Press Release Criterion Press Release: CC40 (40-Film Collection) (Blu-ray) (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

11/19/2024

This monumental forty-film box set celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection by gathering an electrifying mix of classic and contemporary films, and presenting them with all their special features and essays in a deluxe clothbound, slipcased edition. CC40’s eclectic selection includes the releases most frequently chosen by the hundreds of filmmakers, actors, writers, and other movie-loving luminaries who have visited Criterion over the years, as documented in our popular Closet Picks video series. Neither a historical survey nor a top-forty compilation, this exciting, personal, unpredictable anthology reflects the cinematic joys and inspirations of the creative community that makes the Criterion Collection possible.
Watch the teaser

Read the introduction to the box set

SHARE

FILMS IN THIS SET​

• • 
    8½
    
    1963
    One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life—including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion,and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act.
  
  
  • 
    Tokyo Story
    
    1953
    A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu. The film, which follows an aging couple’s journey to visit their grown children in bustling postwar Tokyo, surveys the rich and complex world of family life with the director’s customary delicacy and incisive perspective on social mores. Featuring lovely performances from Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, Tokyo Storyplumbs and deepens the director’s recurring theme of generational conflict, creating what is without question one of cinema’s mightiest masterpieces.
  
  
  • 
    All That Jazz
    
    1979
    The preternaturally gifted director and choreographer Bob Fosse turned the camera on his own life for this madly imaginative, self-excoriating musical masterpiece. Roy Scheider gives the performance of his career as Joe Gideon, whose exhausting work schedule—mounting a Broadway production by day and editing his latest movie by night—and routine of amphetamines, booze, and sex are putting his health at serious risk. Fosse burrows into Gideon’s (and his own) mind, rendering his interior world as phantasmagoric spectacle. Assembled with visionary editing that makes dance come alive on-screen as never before, and overflowing with sublime footwork by the likes of Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, and Ben Vereen, All That Jazzpushes the musical genre to personal depths and virtuosic aesthetic heights.
  
  
  • 
    Bicycle Thieves
    
    1948
    Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thievesembodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty.
  
  
  • 
    Repo Man
    
    1984
    A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox’s singular sci-fi comedy stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton as a weathered repo man in a desolate Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez as the nihilistic middle-class punk he takes under his wing. The job becomes more than either of them bargained for when they get involved in repossessing a mysterious —and otherworldly—Chevy Malibu with a hefty reward attached to it. Featuring the ultimate early-eighties LA punk soundtrack, this grungily hilarious odyssey is also a politically trenchant take on President Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.
  
  
  • 
    Naked
    
    1993
    The brilliant and controversial Naked, from director Mike Leigh, stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself around London on a nocturnal odyssey, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh’s depiction of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
  
  
  • 
    Jules and Jim
    
    1962
    Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession. The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring and willful Catherine, whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, Jules and Jimwas a worldwide smash in 1962 and remains every bit as audacious and entrancing today.
  
  
  • 
    Being There
    
    1979
    In one of his most finely tuned performances, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted, childlike Chance, a gardener who is forced into the wilds of Washington, D.C., when his wealthy guardian dies. Shocked to discover that the real world doesn’t respond to the click of a remote, Chance stumbles into celebrity after being taken under the wing of a tycoon (Melvyn Douglas, in an Oscar-winning performance), who mistakes his protégé’s horticultural mumblings for sagacious pronouncements on life and politics, and whose wife (Shirley MacLaine) targets Chance as the object of her desire. Adapted from a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, this satire, both deeply melancholy and hilarious, is the culmination of Hal Ashby’s remarkable string of films in the 1970s, and a carefully modulated examination of the ideals, anxieties, and media-fueled delusions that shaped American culture during that decade.
  
  
  • 
    Weekend
    
    1967
    This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and— according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.
  
  
  • 
    Yi Yi
    
    2000
    The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.
  
  
  • 
    The Night of the Hunter
    
    1955
    The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic—also featuring the contributions of actress Lillian Gish and writer James Agee—is cinema’s most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil.
    
