Best of Criterion’s New Releases: September 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, September 2024:
Repo Man
Year: 1984
Director: Alex Cox
Starring: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, Dick Rude
Rating: R
Runtime: 92 minutes
Repo Man blurs the line between “cult classic” and “classic.” On the one hand, the 1983 sci-fi comedy (if you could actually sum it up this easily) looks and feels like the former given all its ridiculous quirks. Take the opening sequence, for example, with a motorcycle cop getting obliterated by alien radiation when opening the trunk of a Chevy Malibu. Between the over-the-top special effects and the rough abruptness of the scene, you know you’re in for an unforgettable experience, the stuff that people form subcultures around. On the other hand, Repo Man exceeds the norms of a typical cult film through its deliberate craft. The film didn’t form out of a convoluted or futile effort from its director like, say, The Room. Alex Cox, fresh out of film school at UCLA at the time, knew exactly what he wanted from Repo Man, and he accomplished it. The result proves an exciting mash-up of varying genres and ideas, from a punk-rock manifesto, to alien sci-fi, to satirical and absurdist humor. Of course, the whole thing sounds wack, but it comes together nearly flawlessly—and could only be the work of a true artist. For that reason, Repo Man ultimately poses the question: What is the line between a “cult classic” and a “classic”? Perhaps this particular cult classic is simply a classic that Hollywood can’t get its head around. Perhaps it’s both.—David Roark
All of Us Strangers
Year: 2023
Director: Andrew Haigh
Starring: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell
Rating: R
Runtime: 105 minutes
In All of Us Strangers, Haigh makes clear that loneliness need not confine itself to physically desolate landscapes. The solitary, melancholy Adam (Andrew Scott) seems reasonably well-off, though he insists to his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) that he’s not a particularly rich or famous type of writer. Still, he can afford a nice apartment in a London high-rise where, still, he feels removed from the world. For the moment, he and Harry appear to be the only tenants in the new building, and Adam’s job does afford him the ability to spend his days at home, alone. He only meets Harry when the younger man knocks on his door in a flirtatious, drunken stupor, assuming (correctly) that Adam is also gay. Adam is working on a screenplay inspired by his childhood years, which has him thinking about one likely reason contributing to his loneliness: His parents both died in a car crash when he was only 12. Seeking to reconnect with his roots, Adam is drawn back to his old neighborhood, a train ride away from London, and is surprised yet somehow not exactly shocked at what he eventually finds: His father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), living in their old house, just as he remembers it. He is aware of the strangeness, and so are his parents; they understand that they have not been with Adam all these years, and that their renewed time with him may be limited, subject to disappear at any moment. The reunited family tries not to focus on this, instead having tea and catching up with Adam’s adult life. Are his parents ghosts? Transposed memories? Hallucinations generated with unusual calm and rationality? Haigh, adapting a 1987 novel just called Strangers, does not commit to one particular explanation – even when it seems like maybe he has. Yet All of Us Strangers doesn’t have the watery, wishy-washy quality of the more precious strains of magical realism. In its way, it is as clear-eyed and upfront as it needs to be. The performances are note perfect, as they must be with such a small cast. For all its open-heartedness, All of Us Strangers doesn’t peddle easy uplift. The movie suggests that loneliness, isolation or ostracization – whether created by circumstance or intolerance – don’t heal like normal physical wounds, and that all the time in the world given over to that process wouldn’t necessarily feel like enough. A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.–Jesse Hassenger
The Long Good Friday
Year: 1980
Director: John Mackenzie
Starring: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Eddie Constantine, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thompson, Paul Freeman, Pierce Brosnan
Rating: R
Runtime: 114 minutes
Bob Hoskins breaks out as a feisty, ambitious barrel of a proto-Soprano in the intensely British gangster film The Long Good Friday. Hoskins plays Harold, a potent little London fireball looking to complete the move from “thug done good” to “legitimate businessman who never talks about his start.” The only problem is that someone keeps stabbing, shooting, and bombing his loved ones and employees. And when the Americans are in town too! How embarrassing. Bolstered by John Mackenzie’s kinetic, hard-nosed style, Francis Monkman’s ripping synth-and-sax score and Hoskins’ bulldog performance (softened only briefly by his moll Helen Mirren), the crime thriller is a searing whirlwind, throwing us into disarray as quickly and easily as its central mafiosos. Sprinkled with Barrie Keeffe’s bantery dialogue and rife with political tension—the Irish and Black immigrants are both suspect in this conservative land of crooked middle-managers—The Long Good Friday defines its era through its underworld. Here the ’70s come to a stinking, gaudy end, one where boats reek of booze, fancy dinners seem rotted, the city’s dereliction sings a siren song to profiteers and dangling from a meat hook is all that awaits you at the end of the day.—Jacob Oller
