A complete list with everything coming to The Criterion Collection in May 2024
The Criterion Collection announced their releases for May 2024, and we’re getting a little bit of everything Headlining the bunch are a few box sets and our first official physical release of a 2023 movie.
The physical media distributor seems to finally be collaborating with studios to release new films from the past year. This is a partnership with NEON, whom Criterion collaborated with frequently last year with the likes of Triangle of Sadness and Saint Omer (officially releasing in March).
Anyways, here’s what is releasing in The Criterion Collection in May 2024:
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds (1959) – Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Per The Criterion Collection: 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 with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and their son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. Together, the films offer a unique glimpse into the evolution of one of cinema’s greatest directors. A Story of Floating Weeds finds Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; Floating Weeds reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness of everyday life.
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds (1959) releases on May 7, 2024 and can be pre-ordered here.
Peeping Tom – Directed by Michael Powell
Per The Criterion Collection: 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 Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths—until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking Peeping Tom dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen.
Peeping Tom releases on May 14, 2024 and can be pre-ordered here.
Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène
Per The Criterion Collection: 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 colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms.
Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène releases on May 21, 2024 and can be pre-ordered here.
Anatomy of a Fall – Directed by Justine Triet
Per The Criterion Collection: 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 material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration—or was it suicide?—of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. Tapping into the minimalist intensity of a chamber drama—and using intricate, elliptical editing—Triet constructs a mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead. Our Anatomy of a Fall review
Anatomy of a Fall releases on May 28, 2024 and can be pre-ordered here.
Girlfight – Directed by Karyn Kusama
Per The Criterion Collection: 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 Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity and deep wells of vulnerability as a young woman hitting back at society’s expectations and her own personal demons. Capturing the full emotional weight of Diana’s journey and the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion, Kusama crafts a singularly uncompromising story of self-realization.
Girlfight releases on May 28, 2024 and can be pre-ordered here.
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