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NEWSLETTER - MAY?28,?2020

Announcing Our June Lineup

This June, the Criterion Channel celebrates Pride Month with a?lineup full of queer artists who have taken up the camera to expand?our understanding of desire, identity, and history. At the center of the month is Queersighted: Turn the Gaze Around, a selection of films that subvert the heterosexual male gaze and eroticize the unexpected. Other programs spotlight?Cheryl Dunye's brilliantly self-reflexive explorations of race and sexuality,?Gregg Araki's vibrant punk provocations,?Chantal Akerman's?restless experimentation, and?Jonathan Caouette's ingenious autobiographical documentary?Tarnation.?

And that's not all: June also brings a collection of Mike Leigh's acclaimed dramas, D. A. Pennebaker's long-unavailable?Original Cast Album: "Company," a twenty-four-film?survey of the Czechoslovak New Wave,?exclusive streaming premieres of Bertrand Bonello's eerie?Zombi Child and Nadav Lapid's audacious?comedy Synonyms,?a collection of Bette Gordon's bold independent films, and so much more.

Now check out?the full calendar!

NEWSLETTER - JUNE 12,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Queersighted: Turn the Gaze Around

For the second installment of Queersighted, a series from guest programmer Michael Koresky that views film history through a distinctly queer lens, we turn our sights to a handful of filmmakers who have turned their gazes away from convention, using cinema to eroticize the unexpected and subvert objectification.?In a new conversation, Koresky and food and film writer Mayukh Sen explore the work of artists from Jean Cocteau to Cheryl Dunye who have subverted the heterosexual male gaze.?Men looking at men, women looking at women: the result is, of course, pure pleasure.

Looking for a place to start?
Gus Van Sant's New Queer Cinema?classic My Own Private Idaho?stars Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix as a pair of wayward hustlers drifting through the Pacific Northwest. Then?Cheryl Dunye devises a brilliantly reflexive mockumentary style to investigate the intersection of race and sexuality in?The Watermelon Woman.?

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If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Criterion Channel, please reach out to channelhelp@criterion.com! We'd love to hear from you.

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
JUNE 25,?2020

Ask Jim Jarmusch

Our popular Q&A series with director Jim Jarmusch is back!

We are currently working on the special edition of Jarmusch's?Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,?which will feature a new 4K restoration, and we're wondering if you have any questions you would like answered about the film.

We'll be accepting all of your questions from now until July 5 and sending the most thoughtful and creative ones to Jim. Though we can't guarantee that all will be answered on the release, feel free to ask as many as you like.?

Personal requests will not be answered. Just make sure to include your full name, city, state, and country of residence with your questions.

Submit your questions here!

NEWSLETTER - AUGUST?21,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Bad Vacations

Wishing you could get away this summer? This collection of some of cinema's most memorably disastrous trips will have you reconsidering the comforts of home. Shining an unsettling light on destinations as lovely as the French Riviera and the canals of Venice, filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat, Paul Schrader, Joanna Hogg, Lucrecia Martel, and Otto Preminger catalog an array of holiday horrors ranging from?existential ennui to full-throttle terror.

Looking for a place to start?
Begin with the gentler disquiet of Joanna Hogg's Unrelated?before venturing out into wilder territory: the nature's-revenge nightmare of Long Weekend, or the haunting desert journey of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky.

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If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Criterion Channel, please reach out to channelhelp@criterion.com! We'd love to hear from you.

NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER?27,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Glorious Food

Didn't get a big enough helping at Thanksgiving? Feast your eyes on a buffet of some of cinema's most sumptuous banquets, a smorgasbord of lip-smacking delicacies that delight in the sensual pleasures and social rituals of eating. There's gastronomic debauchery galore courtesy of Vera Chytilov? and Luis Bu?uel, offbeat odes to garlic and Cajun cuisine from Les Blank, a most memorable dinner with Andre, and more. Bon app?tit!

