domesticity in order to pull it down piece by piece, habit by habit, hourly ritual by daily routine. The title of her second film, a name and a location, reflects a submission to a time and to a place, and over the course of nearly three and a half hours, Akerman defines that name, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), through the ways in which Dielman—mother, single homemaker, occasional prostitute—fills that location, a small Brussels apartment of modest means, with the cooking and cleaning and mothering and fornication of a person trapped within the order and regiment of a society that doesn’t so much care for her as expect her to continue to uphold that order, all for the benefit of the men in her life, who make no attempt to understand the intricacies of what she’s accomplished. On the first day, Akerman establishes Jeanne Dielman’s quotidian, an architecture of perfectly calibrated chores, meals, joyless sex, vigorous bathing and thankless evenings spent with her aloof wad of a son (Jan Decorte), all of which she assembles seamlessly seemingly for him, and for no one else. On the second day, a few items go awry, Jeanne overcooks the potatoes and remainders begin to appear in the façade of her daily algorithm. On the third day, chasms open in the midst of her everyday pattern, Jeanne unable to fill that space with anything at all, because she has nothing save for that structure, no passion or personality besides the ways in which she coddles her progeny and basely satisfies her clients. In the midst of literal minutes’ worth of Jeanne sitting, staring, silent, Akerman introduces tension by default: When Jeanne Dielman can no longer be manifest through her methodical fulfilling of the mundane, does she even exist anymore? Akerman responds with violence, pointless and fatal—followed by more sitting, more staring and the bleak notion that the life lived within the walls of this film may not be anything more than a name, a place and a single act of humanity. —Dom Sinacola
News from Home
Year: 1976
Director: Chantal Akerman
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
“Why I’m Leaving New York” essays are always countered with “Why New York Is The Only City” essays. Throwing both into the blender, then staring directly at the final product, News from Home assesses not just NYC at a hyper-specific moment in time, but the timeless feelings associated with leaving home for bigger and (hopefully, you tell yourself) better things. Chantal Akerman’s return to New York is juxtaposed with all the letters her mother wrote her the first time she lived abroad. In these words, read by Akerman, are wistful, demanding, loving, self-deprecating emotions. In the images associated with them, which range from trucks rumbling towards their loading docks to subway riders forever caught in a people-watching time capsule, New York erodes in front of us. The world is flat, the sky the same grey as the asphalt, and the people pop from the grain with the same colorful intensity as the neon signs. Need and guilt bounce off one another, as do hope and regret. The comforts and familiarity of home are enclosed in each letter; the weather changes a bit, as does the health of Akerman’s family, but it’s all predictable and small. The uncertainty of urban life bristles back: Akerman’s job and housing insecurity make her hard to track down, and an unreliable correspondent (especially with a mother demanding such frequent mail). These elegant emotions often fade behind the city itself, shot as an aching and emptied center of purposeless bustle and devoted stagnation. The sounds of transportation (we ride boats, trains and cars) rumble along and even drown out Akerman’s voiceover, which becomes one of the most telling stylistic choices in the understated film. News from Home yearns for something that may have never existed, whether that was the New York of one’s imagination or the home that was never as comforting as it promised.—Jacob Oller
Les Rendez-Vous D’Anna
Year: 1978
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Aurore Clément, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Helmut Griem, Lea Massari, Magali Noël, Hanns Zischler
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Transforming some of the autobiography of News from Home into fiction, Les Rendez-Vous D’Anna brings the nomadic disconnection Chantal Akerman experienced as a filmmaker traveling to shoot and screen her projects to life. Belgian filmmaker Anne Silver (Aurore Clément) roams across Europe. As she travels from city to city, rarely exposing others to more than her answering machine message, her chance run-ins with other people are almost as unsatisfying. Whether it’s the impotent interactions with potential one-night stands and usual lays, or the chance flirtations found in the interstices of travel (a shared cigarette with a fellow train passenger), Anne’s life on the road is a series of disappointments. Or, rather, they were inherently robbed of the opportunity to be more. The cage Anne has built for herself, busy and always on the go, keeps her from being too close to anyone — even her mother (Lea Massari), with whom she shares the film’s most intimate scene. Sharing a hotel bed, nude, with her mother, Anne recounts her first lesbian fling. Not necessarily the most subtle situation but, especially shot in a high-angled stare that allows the recollection to play out in full, one with more impact than the series of men who dump their problems at Anne’s feet. A final, destructive sequence where Anne finally collapses in her “own” bed and listens to the variously peeved messages on her machine is an emotional mic drop. It would be damning, if only we thought that Anne wanted things to be different. It would be devastating, if only we thought she could live any other way.—Jacob Oller
Trainspotting
Year: 1996
Director: Danny Boyle
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle
Rating: R
Runtime: 94 minutes
Based on the gritty Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, this early film from the director of Slumdog Millionaire and Millions follows a thuggish group of heroin addicts in Scotland and features brilliant performances from young Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald and Robert Carlyle. At times funny, gripping and nightmarishly haunting, Trainspotting is not an easy movie to forget. —Josh Jackson
Mudbound
Year: 2017
Director: Dee Rees
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Garrett Hedlund
Rating: R
Director Dee Rees uses the uneasy partnership between a white family and a black family in postwar Mississippi as a bruising metaphor for modern-day America. In Mudbound, Jason Clarke is the patriarch of a recently relocated Tennessee clan that must work together with the Jacksons (led by Mary J. Blige) to cultivate farmland, but the poisonous economic, racial and social atmosphere surrounding them constantly threatens the crops they’re trying to sow. This somber, despairing film sees the world plainly: War veterans aren’t given the care they need when they return, bigotry runs rampant, and good people are outnumbered by the small-minded. And the performances are stellar—especially Garrett Hedlund, as a bomber pilot who’s a shell of himself now that he’s home, and Jason Mitchell as a black soldier who finds that America still won’t accept him, even though he fought valiantly for his country. —Tim Grierson