Why So Blu?

Araki, Cox, Solondz 4Ks & More Coming to The Criterion Collection September 2024

Coming in September to the Criterion Collection: Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, a trio of films from the New Queer Cinema renegade; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s metaphysical exploration of queer love and loneliness; and Happiness, Todd Solondz’s disturbingly funny portrait of middle-class suburbia. Plus: The Long Good Friday, John Mackenzie’s landmark of British crime cinema, and Repo Man, Alex Cox’s quintessential 1980s cult comedy—now on 4K UHD.

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REPO MAN

1984 • 92 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.78:1 aspect ratio 

A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox’s singular sci-fi comedy stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton as a weathered repo man in a desolate Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez as the nihilistic middle-class punk he takes under his wing. The job becomes more than either of them bargained for when they get involved in repossessing a mysterious—and otherworldly—Chevy Malibu with a hefty reward attached to it. Featuring the ultimate early-eighties LA punk soundtrack, this grungily hilarious odyssey is also a politically trenchant take on President Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.

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

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Alex Cox, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• Audio commentary featuring Cox, executive producer Michael Nesmith, casting director Victoria Thomas, and actors Sy Richardson, Zander Schloss, and Del Zamora

• Interviews with musicians Iggy Pop and Keith Morris and actors Dick Rude, Olivia Barash, and Miguel Sandoval

• Deleted scenes

• Roundtable discussion about the making of the film, featuring Cox, Richardson, Rude, Zamora, and producers Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks

• Conversation between McCarthy and actor Harry Dean Stanton

• Cox’s “cleaned-up” television version of the film

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Sam McPheeters, an illustrated production history by Cox, and a 1987 interview with real-life repo man Mark Lewis

Available September 3, 2024

 

ALL OF US STRANGERS

2023 • 105 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio

A metaphysical exploration of queer love and loneliness, familial grief and healing, this delicate but audacious chamber drama confirms director Andrew Haigh’s gift for bringing complicated emotions to the screen. Isolated in a seemingly empty new high-rise, London screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) finds his solitary existence upended when he begins a passionate romance with the impulsive Harry (Paul Mescal), then reconnects with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) in a reunion that pushes beyond the limits of time and space. Putting a deeply personal imprint on a novel by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada, Haigh reaches cosmic heights while never losing sight of the story’s achingly human heart.

 

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed stereo soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between director Andrew Haigh and author and critic Michael Koresky

• New interview with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay

• Behind-the-scenes documentary and featurettes

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio

• PLUS: An essay by film critic Guy Lodge

 

Available September 10, 2024

 

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

1980 • 114 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

A combustible performance from Bob Hoskins is the fuse that lights this underworld saga, a landmark of British crime cinema. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, an ambitious London mobster who, just as he attempts to close a major real-estate deal with the American Mafia, finds his crime empire rocked by a string of attacks, sending him on a ruthless quest to find out who’s responsible. Abetted by an ice-cool performance from Helen Mirren as Shand’s in-command moll, The Long Good Friday is not only a gripping gangster thriller but also a vivid portrait of late-1970s Britain—a powder keg of cultural and political tensions on the verge of explosion.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director of photography Phil Méheux, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features

• Audio commentary with director John Mackenzie

• An Accidental Studio (2019), a documentary about the early years of HandMade Films

• Introduction by Criterion Collection curatorial director Ashley Clark

• Documentary about the making of the film featuring interviews with Mackenzie and actors Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren

• Program comparing the soundtracks for the UK and U.S. releases

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Ryan Gilbey

Available September 17, 2024

 

GREGG ARAKI’S TEEN APOCALYPSE TRILOGY

Take the conventions of the American teen movie, transpose them to Los Angeles’s freaky fringes, anchor them in an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity, and top it all off with heavy doses of Gen X disillusionment, gonzo violence, and hallucinogenic surrealism, and you’ll end up with something like these audacious transgressions from New Queer Cinema renegade Gregg Araki. Gleefully mixing slacker irony with raw sincerity, Godardian cool with punk scuzz, the savagely subversive, hormone-fueled films that make up the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.

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DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration of Totally F***ed Up and new 4K digital restorations of The Doom Generation and Nowhere, supervised and approved by director Gregg Araki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of The Doom Generation and Nowhere and two Blu-rays with all three films and the special features

• New conversation between director Gregg Araki and filmmaker Richard Linklater

• New audio commentary on Nowhere with Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons

• Audio commentary on Totally F***ed Up with Araki, Duval, and actor Gilbert Luna

• New documentary on the trilogy’s visual style featuring Araki, Duval, producer Andrea Sperling, cinematographer Jim Fealy, costume designers Cathy Cooper and SaraJane Slotnick, production designer Patti Podesta, art director Michael Krantz, and hair and makeup artist Jason Rail

• James Duval’s Teen Apocalypse Archive, a new conversation between Araki and Duval

• Q&As with Araki, moderated by filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Andrew Ahn

• The Doom Generation video comic book

• Trailers

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee

TOTALLY F***ED UP

1993 • 79 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.33:1 aspect ratio 

A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin féminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsiderhood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still bruises.

THE DOOM GENERATION

1995 • 83 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foulmouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky, and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Working with a significant budget for the first time, Araki employs boldly stylized lighting and art direction to create a heightened sense of unreality in a shocking, shoegaze-soundtracked chronicle of young lives careening toward oblivion.

NOWHERE

1997 • 82 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death, and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can—Araki folds it all into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively caustic close.

 

Available September 24, 2024

 

HAPPINESS

1998 • 140 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

As disturbingly funny as it is audaciously empathetic, auteur of unease Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburban “normalcy.” An extraordinary ensemble cast—including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Dylan Baker—embodies an array of loosely connected New Jersey deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of whom want just one thing: to be loved. One of the most controversial films of the 1990s, the unflinching Happiness unnerves precisely because it dares to see the humanity in those most often denied it.

 

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Maryse Alberti, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

• New conversation between director Todd Solondz and filmmaker Charlotte Wells

• New interview with actor Dylan Baker

• Trailer

• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• PLUS: An essay by novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner

 

Available September 24, 2024