Best of Criterion’s New Releases: May 2024
Each month, Paste brings you a look at the best new selections from the Criterion Collection. Much beloved by casual fans and cinephiles alike, Criterion has presented special editions of important classic and contemporary films for over three decades. You can explore the complete collection here.
In the meantime, because chances are you may be looking for something, anything, to discover, find all of our Criterion picks here, and if you’d rather dig into things on the streaming side (because who’s got the money to invest in all these beautiful physical editions?) we’ve got our list of the best films on the Criterion Channel. But you’re here for what’s new, and we’ve got you covered.
Here are all the new releases from Criterion, May 2024:
A Story of Floating Weeds
Year: 1934
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Stars: Takeshi Sakamoto, Chōko Iida, Kōji Mitsui, Yoshiko Tsubouchi
Runtime: 86 minutes
A bit old-fashioned even upon its release, Yasujiro Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds is as concerned with tradition—even in the face of changing ways—as its roaming theatrical troupe and its conservative family dynamics. A silent film released relatively late in film history, A Story of Floating Weeds is a story of pride, masculinity, self-worth and how all that gets complicated when it comes to the arts—and to having children. With crisp melodramatic acting, straightforward camera positions and simply defined characters, you can grasp every part of Ozu’s work here with ease. The small rural town and painful interpersonal dynamics resonate from the screen, all the more so when the troupe is performing its kabuki or when an actor father is fishing with his son…who doesn’t know his partner’s true identity. It’s a simple tragedy, with plenty of Ozu hallmarks: It was the first appearance of his sackcloth credit sequences, it’s got some scatalogical punchlines with an incontinent child actor, and it’s filled with daddy issues. Perhaps it’s both this simplicity and this old-fashionedness that led Ozu to remake his own film more than two decades later. With so much more life lived, and so much more art made, he could return to find unexpected and more refined ideas while still paying his regards to tradition.—Jacob Oller
Floating Weeds
Year: 1959
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Stars: Nakamura Ganjirō II, Machiko Kyō
Runtime: 119 minutes
In 1959, much like the traveling actor who keeps returning to the country town where his ex-lover and illegitimate son reside, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu returned after a long absence to a movie he made back in 1934. Floating Weeds is a lushly colored, sound-filled remake of the earlier silent effort A Story of Floating Weeds, and in this do-over, Ozu hones the narrative to its finest form. While the plot is largely the same (some details are more explicitly expressed, some dialogue sharper, some anger more fierce), the main change here is the setting. Moving his town to the seaside provides some gorgeous landscape images, a delightfully sweaty scene on the beach and a Fitzgeraldian tidal symbol of cyclical heartbreak. Some of the cast returns, and some of the shot choices are almost exactly the same as those done decades ago (straight-on reaction shots allow the cast to fully embody the gut-punches constantly thrown at them), but all the emotions coursing through the film are more elegantly and effectively expressed in this more mature and successful version of the story. And, maybe along with that age and skill coming across on screen, the film is maybe all the sadder because we can feel the time that’s passed for its maker.—Jacob Oller
Peeping Tom
Year: 1960
Director: Michael Powell
Stars: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer
Runtime: 101 minutes
In one respect, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is a meticulous, human, thoughtful movie about the mechanics and emotional impulses that drive the filmmaking process. In another, it’s a slasher flick about a loony tune serial killer-cum-documentarian who murders people with his camera’s tripod. (The tripod has a knife on it.) Basically, Peeping Tom is precisely as silly or as serious as you care to read it, though as absurd as the premise sounds on the page, the film is anything but on the screen. In fact, it was considered quite controversial for a time—and depending on whom you ask it may still be. Understanding why doesn’t take a whole lot of heavy lifting; movies about women in peril have a way of striking their audience’s nerves, and Peeping Tom takes that idea to an extreme, giving its slate of victims-to-be little room to breathe as Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) closes in on them, capturing their exponentially increasing fear from second to second as they face dawning comprehension of their impending deaths. It’s a tough film to sit through, as any film about a psychopath with a habit of brutally slaying women would be, but it’s also thorough, insightful, impeccably made and brilliantly considered. —Andy Crump
Emitaï
Year: 1971
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Stars: Robert Fontaine
Runtime: 101 minutes
In Emitaï, Ousmane Sembène strikes a balance between depicting colonial oppression from warring Europeans and the existential crisis this brings about for a young group of Diola people in Senegal. Conscription, murder, the looting of crops (which is, we understand, tantamount to murder after we’ve watched the work the Diola farmers put into their rice) — these are the afflictions imposed by the pith-helmeted Frenchmen. This poses a crisis for the tribe’s leadership, who face their own end-times conflict outside yet adjacent to WWII. Emitaï is at its most engaging and experimental when it focuses on the plight of the men in charge, who consult gods (including the title deity) in a fantastical flux of color-and-time. People pop out of existence, others appear, and powerful figures made of masks and grass encourage sacrifice. Is it all in vain? Some of the dry satirical humor Sembène shows his stance, looking at how ridiculous the French org chart truly is. But the rest of this film is slow, repetitive and — as it faithfully documents a colonial history imposed upon so many culture — familiar with every narrative beat and lopsided image.—Jacob Oller
