criterion

  1. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (4k UHD Combo)

    It is 1971, and journalist Raoul Duke barrels toward Las Vegas—accompanied by a trunkful of contraband and his slightly unhinged Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo—to cover a motorcycle race. What should be a cut-and-dried journalistic assignment quickly descends into a feverish psychedelic odyssey...
  2. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Querelle (1982) (Blu-ray)

    Conjured from the unholy meeting of two iconoclastic queer artists, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film audaciously raises Jean Genet’s controversial novel to the level of myth. In an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French seaport town—bathed in fiery reds and complete with phallic...
  3. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Bound (1996) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    Before they blew the world’s mind with The Matrix, Lana and Lilly Wachowski delivered a jolt of pure pulp pleasure with their hyperstylish debut, which puts a deliciously sapphic spin on a crackerjack caper premise. When butch plumber Corky (Gina Gershon) catches the eye of alluring femme...
  4. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Victims of Sin (1951) (Blu-ray)

    A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera—a female nightclub...
  5. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: The Underground Railroad (2021) (Blu-ray)

    A monumental reimagining of American history, Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 novel is a harrowing and rhapsodic journey through a still-echoing past. Weaving together historical fiction with moments of magical realism, The Underground Railroad is a...
  6. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Blue Velvet (1986) (4k UHD Combo)

    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, writer-director David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to...
  7. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Janus Contemporaries Press Release: All That Breathes (2022)

    Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes reinvents the environmental documentary by portraying, in incisive yet lyrical fashion, the reciprocal influence of animals and humans. For more than a year, Sen followed New Delhi brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad as they rescued birds of prey from the...
  8. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu (Blu-ray)

    In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds in color with celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town...
  9. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Peeping Tom (1960) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    Having brought British cinema into exalted realms of fantasy and imagination, Michael Powell took a dark detour into obsession, voyeurism, and violence with this groundbreaking metacinematic investigation into the mechanics of fear. Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark...
  10. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène (Blu-ray)

    Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of...
  11. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Anatomy of a Fall (2023) (Blu-ray)

    The closer we look, the less we know in Justine Triet’s masterful Palme d’Or–winning Anatomy of a Fall, an eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter (a transfixing Sandra Hüller), a writer who turns the...
  12. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Girlfight (2000) (Blu-ray)

    Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn...
  13. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: la haine (1995) (4k UHD Combo)

    Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs...
  14. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) (4k UHD Combo)

    This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a...
  15. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) (4k UHD Combo)

    This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an...
  16. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: I Am Cuba (1964) (4k UHD) (Blu-ray)

    Both a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made, this legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries...
  17. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Dogfight (1991) (Blu-ray)

    An ineffably bittersweet portrait of youth in the 1960s, Nancy Savoca’s funny, sensitive tale of love and war etches two vividly alive characters: aspiring San Francisco folk singer Rose (Lili Taylor) and hotheaded, Vietnam-bound marine Eddie (River Phoenix), who meet on the occasion of a...
  18. Ronald Epstein

    Pre-Order Lynch/Oz (2022) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder

    Thank you for supporting HTF when you preorder using the link below. As an Amazon Associate HTF earns from qualifying purchases. If you are using an adblocker you will not see link.
  19. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) (Blu-ray)

    Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras’s career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival. Made in collaboration with renowned artist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshedentwines the mission of PAIN—an advocacy group...
  20. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: All That Money Can Buy (1941) (Blu-ray)

    Jabez Stone is a hardworking farmer trying to make an honest living, but a streak of bad luck tempts him to do the unthinkable: bargain with the devil himself. In exchange for seven years of good fortune, Stone promises “Mr. Scratch” his soul. But when the troubled farmer begins to realize the...
  21. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: The Runner (1984) (Blu-ray)

    Childhood takes on mythic dimensions in one of the defining works of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Inspired by director Amir Naderi’s own boyhood, The Runner is lit from within by Madjid Niroumand’s electrifying performance as a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port city...
  22. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Saint Omer (2022) (Blu-ray)

    Bringing a documentarian’s sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop constructs a morally and emotionally layered courtroom drama unlike any other. When she travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie...
  23. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: To Die For (1995) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    The all-American obsession with celebrity turns monstrous in this deliciously subversive (and disturbingly prescient) satire of our television-mediated, true-crime-obsessed age. In a career breakthrough, Nicole Kidman delivers a diabolical deconstruction of the girl next door as a local TV...
  24. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as two newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a...
  25. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons (Blu-ray)

    The seasons may change, but the follies of the heart are constant in this ineffably lovely quartet of films by Eric Rohmer, one of cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of the pangs and perils of romance. Set throughout France, Tales of the Four Seasons is a cycle to stand alongside the...
  26. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: The Heroic Trio / Executioners (1993) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    The star power of cinema icons Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh fuels these gloriously unrestrained action joyrides from auteur Johnnie To and action choreographer Ching Siu-tung. The Heroic Trio and its sequel, Executioners, follow a new kind of justice league: a team of...
  27. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Nothing But A Man (1964) (Blu-ray)

    Michael Roemer’s groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the height of the civil rights movement, Nothing but a Man reveals the toll of systemic racism through...
  28. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: The Roaring Twenties (1939) (4k UHD Combo) (Blu-ray)

    Ripped from the headlines of the turbulent era between the Great War and the Great Depression, this dynamic, nostalgia-tinged crime drama balances tommy-gun action with epic historical sweep. Legends James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart star as army buddies whose fortunes rise and fall as their...
  29. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Trainspotting (1996) (4k UHD Combo)

    A jolt of adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British cinema, this darkly funny adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel was a major breakthrough for director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and screenwriter John Hodge. With live-wire energy and stylistic verve, Trainspotting...
  30. Ronald Epstein

    Press Release Criterion Press Release: Mudbound (2017) (Blu-ray)

    In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families—one of white landholders, one of Black tenant farmers—are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young...
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