    The Night of the Hunter was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc., with funding provided by Robert Sturm and The Film Foundation.
  
  
  • 
    Pickpocket
    
    1959
    This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsive pursuit of the thrill of stealing grows, however, so does his fear that his luck is about to run out. A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers.
  
  
  • 
    Sweet Smell of Success
    
    1957
    In the swift, cynical Sweet Smell of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster stars as the vicious Broadway gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the unprincipled press agent Hunsecker ropes into smearing the up-and-coming jazz musician romancing his beloved sister. Featuring deliciously unsavory dialogue, in an acid, brilliantly structured script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and noirish neon cityscapes from Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, Sweet Smell of Success is a cracklingly cruel dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan.
  
  
  • 
    On the Waterfront
    
    1954
    Marlon Brando gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry. A raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and social corruption, On the Waterfront follows Terry’s deepening moral crisis as he must decide whether to remain loyal to the mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Johnny’s right-hand man, Terry’s brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), as the authorities close in on them. Driven by the vivid, naturalistic direction of Elia Kazan and savory, streetwise dialogue by Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront was an instant sensation, winning eight Oscars®, including for best picture, director, actor, supporting actress (Eva Marie Saint), and screenplay.
  
  
  • 
    Do the Right Thing
    
    1989
    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.
  
  
  • 
    Ratcatcher
    
    1999
    In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, Ratcatcher explores the experiences of a poor adolescent boy as he struggles to reconcile his dreams and his guilt with the abjection that surrounds him. Utilizing beautiful, elusive imagery, candid performances, and unexpected humor, Ramsay deftly contrasts urban decay with a rich interior landscape of hope and perseverance, resulting in a work at once raw and deeply poetic.
  
  
  • 
    Sunday Bloody Sunday
    
    1971
    John Schlesinger followed his iconic Midnight Cowboywith this deeply personal take on love and sex. Sunday Bloody Sunday depicts the romantic lives of two Londoners, a middle-aged doctor and a prickly thirtysomething divorcée—played with great sensitivity by Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson—who are sleeping with the same handsome young artist (Murray Head). A revelation in its day, this may be the seventies’ most intelligent, multitextured film about the complexities of romantic relationships.
  
  
  • 
    Mirror
    
    1975
    A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) is as much a poem composed in images, or a hypnagogic hallucination, as it is a work of cinema. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, his dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystical power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics on its release because of its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.
  
  
  • 
    Barry Lyndon
    
    1975
    Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.
  
  
  • 
    Safe
    
    1995
    Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safefunctions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Seconds

1966
Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfied with his suburban existence, elects to undergo a strange and elaborate procedure that will grant him a new life. Starting over in America, however, is not as easy as it sounds. This paranoiac symphony of canted camera angles (courtesy of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe), fragmented editing, and layered sound design is a remarkably risk-taking Hollywood film that ranks high on the list of its legendary director’s achievements.

• • 
    His Girl Friday
    
    1940
    One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, His Girl Friday stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from hopping the train that’s supposed to take her to Albany and a new life as a housewife. When adapting Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s smash hit play The Front Page, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of turning star reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, and the result is an immortal mix of hard-boiled newsroom setting with ebullient remarriage comedy. Also presented here is a brand-new restoration of the 1931 film The Front Page,Lewis Milestone’s famous pre-Code adaptation of the same material.
  
  
  • 
    Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    
    1985
    Paul Schrader’s visually stunning, collagelike portrait of the acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted the impossible task of finding harmony among self, art, and society. Taking place on the last day of Mishima’s life, when he famously committed public seppuku, the film is punctuated by extended flashbacks to the writer’s past as well as gloriously stylized evocations of his fictional works. With its rich cinematography by John Bailey, exquisite sets and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and unforgettable, highly influential score by Philip Glass, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a tribute to its subject and a bold, investigative work of art in its own right.
  
  
  • 
    Y tu mamá también
    
    2001
    This smash road comedy from Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón is that rare movie to combine raunchy subject matter and emotional warmth. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna shot to international stardom as a pair of horny Mexico City teenagers from different classes who, after their girlfriends jet off to Italy for the summer, are bewitched by a gorgeous older Spanish woman (Maribel Verdú) they meet at a wedding. When she agrees to accompany them on a trip to a faraway beach, the three form an increasingly intense and sensual alliance that ultimately strips them both physically and emotionally bare. Shot with elegance and dexterity by the great Emmanuel Lubezki, Y tu mamá también is a funny and moving look at human desire.
  
  
  • 
    My Own Private Idaho
    
    1991
    River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in this haunting tale from Gus Van Sant about two young street hustlers: Mike Waters, a sensitive narcoleptic who dreams of the mother who abandoned him, and Scott Favor, the wayward son of the mayor of Portland and the object of Mike’s desire. Navigating a volatile world of junkies, thieves, and johns, Mike takes Scott on a quest along the grungy streets and open highways of the Pacific Northwest, in search of an elusive place called home. Visually dazzling and thematically groundbreaking, My Own Private Idaho is a deeply moving look at unrequited love and life on society’s margins.
  
  
  • 
    Love & Basketball
    
    2000
    Sparks fly both on and off the court in this groundbreaking feature debut by writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Old Guard), which elevated the coming-of-age romance by giving honest expression to the challenges female athletes face in a world that doesn’t see them as equal. Sanaa Lathan (Alien vs. Predator) and Omar Epps (Higher Learning) make for one of the most iconic screen couples of the 2000s as the basketball-obsessed next-door neighbors who find love over flirtatious pickup games, fall apart under the strain of high-pressure college hoops and families, and drift in and out of each other’s lives as they pursue their twin aspirations of playing professionally. Aided by stellar supporting performances and an eclectic R&B soundtrack, Love & Basketball captures the intoxicating passions, heartbreaking setbacks, and sky-high ambitions that mark a young woman’s journey to the top of her game and to lasting love.
  
  
  • 
    Night of the Living Dead
    
    1968
    Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, Night of the Living Dead, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time. A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of recently dead, flesh-eating ghouls, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combining gruesome gore with acute social commentary and quietly breaking ground by casting a Black actor (Duane Jones) in its lead role.
    
    Night of the Living Dead was restored by the Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and the Celeste Bartos Preservation Fund.
  
  
  • 
    Ace in the Hole
    
    1951
    Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time.
  
  
  • 
    3 Women
    
    1977
    In a dusty, underpopulated California resort town, a naive southern waif, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), idolizes and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate and “thoroughly modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her roommate, Pinky’s hero worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
  
  
  • 
    The Red Shoes
    
    1948
    The Red Shoes, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Technicolor feasts ever concocted for the screen. Moira Shearer is a rising star ballerina torn between an idealistic composer and a ruthless impresario intent on perfection. Featuring outstanding performances, blazingly beautiful cinematography by Jack Cardiff, Oscar-winning sets and music, and an unforgettable, hallucinatory central dance sequence, this beloved classic, dazzlingly restored, stands as an enthralling tribute to the life of the artist.
    
    The Red Shoes was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with the BFI, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Film Foundation, and the Louis B. Mayer Foundation.
  
  
  • 
    Down by Law
    
    1986
    Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout film Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in the American landscape. When fate brings together three hapless men—an unemployed disc jockey (Tom Waits), a small-time pimp (John Lurie), and a strong-willed Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni)—in a Louisiana prison, a singular adventure ensues. Described by Jarmusch as a “neo-Beat noir comedy,” Down by Law is part nightmare and part fairy tale, featuring sterling performances and crisp black-and-white cinematography by the esteemed Robby Müller.
  
  
  • 
    La Ciénaga
    
    2001
    The release of Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.
  
  
  • 
    Wanda
    
    1970
    With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.
    
    Wanda was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
  
  
  • 
    House
    
    1977
    How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other ghoulish visions, all realized by Obayashi via mattes, animation, and collage effects. Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years.
  