Xala
Year: 1975
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Stars: Thierno Leye, Seune Samb, Douta Seck, Younousse Sèye, Fatim Diagne, Myriam Niang
Runtime: 123 minutes
A truly silly satire surrounding a recently empowered official, El Hadji (Thierno Leye), his third wife and his newfound impotence, Xala sees Ousmane Sembène adapt his own novel into scathing political commentary aimed at those pushing Senegal in the same direction as the Europeans who once controlled it. Though excruciatingly paced and with an oppressively loud score, Xala offers a clear thematic throughline against ideological collaborationists (and hypocrites of all stripes) as El Hadji and those like him suffer indignity after indignity for turning their backs on their countrymen. Along the way, there are a few laugh-out-loud bits of physical humors, some knowing gags about polygamy and a simmering anger at those opportunists who looted Senegal instead of led it. A disgusting finale sums it up best: A soft dick is the least of these men’s problems.—Jacob Oller
Ceddo
Year: 1977
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Stars: Tabata Ndiaye, Moustapha Yade
Runtime: 116 minutes
A nearly Shakespearean tale of political succession, kidnapping, family rivalry and religious factionalism, Ceddo sees Ousmane Sembène bring a stage-like sensibility to an expansive Senegalese story before Europe’s influence moved from simple missionaries and slave traders (whose connection is darkly made by scoring scenes of branding to Christian organ music) to full-scale colonists. Like much of Sembène’s ’70s work, the acting and writing is straightfoward and stiff, full of repeated proclamations and pregnant pauses, but Ceddo‘s scale surpasses both Xala‘s modern satire and Emitaï‘s WWII traumas. (Not to mention some stylistic, anachronistic flourishes from Sembène.) A large community encompassing outsiders, insiders, Islamic faithful, the odd white man and more, the people captured within Sembène’s colorful frames give the film a sense of grandeur. The closely observed details of their lives never take up too much time though, simply making up an elegant foundation for its characters, making the impositions of the drama seem that much more out of place. A seemingly simple tale of kidnapping reveals all the simmering details underneath as the fallout plays out before us, unpacking both tradition and the encroaching tendrils of Western culture and Abrahamic religion.—Jacob Oller
Anatomy of a Fall
Year: 2023
Director: Justine Triet
Stars: Sandra Hüller, Milo Machado-Graner, Swann Arlaud, Samuel Theis
Runtime: 151 minutes
Anatomy of a Fall is the tale of a stone-cold female author who steals her husband’s book idea, then mercilessly murders him. It’s also the sorry story of a widow who must defend herself in court after her depressed husband commits suicide by jumping from the attic window of their remote home in the French Alps. The truth remains ambiguous; we may learn the ending of the trial, but we will never know what really happened. The facts of the case: Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a writer whose books often borrow from her life—the death of her mother, the emotional rift from her father, and the accident that left her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, was unable to pick Daniel up from school on time, leading to the accident, and thus blamed himself. One morning, Daniel goes on a walk with his dog Snoop and returns to find his father dead in the snow. Sandra, the only other person present in the house at the time, is the prime suspect, although she claims she was asleep. Although filmmaker Justine Triet leaves the ending ambiguous, it’s fairly easy to parse which of these two films she set out to make. Sandra might be an icy protagonist, but Triet’s view of her is largely sympathetic. If your romantic life were put under the scrutiny of the law, without time for preparation, would you come out as the victim or the perpetrator? While it may be fun to debate whether or not Sandra is guilty, Anatomy of a Fall is most compelling as a picture of a grieving child working his way through his father’s death. Its interrogation of a marriage is a touch too clinical to deliver any real dramatic gut punches, due both to the nature of the procedural genre and Sandra’s chilly personality. But Machado-Graner’s tear-jerking performance as a heartbroken kid searching for impossible answers after discovering his father’s lifeless corpse is another story. Anatomy of a Fall may not reinvent the wheel, but it’s still one of the most sharply made courtroom dramas in recent memory. —Katarina Docalovich
Girlfight
Year: 2000
Director: Karyn Kusama
Stars: Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderón, Santiago Douglas
Runtime: 111 minutes
Karyn Kusama’s feminist exploration of the fight world intrudes into an otherwise overwhelmingly male genre. It’s grown increasingly relevant as women’s boxing has slowly begun to break into the mainstream over the past decade. It features Fast & the Furious star Michelle Rodriguez as Diana, a Brooklyn teen who begins training in a boxing gym to take the edge off her personal aggression. The men around her—including her father—disapprove, but she finds a revitalizing love for the sport that’s unstoppable. Rodriguez, in her first film role, is a creature of fiery energy and steely nerve—in other words, a perfect prizefighter.—Christina Newland