Best of Criterion’s New Releases: July 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, July 2024:
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Year: 1973
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Stars: James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Jason Robards, Slim Pickens, Bob Dylan
Rating: R
A battered and bruised masterpiece. Despite egregious studio interference during post-production and the fact that there is no definitive cut of the movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is Peckinpah’s most heartfelt, romantic, bitter and saddest of all his works. Based more on the outlaw legend than historical reality, the director and cinematographer John Coquillon infuse every frame with a profound sense of loss, as the once wild West becomes ever more tamed by the apparatus of civilization and the outlaws make way for the legalized violence of politicians, bankers and the marshals. Ranchers demand that their investments are secure and hire Garrett to convince the anarchistic Billy to flee the territories with his gang. Barbed wire stretches across the rugged landscape, foreshadowing the inevitable clomping of state-sanctioned progress. The smart thing for Billy to do is to get out of the way. But he refuses and Garrett is forced to hunt him down, their showdown resonating with a mythic emotional power. In Peckinpah’s updating of outlaw lore for the freaky counterculture 1970s, he cast Bob Dylan in a co-starring role, and the musician also composed and performed the score. The movie showcases a number of excellent character actors—Slim Pickens, Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, et al.—who made their names in the genre, here in smaller, though significant, roles. A ragged, stoned, angry yet elegiac ode to the West … as it should be. —D.H.
Le Samouraï
Year: 1967
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Stars: Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Cathy Rosier
Rating: NR
Flip a coin to decide whether Le Samourai or Le Doulos is the coolest Melville film of them all; odds are, it’ll land upright, because that’s an impossible distinction to make. Melville films pulse with ineffable cool. In the case of Le Samourai, proof of Melville’s dedication to brewing substance from style lies in the film’s enormous influence: Everybody from Jim Jarmusch to Madonna recognizes Melville’s flair, and they’ve been imitating it, or mixing it with their own trademarks, for years. There are hitmen movies, and there are hitmen movies, and standing head and shoulders above most of them there’s Le Samourai, a movie that makes the lethal discipline of knocking people off into fine art. It’s as much a study of human isolation as it is a paean to the magnetic pull of a sleek aesthetic. —A.C.
Black God, White Devil
Year: 1964
Director: Glauber Rocha
Stars: Othon Bastos, Maurício do Valle, Yoná Magalhães, Geraldo Del Rey
Rating: NR
Heat takes no prisoners. This universal truth is as veracious in the unairconditioned Boston apartment from which I write this in the dead of summer, as it is in the Brazilian sertão where Black God, White Devil takes place. Or perhaps I exaggerate my own plight by comparing it to that of the characters in filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s seminal classic. After all, there’s no escaping the heat of the stark desert in Rocha’s film, untouched by the urban developments that had by then reached Brazil’s major cities. If the heat in prototypical American Westerns reflected settlers’ valiance amid the harsh and unfamiliar new frontier, the punishing heat in Black God, White Devil serves as its inverse, reflecting the hardships of Brazilians neglected by their nation and abused at the hands of landowners. Black God, White Devil tells the story of the ranch hand Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey) and his wife Rosa (Yoná Magalhães), who struggle to make ends meet in the hinterlands which form the country’s northeastern region. Manoel hopes to buy his own plot of land, but ends up killing his boss after the latter tries cheating him of his earnings. Pursued by authorities, the couple venture deeper into the desert where they join forces with two leaders who preach revolutionary ideals, promising the desperate Manoel an escape from poverty. A benchmark of modern Brazilian film, Black God, White Devil is notable for many reasons, not least its presence in the country’s Cinema Novo movement. A major proponent of this movement was Rocha himself, who in 1964 published his seminal “Aesthetics of Hunger” essay, making the case for a new national cinema that catered to the average Brazilian instead of placating foreigners who viewed Latin American society as unsophisticated without understanding their plight. Rocha’s manifesto argued that it was natural and not primitive for colonized populations to resort to violence during times of desperation; it is through this lens that the transgressive violence in Black God, White Devil is best understood. Black God, White Devil and the work of Rocha remains prescient in the 21st century, as ideological purity and extremism continue to threaten the fabric of not just Brazil, but the entire American continent—not least of all, the United States. As surely as the sun rises, demagogues continue to take advantage of us.–Ursula Muñoz S.