  
  • 
    Sullivan’s Travels
    
    1941
    Tired of churning out lightweight comedies, Hollywood director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) decides to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?—a serious, socially responsible film about human suffering. After his producers point out that he knows nothing of hardship, Sullivan hits the road disguised as a hobo. En route to enlightenment, he encounters a lovely but no-nonsense young woman (Veronica Lake)—and more trouble than he ever dreamed of. This comic masterpiece by Preston Sturges is among the finest Hollywood satires and a high-water mark in the career of one of the industry’s most revered funnymen.
  
  
  • 
    The Battle of Algiers
    
    1966
    One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
  
  
  • 
    A Woman Under the Influence
    
    1974
    This uncompromising portrait of domestic turmoil details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself. Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk give unforgettably harrowing performances as a married couple deeply in love but unable to express their ardor in terms the other can understand. This landmark American film is perhaps the most beloved work from the extraordinary John Cassavetes.
  
  
  • 
    Cléo from 5 to 7
    
    1962
    Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
  
  
  • 
    Persona
    
    1966
    By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.
  
  
  • 
    In the Mood for Love
    
    2000
    Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.

49-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES​

• Digital restorations of all forty films
• Hundreds of hours of supplemental features
• Alternate soundtracks and dubbed tracks
• Audio commentaries
• Extensive documentaries and making-of programs
• Interviews with casts and crews
• Outtakes and deleted scenes
• Trailers and TV spots
• English subtitles and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Selection of Criterion Closet Picks videos
• And more!
• PLUS: Deluxe packaging with a lavishly illustrated 216-page book featuring essays on the films by critics, scholars, and authors
  
  Cover by Eric Skillman

 

[Ronald Epstein]

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.

Amazon.com

 

[Robert Harris]

A wonderful concept, but wondering who might be the potential audience?

 

[Mark_TB]

A wonderful concept, but wondering who might be the potential audience?

I was thinking the same thing. I'm guessing that most Criterion fans already have at least a fair number of these titles.

 

[titch]

A wonderful concept, but wondering who might be the potential audience?

I think Criterion wanted to do a blu-ray version of their "Essential Art House" DVD set, but this box is too late in the game. Most of Criterion's collectors will have the majority of these titles and simply recycling all their old blu-rays won't appeal to them. If they had released them as upgraded scans, or as 4K UHDs, they could have made something special. I certainly am not completist enough to purchase this!

 

[SD_Brian]

I'm guessing that most Criterion fans already have at least a fair number of these titles.

Maybe they are hoping to attract some new fans? It's a good deal for the collector who's just starting out.

 

[TheSteig]

Easy pass for me

 

[TheSteig]

Duplicate for some reason !

 

[BRAD1963]

Yes, the concept is good. Apparently these titles are the most chosen in the Criterion Closet visits. But Criterion Collectors are aggressive when purchasing titles when they are released. So redundancy is the major factor on almost everyone passing on this set. I give them props for the attempt, but what a wasted opportunity to really do something.

 

[Robert Crawford]

A wonderful concept, but wondering who might be the potential audience?

Well, it's not I.

 

[Richard Kaufman]

I already have all the discs in this set I want, purchased at 50% off during sales,. The creation and marketing of this set makes no sense.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Maybe they are hoping to attract some new fans?

I don't know any new-to-Criterion people who would be willing to pluck down the money for a 40-movie box set. The discounted price for this box set on Criterion's site is $639.96.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I don't know any new-to-Criterion people who would be willing to pluck down the money for a 40-movie box set. The discounted price for this box set on Criterion's site is $639.96.

Assuming this will get included in the usual 50%-off sales, it'd "only" be $400 then, which is a great bargain if one doesn't already own more than just a very few of them.

I wonder what they might be seeing w/ their TCC streaming subscribership. Are they maybe noticing a good number likely not already owning most of these titles perhaps? IF so, they might be a meaningful target for this kinda set (and those customers would probably even benefit from the periodic promo GCs they give to regular TCC subscribers usable for this)...

_Man_

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Assuming this will get included in the usual 50%-off sales, it'd "only" be $400 then, which is a great bargain if one doesn't already own more than just a very few of them.

I wonder what they might be seeing w/ their TCC streaming subscribership. Are they maybe noticing a good number likely not already owning most of these titles perhaps? IF so, they might be a meaningful target for this kinda set (and those customers would probably even benefit from the periodic promo GCs they give to regular TCC subscribers usable for this)...

