This October, Criterion presents the feature debuts of three acclaimed international filmmakers: Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, and Lodge Kerrigan. All of these directors are known for their visual and emotional audacity, and these are the films that laid the groundwork for their idiosyncratic styles. Additionally, we present Francesco Rosi’s much sought-after political thriller Hands over the City, featuring a blistering, unforgettable performance by Rod Steiger.

Happy viewing!


Canadian filmmaker and writer Guy Maddin’s latest film, Brand upon the Brain!, featuring Isabella Rossellini as the narrator, will be making its U.S. debut on October 15, at the New York Film Festival. To read Maddin's thoughts on his top ten selections, click here.

1. Forbidden Games
(René Clément)
2. Day of Wrath
(Carl Theodor Dreyer)
3. Umberto D.
(Vittorio De Sica)
4. Grey Gardens
(Maysles Brothers)
5. Pandora’s Box
(G. W. Pabst)
6. I vitelloni
(Federico Fellini)
7. Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II
(Sergei Eisenstein)
8. Black Narcissus
(Michael Powell)
9. Written on the Wind
(Douglas Sirk)
10. Häxan
(Benjamin Christensen)





Last month, in anticipation of the fifty-disc, fiftieth-anniversary Janus Films box set, we asked our viewers to name those films included in Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films that have not yet been released on Criterion DVD. The five prizewinners, receiving new Criterion Collection T-shirts, were Roger Fecher, Enrique Chumbes, Ben Kalakewich, Jared Westover, and Rob Harten.





If you’re in the New York City area, don’t miss Fifty Years of Janus Films, a series of classic Janus titles in glistening new 35mm prints, at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. For showtimes and further information, click here. And the celebration of the legendary distributor’s fiftieth anniversary will continue: For the first time in more than thirty years, Janus presents a new print of Jean Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game, made from a new digital internegative of a high-definition master. Rules of the Game will open at New York’s Film Forum, on November 1, and then go on to tour the country soon after. To see the brand-new trailer for this once maligned classic, click here.





Pandora's Box
The Double Life of Veronique
The Fallen Idol

STREET DATE: 10/17
Shot and edited over a period of three years, for a mere $60,000, Clean, Shaven defines the indie film ethos. And as director Lodge Kerrigan explains to Steven Soderbergh in the commentary for this new special edition, the drawn-out length of the shoot created a couple of problems. He knew that young Jennifer MacDonald (Kerrigan’s cousin in real life) would age quickly, so he shot her part, as the troubled protagonist’s daughter, all at once. And though Kerrigan was able to control leading man Peter Greene’s appearance over the two years of principal photography, by the time he raised enough funds to complete the film, Greene had already been cast in Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity. Though Clean, Shaven had been Greene’s first feature, Laws of Gravity was released first, making it Greene's official debut.


STREET DATE: 10/17
In an interview on Criterion’s release of his wildly successful Mexican feature-film debut, Sólo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuarón (who would go on to make Y tu mamá también) talks about his early film education, including a stint directing episodes of the Mexican “telenovela” Hora marcada. Though the horror anthology was not exactly high art, Hora marcada was nevertheless a breeding ground for some of the filmmakers who would eventually rejuvenate Mexican cinema’s international image, including Guillermo del Toro, who provided makeup effects and even played a monster in one of Cuarón’s episodes, before becoming a director in his own right (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth). The two filmmakers, who literally met in the waiting room where Hora marcada was shot, still support, and often help produce, each other’s work.


STREET DATE: 10/24
In the opening moments of Francesco Rosi’s award-winning critique of corrupt land developers and politicos in sixties Naples, an apartment building collapses in spectacular and catastrophic fashion. In order to successfully shoot the four-story building’s demolition without having to resort to special effects or miniatures, Rosi worked with his brother, architect Massimo Rosi, and set designer Carlo Agate to rebuild and then recollapse the side of a building that had already been felled right in the heart of Naples. This cinematic feat, dramatically captured by placing seven cameras strategically around the area, exemplifies the lengths to which Rosi would take his cast and crew to deliver his ferocious exposé.

STREET DATE: 10/24
The first thing everyone seems to remember about Sweetie is its beautiful, idiosyncratic visual style, which was a true collaboration between director Jane Campion and her cinematographer, Sally Bongers, who had also shot Campion’s Peel, which won the short-film equivalent of the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival and effectively launched Jane’s career. On the commentary track of Criterion’s new director-approved special edition of Sweetie, Campion and Bongers talk about how the film’s more static compositions were influenced by their love of William Eggleston’s still photography, but also, more prosaically, by their exhaustion at having to compete with other filmmakers for the equipment necessary to create more elaborate tracking shots. What resulted are some of the most extraordinarily vibrant images in modern movies.

The eight-year reign of terror unleashed on Uganda by dictator Idi Amin, dramatized by director Kevin Macdonald and star Forest Whitaker in the current release The Last King of Scotland, was first documented on film by legendary director Barbet Schroeder (Koko: A Talking Gorilla, Maitresse). In the French filmmaker’s incisive, disturbing profile, the unsettlingly charming tyrant comes across as far more colorful, dangerous, and strange than any fiction could possibly capture.


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