Perfect Days
Year: 2023
Director: Wim Wenders
Stars: Kôji Yakusho, Yumi Asô, Tokio Emoto
Rating: NR
Actor and recently christened Cannes Film Festival award-winner Koji Yakusho introduced my New York Film Festival screening of his new Wim Wenders-helmed film, Perfect Days (which shares its name with the Lou Reed song it samples) with a plea. He implored us to make use of Tokyo’s magnificent public restrooms if we were ever to visit the city. I was struck not only by the multitude of public restrooms ready for use at a moment’s notice in Tokyo, but the quality of these restrooms. I digress—because in real life these same public restrooms might not have a person like Hirayama (Yakusho) to take care of them. Hirayama is a quiet, solitary man who revels in the bare-bones simplicity of his life, happy to wake up before the sun creeps out and start his day of making toilet bowls sparkle. Hirayama chooses his words so carefully that most of the time he does not speak at all, especially when paired with his motormouthed “Tokyo Toilet” cohort Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who practically speaks for him, but establishes Hirayama’s persistent peace of mind. When Hirayama is not spending the bulk of his time tending to bathrooms, he’s taking photos of the sun, peeking behind the trees, with an old Olympia film camera, or showering at the public bathhouse, or digging up saplings to repot in his home, or listening to his ancient cassette tapes of Lou Reed and Nina Simone. But the rhythm of the man’s tranquil day-to-day is interrupted when his teenage niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) drops by his tiny apartment for an unannounced visit, having run away from her mother, Hirayama’s estranged, wealthy sister. Though directed by the German Wenders, Perfect Days’ co-writer, Takuma Takasaki, admitted before my screening that the film made him appreciate Tokyo, a city he knows and loves very well already, even more. It’s clear that Wenders has an extensive rapport with Japan’s capital, and his camera (cinematography credited to Franz Lustig) lovingly paints the city as a place defined by its coexistence between urbanism and nature—like Hirayama attempting to coexist in simplicity against the demands of the 2020s. Still, there is despair and heartache tucked into the sentimental folds of the frame, all of which is carried masterfully by the great Koji Yakusho. Perfect Days revels in its ambient minimalism as much as its own protagonist, though something is missing. One might ask for more from Perfect Days, a film that finds itself a bit too understated in its understatement. But sometimes it is just nice to be reminded that there are pockets of beauty in a world which does all it can to extinguish them—like finding a store that doesn’t make you buy something in order to get a code to use the bathroom.—Brianna Zigler
Risky Business
Year: 1983
Director: Paul Brickman
Stars: Tom Cruise, Rebecca De Mornay, Joe Pantoliano, Curtis Armstrong
Rating: R
Runtime: 98 minutes
Tom Cruise’s breakout film is as fittingly deceptive as its star’s abilities. A teen sex comedy, shot by director Paul Brickman and cinematographers Bruce Surtees and Reynaldo Villalobos like a dreamy slasher film. A movie about a rich little yuppie becoming a pimp, suffused with Brickman’s pointed class critique. Naturally, the movie that made Cruise a star isn’t quite what it seems, just like Cruise was never just the handsome, pantsless high schooler lip-syncing to “Old Time Rock and Roll.” In fact, that song’s juxtaposition with Tangerine Dream’s synth score creates the charming friction that sums up Risky Business—and that makes it so winning despite its ludicrous premise. Cruise teeters between easy emasculation and inhumanly confident grins, the very notion of sex seeming foreign and terrifying to him. His deliveries are momentarily confident, yet constantly undercut by his own insecurity. Rebecca De Mornay picks him apart with ease, in part because Cruise is so good at being guileless. The arc he covers shows off a range that could believably hold cockiness, silliness and fallibility, a combo that put action heroes and romantic leads within his grasp. With a sharp script filled with zingers and a central performance that rightly holds up as a star-maker, Risky Business is ’80s suburban satire done right. Not bad for a movie that’s effectively a horny Home Alone.—Jacob Oller
Farewell My Concubine
Year: 1993
Director: Chen Kaige
Stars: Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, Gong Li
Rating: R
Runtime: 171 minutes
A similarly operatic blending of intense personal relationships with melodramatic shifts in geopolitics to its queer bunkmate M. Butterfly, Farewell My Concubine explodes this parallel into an unmitigated epic spanning four decades of modern Chinese history. Chen Kaige weaves the Dickensian rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-class-traitors story of two childhood Peking opera troupemates, Douzi (Leslie Cheung) and Shitou (Zhang Fengyi). Cast in the broadly feminine and masculine roles of traditional opera, even more specifically into the consort and king roles of the opera from which the film takes its name, the pair’s performances and identities become one over the years. Accompanying that shift is Douzi’s unrequited affections, which cattily turn on Shitou’s take-no-shit wife (Gong Li). The love triangle is less than its thematic components, much like Farewell My Concubine is less than the dramatic heft of its ambitions. Cheung in particular is stuck in a shrill role, attempting to hold up his point of the triangle through sheer force of will. It’s one of the reasons why the film works best when focusing not on any one character, but on the aesthetic of one moment. The brutal, abusive opera school of the film’s opening, where boys are relentlessly beaten as they somersault and backflip and stretch their splits, is gripping–perhaps in part because we know how many movie stars (like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung) came from institutions like this. As the film’s China takes its hard turn into Communist revolution, visual lushness turns to stark mania, and its depiction of this cold, distancing, dehumanizing thought reform is as terrifying as its stage performances are methodically lovely. The groundbreaking Cannes-winner is still a majestic-looking film with an impressive scope, even if those at its core remain more stock types than human beings.—Jacob Oller