_Man_

Actually, they probably know/believe I only own around 10-ish of them based on my profile's collection on their site (though I actually own more if including non-Criterion discs plus digitals)... so I guess this could be somewhat tempting for someone like me... though I just finished saying earlier (in the other general collecting, filing/sorting thread) I don't generally like this kinda random selection boxset, heh, so not really too enticing even though I'm interested (to varying degrees) in most of the titles (and may eventually buy at least a few more of them separately).

And oh, if I do actually change my mind, which is not likely at all, and buy this set, it will be the 3rd time buying that BD of On the Waterfront... as that was one case where I mistakenly rebought it thinking I hadn't before, LOL(!). Then, I'd be stuck having to give away 2 copies instead of just 1 (I never got around to do, LOL)...

_Man_

 

[Jake Lipson]

Assuming this will get included in the usual 50%-off sales, it'd "only" be $400 then, which is a great bargain if one doesn't already own more than just a very few of them.

It might be a bargain compared to purchasing all of the discs individually. But $400 is never not a lot of money especially if you're spending it all at once. Or at least it is a lot to me. I suppose it would not be a barrier to entry for rich people, but I don't fall not that category.

I love Criterion and I'm sure this will be a very nice package. But it seems impractical.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

It might be a bargain compared to purchasing all of the discs individually. But $400 is never not a lot of money especially if you're spending it all at once. Or at least it is a lot to me. I suppose it would not be a barrier to entry for rich people, but I don't fall not that category.

I love Criterion and I'm sure this will be a very nice package. But it seems impractical.

Unfortunately, $400 is just not quite what it used to be though, especially if one lives in/around NYC or similarly high cost metro areas, which may include a whole lot of Criterion's clientele (even though many on HTF don't live in such places... anymore).

Not suggesting everyone frequenting HTF and similar enthusiast sites are "rich" per se, but my impression is most around such can indeed afford $400-600 for a set of that kind, if they're actually interested.

There really are a whole lot in the various enthusiast/hobby worlds that easily cost way more than $400 nowadays (or even 20-30 years ago)... not that everyone is quick to spend (or plurge) on such of course (nor need not be budget-conscious about it)...

But really, consider how so many keep buying iPhones and other mobile devices, cameras and related gear, musical gear, sporting gear, etc etc NTM HT gear... many/most of which can easily cost more than $400 per item...

_Man_

 

[SD_Brian]

Just because none of us would buy it doesn't mean there aren't people out there who would.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Just because none of us would buy it doesn't mean there aren't people out there who would.

I think we all know there are such people, but the basic question remains to be answered. How many of them?

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I think we all know there are such people, but the basic question remains to be answered. How many of them?

I don't suppose Criterion will ever tell us, hehheh... but if they start doing more of such and/or do additional printings/pressings after seemingly selling out, then we'll at least know they think it's enough to warrant such w/ actual sales to support that belief (at least to some extent)...

But as I said, I do definitely wonder about their streaming subscriber base and whether they're seeing some opp there that we don't easily/readily see... since I suspect many/most of their TCC subscribers have not been quite that big, if at all, on collecting their disc releases at least in the past -- I'm sorta in between, so not quite interested enough even though I could still benefit price-wise if I actually want 90%-plus of those BDs in my collection (even though I already own around 10, but also own some more not from their collection) plus value and/or don't mind the randomness of such collection boxsets (which I do mind )...

With MSRP essentially 50% off the original prices for these BDs (and often enough available w/ additional discounts probably upto another 50%-off on top), they might just feel it's at least a good intro to trying to collect their titles on disc for those who previously found their prices too high to consider (possibly because some/many of them don't even bother enough to be aware enough of the recurring 50%-off sales)... and possibly a way to win more (though likely relatively minor) collectors into their generally fairly loyal customer base...

The other thing is they might already have a good deal of those discs sitting in inventory unable to be moved much anymore in their original, separate/individual form. IF so, they're just repackaging those to see if they could be moved this way quite that well...

_Man_