Totally F***ed Up
Year: 1993
Director: Gregg Araki
Starring: James Duval, Roko Belic, Susan Behshid, Jenee Gill, Gilbert Luna, Lance May
Rating: NR
Runtime: 78 minutes
Direct address and teen angst collide in Gregg Araki’s collage of screw-ups, Totally F***ed Up. The first film in Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy is the most scrappy, experimental in form and overtly depressed about the state of queerness in the late ’80 and early ’90s. It’s also one of the most enjoyable, simply because it hasn’t quite gone off the deep end into affected irony. Sure, the ultra-L.A. dialogue still makes the teens sound like they just mugged Valley Girl for drug money, but era-appropriate signifiers (James Duval, heartbroken, scratches a lover’s name off his speed dial) keep its otherwise aloof surfers of the counterculture grounded. An angry film filled with wooden youths mostly delivering their slang and disaffection in an eye-rolling monotone, Totally F***ed Up still thrums with DIY power, as its shaky shots and unflattering look at its locale come courtesy of Araki’s lived-in guerilla filmmaking. As homophobic violence and the dangers of raging against tradition pile up, the cynical takeaway isn’t that the kids are wrong— just that they might be doomed, even if they have each other.—Jacob Oller
The Doom Generation
Year: 1995
Director: Gregg Araki
Starring: Rose McGowan, James Duval, Jonathan Schaech
Rating: NR
Runtime: 83 minutes
To Gregg Araki, doom is a horny destination. Nihilism is an aphrodisiac. The Doom Generation, the unpleasant second film in his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, gets a boost in budget and spins the trilogy’s guiding star James Duval into childlike submissiveness for the duration of the id-driven road trip. Taking advantage of his purity are his profane, meth-addled girlfriend (Rose McGowan) and the loose cannon hitchhiker (Johnathon Schaech) they pick up after a knife fight. In their over-the-top and blown-out world, everything costs $6.66 at the ubiquitous QuikTrips of the soul. The only way to feel is to push taboos, whether that means blowing the head off a racial stereotype, eating your own cum, or getting killed by ultra-patriotic skinheads. Constructed out of all those in-between scenes in road trip movies, the drive-thrus and smoke breaks, in order to evoke a purgatorial sensation, The Doom Generation amps up Araki’s eccentricities (slang-centric scripting, off-handed acting) and uses its extra cash for a darker visual sensibility. Y tu mamá también would be scandalized.—Jacob Oller
Nowhere
Year: 1997
Director: Gregg Araki
Starring: James Duval, Rachel True, Ryan Phillippe, Mena Suvari, Kathleen Robertson, Denise Richards
Rating: NR
Runtime: 78 minutes
The final entry in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, Nowhere finally veers into overt cartoonishness with mixed results. James Duval, once again, forges through an increasingly evil L.A. with the soft ineffectuality of a confused puppy. This time, though, a space lizard is zapping his peers with a laser gun and his social circle has had their stereotypes exploded into John Waters-like caricatures of sadomasochism, promiscuous bisexuality and raging masculinity. Maybe the preacher on TV has a point. The most beautiful and strange of Araki’s trilogy, Nowhere constructs perfectly confining suburban rooms and a town of depleted natural wonder housing them. As the world ends, smoothed over into blankness rather than catching aflame as in The Doom Generation, the only way forward for so many is to casually ramp up their thrill-seeking. Their kinks, their addictions, their hormonal urges—it all runs wild in an L.A. that seems to be fading into nothingness. When Duval’s moon-eyed lover boy quietly wonders if true love can actually overcome, well, you can’t fault him for asking, but you know what Araki’s answer is going to be.—Jacob Oller
Happiness
Year: 1998
Director: Todd Solondz
Starring: Jane Adams, Elizabeth Ashley, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, Jared Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Louise Lasser, Jon Lovitz, Camryn Manheim, Rufus Read, Cynthia Stevenson
Rating: R
Runtime: 134 minutes
Taste is subjective, as is evaluating movies, and few movies are as subjective to taste as those of Todd Solondz, a guy who specializes in stories that, at best, qualify as “uncomfortably sad” and, at worst, as Happiness. “Worst,” too, is a subjective measure; this is an engrossing piece of work, emphasis on the “gross,” and whether you end up liking it or being repulsed by it, you’ll probably admire it for its casual depiction of Very Problematic Things™. You certainly won’t ever forget it. If the child rape, threatened rape, suicide, relationship entanglements and overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction don’t get you—the film is basically Hannah and Her Sisters, but infinitely pricklier and nauseating—then the final line, that affirmation of the adolescent male orgasm, certainly will. Icky as Happiness may be, its pervasive anxiety puts it over the top. Without it, it’d merely be dark, edgy comedy. With it, it’s something far more corrosive to the soul. —Andy Crump