Looking for a place to start?
Start with a bowl of lusciously slurpable ramen in the freewheeling Japanese satire Tampopo, then tuck into couscous so fragrant it practically wafts off the screen in the richly textured Franco-Arab family portrait The Secret of the Grain. Next up: a decadent seven-course spread of French haute cuisine as served up in the senses-ravishing Oscar winner Babette's Feast.

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If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Criterion Channel, please reach out to channelhelp@criterion.com! We'd love to hear from you.

NEWSLETTER - SEPTEMBER 30,?2020

Announcing Our October Lineup

Genre fans rejoice! October kicks off with a '70s Horror series that collects some of the grimiest, goriest, and most inventive nightmares from the decade that revolutionized the genre, and wraps up with a revelatory spotlight on the head-spinningly eclectic films of the New Korean Cinema, including three by the movement's most internationally acclaimed ambassador, Parasite mastermind Bong Joon Ho. In between, you'll find a career-spanning Joan Crawford retrospective, a tribute to the trailblazing Marlon Riggs, a salute to the pioneers of feminist grindhouse filmmaking, a pair of labor-struggle chronicles from Barbara Kopple, and programs dedicated to Pedro Costa, Catherine Breillat, Jo?o Pedro Rodrigues, and the groundbreaking animators Faith and John Hubley.

Now check out?the full calendar!

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
JUNE 4,?2020

Dear Criterion community,

This has been a powerfully?emotional time. The disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken on communities of color;?the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade; and the casually lethal racism of the Central Park dog walker who called the cops on bird-watcher Christian Cooper have once again thrown into sharp focus the inescapable reality of systemic racism in our society and the many kinds of violence it inflicts on black Americans every day.?

Black Lives Matter. The anguish and fury unleashed all across the country are?rooted in centuries of dehumanization and death. This pattern must stop. We support the protesters who have taken to the streets to demand justice, and we share their hopes. We are committed to fighting systemic racism.?

We've met as a company and a community to talk openly about the work we need to do to build a better, more equitable, more diverse Criterion, beginning with education and training for our ownership and our staff. We are also?committed to examining the role we play in the idea of canon formation, whose voices get elevated, and who gets to decide what stories get told.

Today we are establishing?an employee-guided fund with a $25,000?initial contribution and an ongoing $5,000 monthly commitment to support?organizations fighting racism in America, including?bail funds, community organizations, legal defense funds, and?advocacy?groups that address police reform. If you follow us on Twitter or Instagram,?we'll keep you informed of the?organizations we're supporting.

We are also using our streaming platform, the Criterion Channel,?to highlight films that focus on Black Lives, including works by early pioneers of African American Cinema such as Oscar Micheaux;?classics by Maya Angelou, Julie Dash, William Greaves, Kathleen Collins, Cheryl Dunye, and Charles Burnett; contemporary work by Khalik Allah and Leilah Weinraub;?and documentary portraits of black experience by white filmmakers?Les Blank and Shirley Clarke. We've taken down the paywall on as many of these titles as we can, so even if you aren't a subscriber you can watch them for free.?

We are grateful for your continued support and hope that you will join us in speaking out and making a meaningful?commitment to battling systemic racism in our country.

Sincerely,
Peter Becker and Jonathan Turell

NEWSLETTER - JULY 28,?2020

Our July Releases

NEWSLETTER - JUNE 29,?2020

Announcing Our July Lineup

This July, the Criterion Channel celebrates unconventional?artists who march to the beat of their own drum, with spotlights on indie iconoclast Miranda July, cutting-edge composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, downtown poet Sara Driver,?lyrical documentarians Bill and Turner Ross, and formally adventurous dramatist?Atom Egoyan. Sports fans sad to be missing this year's Olympic Games can relive 100 years of Olympic history through the eyes of filmmakers like Kon Ichikawa, Carlos Saura, and Milos Forman. There's also bracingly radical films from Med Hondo and Lizzie Borden, a trio of Jane Fonda vehicles, the exclusive streaming premiere of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's?Young Ahmed, and a gold mine of Hollywood treasure from an era when film noir met the western.

Now check out?the full calendar!

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
DECEMBER 15,?2020

Our March Titles

For our final new-release?announcement of the year, we're unveiling upcoming editions of a satirical afterlife comedy by Albert Brooks, an enigmatic?ode to friendship and imagination from Jacques Rivette, the Palme d'Or-winning family drama that made Mike Leigh one of the world's most beloved auteurs, and Djibril Diop Mamb?ty's convention-shattering debut feature.?Plus, our recently announced seven-film World of Wong Kar Wai box set!

Preorder now and get 30% off during our holiday sale!

NEWSLETTER - OCTOBER 2,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

'70s Horror

In the 1970s, everything was wilder, weirder, and more far-out-and horror movies were no exception. In North America, a new generation of maverick directors responded to the decade's heightened political anxieties by pushing the genre's psychological intensity and violence to shocking new heights. Across the Atlantic, Britain's legendary Hammer Films continued to serve up old-school gothic spine-tinglers, while a new generation of auteurs wedded spellbinding terror to art-house experimentation. Bringing together some of the decade's most iconic slashers, chillers, and killer thrillers, this tour through the 1970s nightmare realm is a veritable blood feast of perverse pleasures from a time when gore, grime, and sleaze found a permanent home in horror.

Check out the series teaser and set?the mood for all your '70s Horror watching!

Looking for a place to start?
Few horror films can claim to be as influential as Tobe Hooper's confrontational, shockingly realistic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a grindhouse provocation that's lost none of its visceral terror. And for a vision of social breakdown that captures the era's high-wire anxiety, check out George A. Romero's delirious infection thriller The Crazies.

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If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Criterion Channel, please reach out to channelhelp@criterion.com! We'd love to hear from you.

NEWSLETTER - JULY 30,?2020

Announcing Our August Lineup

Stuck at home this summer? Don't let that get you down-our Bad Vacations series makes the case for staying in and watching movies, cataloguing an array of holiday horrors ranging from existential ennui to full-throttle terror. That's just the tip of the (melting) iceberg this month on the Channel: there's also spotlights on independent visionary Bill Gunn, French-cinema luminary Mia Hansen-L?ve, and underground-animation hero Bill Plympton, as well as a sweeping survey of the Australian New Wave. Beyond that, we've got the exclusive streaming premiere of the acclaimed?Bacurau,?Humberto Sol?s's Cuban landmark Luc?a,?a trio of noirs by Robert Siodmak, Joseph Losey's rediscovered existential mystery Mr. Klein, Amy Seimetz's revelatory Sun Don't Shine,?and so much more.

Now check out?the full calendar!

NEWSLETTER - JUNE?19,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Directed by Mike Leigh

The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh's films inhabit a register of tragicomic despair that, thanks to their unwavering compassion, never slips into miserabilism.

Looking for a place to start?
Take your pick from among Leigh's?family portraits: Meantime, an?unflinching look at life on the dole;?Life Is Sweet,?a melancholy comedy of the everyday;?the Palme d'Or-winning career highlight?Secrets & Lies; or Another Year,?a Chekhovian cycle through life's?seasons.

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If you have questions, comments, or feedback about the Criterion Channel, please reach out to channelhelp@criterion.com! We'd love to hear from you.

NEWSLETTER - OCTOBER 30,?2020

Announcing Our November Lineup

With Thanksgiving around the corner, we're grateful to the tireless preservationists?who keep?film history alive. Founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990, The Film Foundation has been an indispensable pillar of moving-image culture for the past three decades, making possible more than 850 restorations so far. This month, we're kicking off a yearlong thirtieth-birthday celebration, showcasing thirty of the films they've restored, including old favorites like The Red Shoes and Ugetsu and rediscovered revelations like The Night of Counting the Years and Soleil ?, to be joined by more classics and rarities in the months to come.

