Criterion Titles for May
The Criterion Collection announced its May lineup, including a packed special edition of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. That’s a human ear all right.
Here are the full details on the lineup, in order of release date, from Criterion.com:
The Heiress (1949)
Release Date: May 7th
Synopsis: Directed with a keen sense of ambiguity by William Wyler, this film based on a hit stage adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square pivots on a question of motive. When shy, fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning turn), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherine’s calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker? A graceful drawing-room drama boasting Academy Award–winning costume design by Edith Head, The Heiress is also a piercing character study riven by emotional uncertainty and lacerating cruelty, in a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking at its most psychologically nuanced.
Special Features:
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New conversation between screenwriter Jay Cocks and film critic Farran Smith Nehme
- New program about the film’s costumes featuring costume collector and historian Larry McQueen
- The Costume Designer, a restored 1950 short film featuring costume designer Edith Head
- Appearance by actor Olivia de Havilland on a 1979 episode of The Paul Ryan Show
- Excerpts from a 1973 tribute to director William Wyler on The Merv Griffin Show, featuring Wyler, de Havilland, and actors Bette Davis and Walter Pidgeon
- Wyler’s acceptance speech from the American Film Institute’s 1976 Salute to William Wyler
- Interview with actor Ralph Richardson filmed in 1981 for the documentary Directed by William Wyler
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Pamela Hutchinson
- New cover by Danielle Clough
House of Games (1987)
Release Date: May 14th
Synopsis: The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet sat in the director’s chair for the first time for this sly, merciless thriller. Lindsay Crouse stars as a best-selling author and therapist who wants to help a client by making restitution for the money he owes to a gambler. After she meets the attractive cardsharp (Joe Mantegna), her own compulsions take hold as he lures her into his world of high-stakes deception. Packed with razor-sharp dialogue delivered with even-keeled precision by a cast of Mamet regulars, House of Games is as psychologically acute as it is full of twists and turns, a rich character study told with the cold calculation of a career con artist targeting his next mark.
Special Features:
- High-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Juan Ruiz Anchía, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 2007 featuring director David Mamet and consultant and actor Ricky Jay
- Interviews with actors Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna from 2007
- David Mamet on “House of Games,” a short documentary shot on location during the film’s preparation and production
- Detail from a storyboard of a short con not used in the film
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Kent Jones and excerpts from Mamet’s introduction to the published screenplay
- Cover illustration by Eric Skillman, design by Jamie Keenan
Funny Games (1997)
Release Date: May 14th
Synopsis: Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, Funny Gamesspares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. With this controversial treatise on violence and entertainment, Haneke issued a summation of his cinematic philosophy, implicating his audience in a spectacle of unbearable cruelty.
Special Features:
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interviews with Haneke and actor Arno Frisch
- New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
- Press conference from the 1997 Cannes Film Festival featuring Haneke and actors Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri
Let the Sunshine In (2017)
Release Date: May 21st
Synopsis: Two luminaries of French cinema, Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche, unite for the first time in this piercing look at the elusive nature of true love, and the extent to which we are willing to betray ourselves in its pursuit. In a richly layered performance, Binoche plays Isabelle, a successful painter in Paris whose apparent independence belies what she desires most: real romantic fulfillment. Isabelle reveals deep wells of yearning, vulnerability, and resilience as she tumbles into relationships with all the wrong men. Shot in burnished tones by Denis’s longtime collaborator Agnès Godard and featuring a mischievous appearance by Gérard Depardieu, Let the Sunshine In finds bleak humor in a cutting truth: we are all, no matter our age, fools for love.
Special Features:
- 4K digital master, approved by cinematographer Agnès Godard, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interviews with director Claire Denis and actor Juliette Binoche
- Voilà l’enchaînement (2014), a short film directed by Denis and adapted from a text by author Christine Angot, featuring actors Norah Krief and Alex Descas
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek
- New cover by Sarah Habibi
One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977)
Release Date: May 28
Synopsis: In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal abortion, but a sudden tragedy soon separates them. Over a decade later, they reunite at a demonstration and pledge to keep in touch via postcard, as each of their lives is irrevocably changed by the women’s liberation movement. A buoyant hymn to sisterly solidarity rooted in the hard-won victories of a generation of women, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is one of Agnès Varda’s warmest and most politically trenchant films, a feminist musical for the ages.
Special Features:
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Agnès Varda and cinematographer Charlie Van Damme, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Women Are Naturally Creative, a 1977 documentary directed by Katja Raganelli, featuring an interview with Varda shot during the making of the film, plus on-set interviews with actors Valérie Mairesse and Thérèse Liotard
- Réponse de femmes, a 1975 short film by Varda, on the question “What is a woman?”
- Plaisir d’amour en Iran, a 1976 short film by Varda, starring Mairesse and Ali Raffi
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin and excerpts from the film’s original press book
- Cover by Michel Landi
Blue Velvet (1986)
Release Date: May 28th
Synopsis: Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), as well as their prime suspect, lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini)—and facing the fury of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep Dorothy in his grasp. With intense performances and hauntingly powerful scenes and images, Blue Velvet is an unforgettable vision of innocence lost, and one of the most influential American films of the past few decades.
Special Features:
- New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, both supervised by director David Lynch
- Alternate original stereo soundtrack
- “Blue Velvet” Revisited, a feature-length meditation on the making of the film by Peter Braatz, filmed on-set during the production
- The Lost Footage, fifty-one minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch
- Mysteries of Love, a seventy-minute documentary from 2002 on the making of the film
- Trailer
- More!
- Cover by Fred Davis
