Following the announcement of their incredible World of Wong Kar Wai Collection last week, The Criterion Collection has announced four new titles to debut on Blu-Ray in March: Touki bouki (1973), Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), Secrets & Lies (1996) and Defending Your Life (1991). These represent a convention-shattering debut from a Senegalese iconoclast, a long-unavailable classic from Jacques Rivette, a Palme d’Or–winner from Mike Leigh and a hilarious philosophical comedy from Albert Brooks. Details on these films can be found below:
Touki bouki
Street Date: March 9, 2021
Synopsis: With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a fractured portrait of the disenchantment of postindependence Senegal in the early 1970s. In this picaresque fantasy-drama, the disaffected young lovers Anta and Mory, fed up with Dakar, long to escape to the glamour and comforts they imagine France has to offer, but their plan is confounded by obstacles both practical and mystical. Alternately manic and meditative, Touki bouki has an avant-garde sensibility characterized by vivid imagery, bleak humor, unconventional editing, and jagged soundscapes, and it demonstrates Mambéty’s commitment to telling African stories in new ways.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- 2K digital transfer, restored by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the family of director Djibril Diop Mambéty, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Introduction from 2013 by The Film Foundation’s founder and chair, Martin Scorsese
- Interview from 2013 with filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako
- Interview program from 2012 featuring musician Wasis Diop and filmmaker Mati Diop, Mambéty’s brother and niece, respectively
- Contras’ City, a 1968 short film by Mambéty, in a new 4K restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna
- PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Ashley Clark
Street Date: March 16, 2021
Synopsis: Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cinema in the spirit of pure play—moviemaking as an anything-goes romp through the labyrinths of imagination. The result is one of the most exuberantly inventive and utterly enchanting films of the French New Wave, in which Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama. Incorporating allusions to everything from Lewis Carroll to Louis Feuillade, Céline and Julie Go Boating is both one of the all-time-great hangout comedies and a totally unique, enveloping cinematic dream space that delights in the endless pleasures and possibilities of stories.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 2017 featuring critic Adrian Martin
- Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur, a 1994 two-part feature documentary by Claire Denis, featuring an extensive interview with Rivette by film critic Serge Daney
- New interviews with actor Bulle Ogier and producer and actor Barbet Schroeder
- New conversation between critic Pacôme Thiellement and Hélène Frappat, author of Jacques Rivette, secret compris
- Archival interviews with Rivette, Ogier, and actors Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, and Marie-France Pisier
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Beatrice Loayza and a 1974 piece by Berto
Street Date: March 30, 2021
Synopsis: Writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy in his ongoing contemplation of unembellished humanity with this resonant exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships to those we love. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth mother, she doesn’t expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award), a desperately lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter sends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family. Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, Secrets & Lies is a Palme d’Or–winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath the surface of everyday lives.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Mike Leigh and director of photography Dick Pope, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New conversation with Leigh and composer Gary Yershon
- New interview with actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste
- Audio interview with Leigh from 1996 conducted by film critic Michel Ciment
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Defending Your Life
Street Date: March 30, 2021
Synopsis: Is there love after death? Acerbic everyman Albert Brooks finds a perfect balance between satirical bite and romantic-comedy charm as the writer, director, and star of this wonderfully warm and imaginative existential fantasy. After he dies suddenly, the hapless advertising executive Daniel Miller (Brooks) finds himself in Judgment City, a gleaming way station where the newly deceased must prove they lived a life of sufficient courage to advance in their journey through the universe. As the self-doubting Daniel struggles to make his case, a budding relationship with the uninhibited Julia (Meryl Streep) offers him a chance to finally feel alive. Buoyed by a brilliant supporting cast that includes Rip Torn, Lee Grant, and Buck Henry, Defending Your Life is a rare feat of personal, philosophical filmmaking that happens to also be divinely entertaining.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Albert Brooks, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide
- New interview on the afterlife with theologian and critic Donna Bowman
- New program featuring excerpts from 1991 interviews with Brooks and actors Lee Grant and Rip Torn
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by filmmaker Ari Aster
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.