But that's just the beginning of our November feast! With films by Claire Denis, Terence Nance, W. C. Fields, Bill Forsyth, Rithy Panh, Joan Tewkesbury, Sky Hopinka, Ngozi Onwurah, Harold Pinter, and Nadav Lapid, we've?prepared a cinematic smorgasbord that's sure to cater to all tastes.

Now check out?the full calendar!

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
OCTOBER?7,?2020

Martin Scorsese's
World Cinema Project No. 3

Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than three dozen restorations that have introduced movie lovers to often-overlooked areas of cinema history. Presenting passionate stories of revolution, identity, agency, forgiveness, and exclusion, this collector's set gathers six of those important works, from Brazil (Pixote), Cuba (Luc?a), Indonesia (After the Curfew), Iran (Downpour), Mauritania (Soleil ?), and Mexico (Dos monjes). Each title is a pathbreaking contribution to the art form and a window onto a filmmaking tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.

Read More

Head over to the Current to learn about these films from the experts: you'll find?Dennis Lim?on Luc?a, Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu?on After the Curfew,?Stephanie Dennison?on Pixote,?Elisa Lozano?on Dos monjes,?Aboubakar Sanogo?on Soleil ?, and?Hamid Naficy?on Downpour.

NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER 6,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Written by Harold Pinter

One of the most influential playwrights of the twentieth century brings his celebrated Pinter pauses and anxious ambiguity to the screen in these masterful dramas that quiver with quotidian menace. The Nobel winner proved especially adept at adaptation, paring novels?by Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and John Fowles to their dramatic essences. Rife with Pinter's signature themes of power and control, these films are an indispensable part of the monumental legacy of an artist who exposed the tensions lurking beneath the surface of everyday life.

Looking for a place to start?
Arguably the pinnacle of Pinter's screen career is his trio of collaborations with director Joseph Losey, all of which coolly dissect the intersections of class and sex in English society: the perverse upstairs-downstairs power game?The Servant,?the fractured puzzle box?Accident,?and the Palme d'Or-winning period drama?The Go-Between.

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NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER?1,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

Frame of Mind: Psychiatry On-Screen

How do you portray the complex inner workings of the human mind on-screen? It's a challenge that has long tantalized filmmakers, as seen in this wide-ranging look at some of cinema's most fascinating explorations of neuroses, psychoses, and the art and science of psychiatry. From pop-Freudian deconstructions of criminal psychology?to investigations?of the therapist-patient relationship both serious and satiric,?these films reflect the increasingly nuanced representation of psychiatry in art as well as our evolving understanding of our own inner lives.

Looking for a place to start?
With its curiosity about the dark nooks and crannies of human nature, film noir makes a perfect match for psychoanalysis-so it's no wonder that one of the earlierst exemplars of the genre, Blind Alley,?pits a hostage shrink against a gang of crooks. But psychiatry also works wonders for melodrama in Vincente Minnelli's?The Cobweb, in which a star-studded ensemble melts down over a question of decoration at a posh mental hospital.

We're Here to Help

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THE CRITERION COLLECTION?- OCTOBER?21,?2020

Hurry! Our 24-hour flash sale at?criterion.com?ends today at noon?ET. ?

All in-stock Blu-rays and DVDs are 50% off SRP.

P.S. Please note that we only ship to addresses within the U.S. and Canada. You can also shop the sale at Unobstructed View for faster, trackable shipping to Canada.

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
OCTOBER 15,?2020

Our January?Titles

We're ringing in?the new year with an?inspiring beginning, a pair of legendary endings, and a visionary reimagining. This January, we?welcome?Bing Liu's award-winning debut documentary, Martin Scorsese's rollicking rockumentary, and the final film from unsung pioneer Larisa Shepitko to the collection. Plus: a new Blu-ray box featuring Luis Bu?uel's three brilliantly surrealist career-capping provocations-The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire.

NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER 13,?2020

What's Playing

A guide to the Criterion Channel. If you haven't already subscribed, click?here?for a 14-day free trial and explore the more than 2,000 titles and thousands of supplemental features available to stream.

30 Years of The Film Foundation

In 1990, Martin Scorsese founded an organization whose stated mission told the world, in no uncertain terms, that movies matter, that the art of cinema and its history is a legacy worth preserving. Three decades later, The Film Foundation is an indispensable pillar of moving-image culture, helping to make possible over 850 restorations so far and raising much-needed awareness of the necessity of film preservation as central to the safeguarding of our cultural heritage. In recognition of thirty years of vital work, the Criterion Channel looks back at a selection of the many brilliant films from around the world?that, thanks to the efforts of The Film Foundation and their collaborators, have been rescued from the ravages of time for future generations to discover.?Beginning with these thirty films, the series will expand over the next year, with new additions to be announced monthly.

Plus: check out a new conversation between Scoresese and filmmaker Ari Aster.

Looking for a place to start?
Some of these restorations have never been widely available theatrically or on home video in the U.S. Check out our exclusive streaming premieres of Jia Zhangke's revelatory feature debut Xiao Wu, Francesco Rosi's Palme d'Or-winning political thriller The Mattei Affair, and Shadi Abdel Salam's The Night of Counting the Years-a film long championed for its "unusual tone-stately, poetic, with a powerful grasp of time and the sadness it carries" by Scorsese himself.

You Won't Want to Miss This

On Monday, November 16, the Criterion Channel is proud to copresent a virtual conversation between Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman) and Ra Malika Imhotep hosted by San Francisco's City Arts & Lectures. Buy your tickets at cityarts.net, and head over to the Channel to watch Dunye's brilliantly self-reflexive films.

NEWSLETTER - AUGUST 31,?2020

Announcing Our September?Lineup

Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.?New restorations of the Academy Award-nominated Streetwise-the beginning of a decades-long collaboration between director Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark,?and Erin Blackwell that culminated in Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell-and Jan Oxenberg's wildly inventive family portrait?Thank You and Good Night make their streaming premieres.?Contemporary innovators Brett Story and Robert Greene push the boundaries of the form while examining the inequalities that divide American society. The Maysles brothers lead a pack of filmmakers in documenting the astonishing environmental-art creations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. And a career-spanning retrospective puts Agn?s Varda's documentary?work in conversation with her fiction films. If that's not enough Real Life?for you, we've also got a selection?of Albert Brooks's brilliantly sardonic comedies, as well as a spotlight on pre-Code sensation Joan Blondell, B?la Tarr's epic S?t?ntang?,?and?films by Lucrecia Martel, Janicza Bravo, Volker Schl?ndorff, and Dorothy Arzner.

Now check out?the full calendar!

NEWSLETTER - MAY 26,?2020

Our May?Releases

THE CRITERION COLLECTION
AUGUST?18,?2020

Our November Titles

We may not be able to gather around a table this November, but our latest releases are sure to unite film lovers far and wide. Martin Scorsese's aging-gangster opus, Jim Jarmusch's offbeat samurai cult classic, Claudia Weill's trailblazing tale of female friendship, and Cher's Oscar-winning romantic-comedy turn all join the collection this fall. Plus, our previously announced 15-Blu-ray?Essential Fellini box set brings together fourteen films from one of art-house cinema's most legendary showmen.

THE CRITERION COLLECTION?- OCTOBER?20,?2020

Don't know what day it is? We can help! It's FLASH SALE DAY!

For the next 24 hours, all in-stock Blu-rays and DVDs are 50% off SRP at criterion.com.

Need help deciding? Our curated sale page will guide you through our library of over 1,000 films. Keep checking back, as we're updating the categories hourly.

Happy shopping, and remember: the sale ends at noon ET tomorrow, October 21!

P.S. Please note that we only ship to addresses within the U.S. and Canada. You can also shop the sale at Unobstructed View for faster, trackable shipping to Canada.