The Criterion Collection has announced five new titles to join the collection on 4K UHD and Blu-Ray in April: Le haine (1995), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), I Am Cuba (1964), and Dogfight (1991). These represent a gritty landmark of 1990s French cinema, Peter Weir’s disquieting work of poetic horror, a hypnotic parable of societal collapse, a dazzling work of radical political cinema, and a bittersweet tale of love and war. Details on these films can be found below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJVdq_G_Go]

Le haine (4K UHD Blu-Ray)

Street Date: April 2, 2024

Synopsis: Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—Jewish, African, and Arab, respectively—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of 1990s French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.nities that refuse to remain silent.

Picnic At Hanging Rock (4K UHD Blu-Ray)

Street Date: April 9, 2024

Synopsis: This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

Werckmeister Harmonies (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)

Street Date: April 16, 2024

Synopsis: This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

I Am Cuba (4K UHD & Blu-Ray)

Street Date: April 23, 2024

Synopsis: Both a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made, this legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising. Backed by Carlos Fariñas’s stirring score, the dazzling camera work by Sergei Urusevsky—an inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow—gives flight to the movie’s message of liberation.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Dogfight

Street Date: April 30, 2024

Synopsis: An ineffably bittersweet portrait of youth in the 1960s, Nancy Savoca’s funny, sensitive tale of love and war etches two vividly alive characters: aspiring San Francisco folk singer Rose (Lili Taylor) and hotheaded, Vietnam-bound marine Eddie (River Phoenix), who meet on the occasion of a cruelly misogynistic party where men compete to bring the most unattractive dates they can find. But what begins as a night to forget unexpectedly develops into something far more meaningful. Featuring music by folk legends Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, Dogfight captures the miracle of human connection while gracefully subverting ideas surrounding machismo, patriotic duty, and the very meaning of America itself.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES