Why So Blu?

Campion, Lee, and Wong 4Ks Coming to The Criterion Collection November 2022

Coming in November: Věra Chytilová’s defiant Czechoslovak New Wave provocation Daisies; Jane Campion’s psychologically piercing revisionist western The Power of the Dog; Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak’s gripping saga of two rival moles in Hong Kong’s criminal underworld, The Infernal Affairs Trilogy; and Spike Lee’s visionary monument to an iconic civil rights leader, Malcolm X. Plus: an upgrade for Wong Kar Wai’s ravishing evocation of romantic longing In the Mood for Love.

 

–

THE POWER OF THE DOG

Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape—pulsating with both freedom and menace—that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage’s novel. After a sensitive widow (Kirsten Dunst) and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) move in with her gentle new husband (Jesse Plemons), a tense battle of wills plays out between them and his brutish brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose frightening volatility conceals a secret torment, and whose capacity for tenderness, once reawakened, may offer him redemption or destruction. Campion, who won an Academy Award for her direction here, charts the repressed desire and psychic violence coursing among these characters with the mesmerizing control of a master at the height of her powers.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, approved by director Jane Campion, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack on the Blu-ray and 4K UHD editions
• For 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
• Interview with Campion about the making of the film
• Program featuring interviews with members of the cast and crew and behind-the-scenes footage captured on location in New Zealand
• Interview with Campion and composer Jonny Greenwood about the film’s score
• Conversation among Campion, director of photography Ari Wegner, actor Kirsten Dunst, and producer Tanya Seghatchian, moderated by filmmaker Tamara Jenkins
• New interview with novelist Annie Proulx
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• English descriptive audio
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin

2021 • 128 minutes • Color • Dolby Atmos/5.1 surround • 2.28:1 aspect ratio

Available November 8, 2022

DAISIES

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also co-wrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary featuring film scholars Daniel Bird and Peter Hames
• New interview with film programmer Irena Kovarova
• Documentary from 2002 about director Věra Chytilová
• Documentary about the artistic collaboration among Chytilová, cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, and screenwriter Ester Krumbachová
• Two short films from 1962 by Chytilová: A Bagful of Fleasand Ceiling
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray

1966 • 76 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Czech with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

Available November 1, 2022

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching sound­track and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.

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

• 4K digital restoration with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, both supervised and approved by director Wong Kar Wai
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Documentary from 2001 by Wong, chronicling the making of the film
• Hua yang de nian hua(2000), a short film by Wong
• Interview and cinema lesson from 2001 featuring Wong
• Press conference from the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival with actors Maggie Cheung Man Yuk and Tony Leung Chiu Wai
• Interview from 2012 with critic Tony Rayns about the soundtrack
• Deleted scenes with optional commentary by Wong
• Music video
• Trailer
• PLUS: A new essay by novelist Charles Yu

2000 • 98 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

Available November 1, 2022

THE INFERNAL AFFAIRS TRILOGY

The Hong Kong crime drama was jolted to new life with the release of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a bracing, explosively stylish critical and commercial triumph that introduced a dazzling level of narrative and thematic complexity to the genre with its gripping saga of two rival moles—played by superstars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah—who navigate slippery moral choices as they move between the intersecting territories of Hong Kong’s police force and its criminal underworld. Set during the uncertainty of the city-state’s handover from Britain to China and steeped in Buddhist philosophy, these ingeniously crafted tales of self-deception and betrayal mirror Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and the psychic schisms of life in a postcolonial purgatory.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
• Audio commentaries for Infernal Affairsand Infernal Affairs II featuring codirectors Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak and screenwriter Felix Chong Man-keung
• Alternate ending for Infernal Affairs
• New interview with Lau and Mak
• Archival interviews with Lau, Mak, Chong, and actors Andy Lau Tak-wah, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Anthony Wong Chau-sang, Kelly Chen Wai-lam, Edison Chen Koon-hei, Eric Tsang Chi-wai, and Chapman To Man-chak
• Making-of programs
• Behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, and outtakes
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Justin Chang

