IT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF!

The Criterion Collection announced its July lineup, with a little something for everyone.

Here are the full details on the upcoming titles, in order of release date, from Criterion.com:

The BRD Trilogy

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

Lola (1981)

Veronika Voss (1982)

Release Date: July 9th

In 1977, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was thirty-two years old and had already directed more than twenty-five feature films. That summer, he embarked on a project to trace the postwar history of West Germany in a series of films told from the perspectives of three remarkable women. Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola—The BRD Trilogy—would garner him his greatest commercial success, both at home and abroad, and cement his position as one of the foremost figures of the New German Cinema.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 4K digital restorations of The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• High-definition digital restoration of Veronika Voss, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentaries from 2003 featuring filmmaker Wim Wenders and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (The Marriage of Maria Braun), film critic and author Tony Rayns (Veronika Voss), and film scholar Christian Braad Thomsen (Lola)
• Interviews with actors Hanna Schygulla, Rosel Zech, and Barbara Sukowa
• Interviews with cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, screenwriter Peter Märthesheimer, and film scholar Eric Rentschler
• Life Stories: A Conversation with R. W. Fassbinder, an interview filmed for German television in 1978
• I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me, a feature-length 1992 documentary on director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life and career
• Dance with Death, a program from 2000 about Ufa studios star Sybille Schmitz, Fassbinder’s inspiration for the character Veronika Voss
• Conversation between author and curator Laurence Kardish and film editor Juliane Lorenz
• Trailers
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Kent Jones and production histories by author Michael Töteberg (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
• Covers by Michael Boland

Europa Europa (1990)

Release Date: July 9th

As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country, where he takes on his most dangerous role: a member of the Hitler Youth. Based on the real-life experiences of Salomon Perel, Agnieszka Holland’s wartime tour de force Europa Europa is a breathless survival story told with the verve of a comic adventure, an ironic refutation of the Nazi idea of racial purity, and a complex portrait of a young man caught up in shifting historical calamities and struggling to stay alive.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

The Baker’s Wife (1938)

Release Date: July 16th

The warmth and wit of celebrated playwright turned cinema auteur Marcel Pagnol shine in this enchanting slice-of-life comedy. Returning to the Provençal countryside he knew intimately, Pagnol draws a vivid portrait of a close-knit village where the marital woes of a sweetly deluded baker (the inimitable Raimu, praised by no less than Orson Welles as “the greatest actor who ever lived”) snowball into a scandal that engulfs the entire town. Marrying the director’s abiding concern for the experiences of ordinary people with an understated but superbly judged visual style, The Baker’s Wife is at once wonderfully droll and piercingly perceptive in its depiction of the complexities of human relationships.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

Klute (1971)

Release Date: July 16th

With her Oscar-winning turn in Klute, Jane Fonda arrived full-fledged as a new kind of movie star. Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels—a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door—Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. Suffused with paranoia by the conspiracy-thriller specialist Alan J. Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, Klute is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970s New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Release Date: July 23rd

Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: