This month, we're proud to add Billy Wilder to the Criterion Collection, and we're especially delighted that it's with his legendary "lost" masterpiece, the shocking, trenchant "daylight noir" Ace in the Hole, with a devastating star performance by Kirk Douglas. Never before released in any home-video format, Ace in the Hole finally arrives in a restored double-disc edition.

But the long-requested titles don't end there: also this month, we introduce Ivan's Childhood, the astonishing debut from Andrei Tarkovsky; Les enfants terribles, the once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between Army of Shadows's Jean-Pierre Melville and Orpheus's Jean Cocteau; and the work of one of cinema's greatest and most daring filmmakers, Hiroshi Teshigahara, whose three essential, visually astonishing films, Pitfall, The Face of Another, and the Oscar-nominated art-house sensation Woman in the Dunes, are finally hitting shelves in a special four-disc box set. Teshigahara's films have been called erotic, disturbing, Kafkaesque. If you've only heard of this legend of Japanese cinema, these films are where to start.

As always, happy viewing!




Buscemi's latest directorial effort, Interview, an adaptation of the 2003 film of the same name by the controversial Dutch director Theo van Gogh, will be released by Sony Classics in New York and L.A. on July 13. Click here to read Steve Buscemi's thoughts on his top ten Criterion picks.

Billy Liar
Brute Force
The Honeymoon Killers
Man Bites Dog
My Own Private Idaho
Salesman
Short Cuts
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
The Vanishing
A Woman Under the Influence








This summer, Janus Films presents Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave classic Pierrot le fou in a brand-new 35 mm print. After its successful run at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music, Godard's film—which J. Hoberman calls "the epitome of New Wave Pop Art romanticism"—will tour cities across the country throughout the summer and into September. Click here for its theatrical play dates.








With Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood getting its U.S. DVD premiere this month, there's no better time to check out his mind-bending Solaris, considered by many to be one of the two most thought-provoking science-fiction films ever made, along with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of its filmmaker's most visually hypnotic and philosophically inquisitive works, Solaris questions the connection between inner consciousness and outer space when a cosmonaut is sent to investigate strange transmissions coming from a space station.





Cría cuervos
House of Games
The Milky Way
Eclipse Series 5: The First Films
of Samuel Fuller

STREET DATE: 7/10
To ensure that his Woman in the Dunes star Kyoko Kishida looked like she'd been living alone in the pit of a sand dune for years, the fastidious Hiroshi Teshigahara instructed her not to wash the sand from her hair for the entirety of the shoot, recalls Teshigahara's producer, Noriko Nomura, in an interview for the Criterion release. (Only once did the actress disobey the director, yet Teshigahara saw right through it, reprimanding her on set.) And since the whole film was shot on a beach outside of Tokyo, production became a nightmare for the crew as well, logistically speaking. Not only did they have to keep sand off the film, they also became plagued with blisters from all the sun reflecting off of the beach.

STREET DATE: 7/17
Sunset Boulevard(1950), Billy Wilder couldn't convince studio executives to fully get behind his hard-boiled Kirk Douglas drama Ace in the Hole, made just one year later. Ace was so cynical and prescient in its depiction of the American media circus that Hollywood disavowed it. In a last-ditch effort to make the film seem more palatable, Paramount retitled it The Big Carnival; it still flopped. Years later, as Wilder biographer Ed Sikov would report, the director was heard to exclaim: "Fuck them all . . . It is the best picture I ever made!"

STREET DATE: 7/24
Les enfants terribleswas the result of one of cinema's most unexpected collaborations: writer Jean Cocteau approached director Jean-Pierre Melville to adapt his popular novel Les enfants terribles because he admired Melville's first film, Le silence de la mer (1949). Yet their working relationship turned out to be less than harmonious—Cocteau demanded more control than Melville would allow; they butted heads over Cocteau's insistence on casting his current amour, the inexperienced Edouard Dermithe, in the lead role; and at one point, when Cocteau suddenly yelled "cut," Melville reportedly had him thrown off the set.

STREET DATE: 7/24
In an interview on the new DVD of Andrei Tarkovsky's feature debut, about a young Russian boy lost amidst the violence of World War II, Nikolai Burlyaev, who played the title role, recalls that even though Tarkovsky later admitted that he had already decided to cast Burlyaev based on the boy's work in a student film by the director's schoolmate Andrei Konchalovsky, Tarkovsky still made him fight for the part in one screen test after another, at one point forcing him to summon the tears required for a heartbreaking scene. Thanks to Tarkovsky's assured direction and Burlyaev's performance, the film won the Golden Lion award at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, along with praise from none other than renowned philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who remarked that it was "one of the most beautiful films I have had the privilege of seeing."


For further information on Criterion and our products, please visit our website at www.criterion.com. The Criterion Collection Newsletter is e-mailed every month. If you are not already on our e-mailing list and would like to be added, please consult our Newsletter sign-up page. ©2007 The Criterion Collection