INFERNAL AFFAIRS

Two of Hong Kong cinema’s most iconic leading men, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah, face off in the breathtaking thriller that revitalized the city-state’s twenty-first-century film industry, launched a blockbuster franchise and inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The setup is diabolical in its simplicity: two undercover moles—a police officer (Leung) assigned to infiltrate a ruthless triad by posing as a gangster, and a gangster (Lau) who becomes a police officer in order to serve as a spy for the underworld—find themselves locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse, each racing against time to unmask the other. As the shifting loyalties, murky moral compromises, and deadly betrayals mount, Infernal Affairs raises haunting questions about what it means to live a double life, lost in a labyrinth of conflicting identities and allegiances.

2002 • 101 minutes • Color/Black & White • 5.1 surround • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

INFERNAL AFFAIRS II

The first of two sequels to follow in the wake of the massively successful Infernal Affairs softens the original’s furious pulp punch in favor of something more sweeping, elegiac, and overtly political. Flashing back in time, Infernal Affairs II traces the tangled parallel histories that bind the trilogy’s two pairs of adversaries: the young, dueling moles (here played by Edison Chen Koon-hei and Shawn Yue Man-lok), and the ascendant crime boss (Eric Tsang Chi-wai) and police inspector (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) whose respective rises reveal a shocking hidden connection. Unfolding against the political and psychological upheaval of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, this elegant, character-driven crime drama powerfully connects its themes of split loyalties to the city-state’s own postcolonial identity crisis.

2003 • 119 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

INFERNAL AFFAIRS III

Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah return for the cathartic conclusion of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which layers on even more deep-cover intrigue while steering the series into increasingly complex psychological territory. Dancing back and forth in time to before and after the events of the original film, Infernal Affairs III follows triad gangster turned corrupt cop Lau Kin-ming (Lau) as he goes to dangerous lengths to avoid detection, matches wits with a devious rival in the force (Leon Lai), and finds himself haunted by the fate of his former undercover nemesis (Leung). A swirl of flashbacks, memories, and hallucinations culminates in a dreamlike merging of identities that drives home the trilogy’s vision of a world in which traditional distinctions between good and evil have all but collapsed.

2003 • 118 minutes • Color/Black & White • 5.1 surround • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

Available November 15, 2022

MALCOLM X

One of the most electrifying heroes of the twentieth century receives an appropriately sweeping screen biopic, rich in both historical insight and propulsive cinematic style, courtesy of visionary director Spike Lee. Built around an extraordinary performance from Denzel Washington, Malcolm X draws on the iconic civil rights leader’s autobiography to trace his journey of empowerment, from a childhood riven by white supremacist violence to a life of petty crime to his conversion to Islam and rebirth as a fearless fighter for Black liberation, whose courage and eloquence inspired oppressed communities the world over. An epic of impeccable craft that was made with Lee’s closest creative collaborators and is buoyed by commanding performances from Delroy Lindo, Angela Bassett, Al Freeman Jr., and others, this is a passionate monument to a man whose life continues to serve as a model of principled resistance.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• For 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 from 2005 featuring director Spike Lee, Dickerson, editor Barry Alexander Brown, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter
• New conversation between Lee and journalist and screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper
• New interviews with actor Delroy Lindo and composer Terence Blanchard
• Program about the making of the film, featuring Lee, Dickerson, Brown, Blanchard, Carter, filmmaker Martin Scorsese, actor Ossie Davis, Reverend Al Sharpton, former Warner Bros. executive Lucy Fisher, producers Preston Holmes and Jon Kilik, production designer Wynn Thomas, casting director Robi Reed, and Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz
• Malcolm X(1972), a feature-length documentary produced by Marvin Worth and Arnold Perl and directed by Perl, narrated by actor James Earl Jones
• Deleted scenes with introductions by Lee
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by Cooper, excerpts from Lee’s 1992 book By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of “Malcolm X” . . ., and Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X

1992 • 201 minutes • Color/Black & White • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Available November 22, 2022