Why So Blu?

Kubrick, Truffaut, Lang, Lonergan, and More Coming to The Criterion Collection July 2025

Coming in July from The Criterion Collection: The Big Heat, a hard-boiled tale of vice and retribution directed by Fritz Lang; Carnal Knowledge, an unnervingly frank look at American masculinity in the postwar era, directed by Mike Nichols; and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, a soulful study of the complexities of a sibling relationship. Plus: Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick’s sumptuously crafted vision of a pitiless aristocracy, and The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, the celebrated saga from François Truffaut that chronicled one of the most indelible characters of the French New Wave—now on 4K UHD.

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THE BIG HEAT

 1953 • 89 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio 

 

Noir doesn’t get any more hard-boiled than this scorching tale of vice and retribution, a film that finds director Fritz Lang working at the peak of his Hollywood style—stripped to the bone, simmering with outrage, and fatalistic to the core. A tightly wound Glenn Ford stars as a homicide detective whose investigation into a sprawling crime syndicate becomes a shockingly personal, hate-fueled quest for revenge. Costarring an iconic Gloria Grahame as the mink-coated gangster’s moll with her own axe to grind, and featuring a supporting cast led by a sensationally sleazy Lee Marvin, The Big Heat hits with raw, unstoppable force.

 

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural 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 audio commentary by film-noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini
• New video essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme on the women in the film
• Audio interviews with director Fritz Lang, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• Interviews with filmmakers Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author Jonathan Lethem

Available July 1, 2025

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BARRY LYNDON

 

1975 • 185 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio 

 

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.

 

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Interviews with the cast and crew as well as archival audio featuring director Stanley Kubrick on the film’s cinematography, costumes, editing, and production
• Interview featuring historian Christopher Frayling on production designer Ken Adam 
• Interview with critic Michel Ciment
• Interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised
• Interview with curator Adam Eaker about the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film
• Trailers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and two pieces about the look of the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer

 

Available July 8, 2025

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THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL

The release of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959 shook world cinema to its foundations. The now-classic portrait of troubled adolescence introduced a major new director in the cinematic landscape and was an inaugural gesture of the revolutionary French New Wave. But The 400 Blows not only introduced the world to Truffaut—it also unveiled his most indelible creation, Antoine Doinel. Initially patterned closely after Truffaut himself, the Doinel character (played by the irrepressible and iconic Jean-Pierre Léaud) reappeared in four subsequent films that knowingly portrayed his myriad frustrations and romantic entanglements, from his stormy teens through marriage, children, divorce, and adulthood. This box set presents Truffaut’s celebrated saga in its entirety: the feature films The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run, and the short subject Antoine and Colette.

 

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restorations of all five films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• In the 4K UHD edition: Four 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and four Blu-rays with the films and special features
• New 4K restoration of Les mistons, Truffaut’s 1957 short film, with commentary by Claude de Givray, Truffaut’s then assistant director
• Two audio commentaries for The 400 Blows, one featuring film scholar Brian Stonehill and the other Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay
• Archival interviews with Truffaut and his collaborators, including actors Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, and Marie-France Pisier and cowriters de Givray and Bernard Revon
• Video essays by film historian Serge Toubiana for Stolen Kisses and Les mistons
• Introducing My Father, François Truffaut, a 2019 interview with Laura Truffaut by filmmaker Daniel Raim
• Trailers
• PLUS: Essays by Annette Insdorf, Kent Jones, Andrew Sarris, Noah Baumbach, and Chris Fujiwara, and a 1971 piece by Truffaut

 

THE 400 BLOWS

 

1959 • 99 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio 

 

with ANTOINE AND COLETTE

 

1962 • 30 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio 

 

François Truffaut’s first feature is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively recreates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood. The film established Truffaut as a trailblazing auteur of the French New Wave. Also included is Truffaut’s Antoine and Colette, from the 1962 omnibus feature Love at Twenty.

 

STOLEN KISSES

 

1968 • 91 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio 

 

Jean-Pierre Léaud returns in the delightful Stolen Kisses, the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually lovestruck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he stumbles into the unlikely profession of private detective and embarks on a series of misadventures. Whimsical, nostalgic, and irrepressibly romantic, Stolen Kisses is François Truffaut’s timeless ode to the passion and impetuosity of youth.

 

BED AND BOARD

 

1970 • 97 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio 

 

The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, Bed and Board, finds our hapless hero once again in crisis. Expecting his first child and still struggling to find steady employment, Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) involves himself in a relationship with a beautiful Japanese woman that threatens to destroy his marriage. Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, Bed and Board is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.

 

LOVE ON THE RUN

 

1979 • 95 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio 

 

Antoine Doinel strikes again! In the final chapter of François Truffaut’s saga, we find Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now in his thirties, convivially concluding his marriage, enjoying moderate success as a novelist, and clinging to his romantic fantasies. The newly single Doinel finds an object of his affections in Sabine, a record-store salesgirl whom he pursues with the fervid belief that without love, one is nothing. Along the way, he renews his acquaintance with previous loves and confronts his own chaotic past. In Love on the Run, Antoine Doinel is still in love, and because he’s still in love,  he’s still alive.

 

Available July 15, 2025

 

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

 

1971 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • 2.35:1 aspect ratio 

 

Amid the sexual revolution and social upheaval of the early 1970s, acclaimed director Mike Nichols delivered a zeitgeist-defining examination of American mores. Sharply written by Jules Feiffer, this acerbic drama flashes through more than twenty years in the lives of two college buddies (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) whose casual chauvinism is all fun and games—until it’s not. As the women who suffer and see through the friends’ insecure posturing, Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane, and Cynthia O’Neal form an extraordinary ensemble that gives the film its soul. So controversial it became embroiled in an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Carnal Knowledge remains startling for its unnervingly frank look at postwar masculinity.

 

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural 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 audio commentary featuring filmmaker and playwright Neil LaBute
• New program with Mike Nichols biographer Mark Harris and film critic Dana Stevens
• New interview with film-editing historian Bobbie O’Steen
• Conversation from 2011 between Nichols and filmmaker Jason Reitman
• Q&A with screenwriter Jules Feiffer
• Radio spot and trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by scholar Moira Weigel and a 1971 piece from American Cinematographer about the look of the film

 

Available July 22, 2025

 

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME

 

2000 • 111 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

 

Celebrated playwright Kenneth Lonergan first brought his rich, humanist vision to the screen with this soulful look at the complexities of a sibling relationship whose roots are as knotted as they are deep. Years after Sammy (Laura Linney) and her younger brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo), lost their parents in a car crash, small-town single mother Sammy is plunged into another crisis when the troubled, adrift Terry comes home for what turns out to be an extended stay—one that could either bring them closer together or tear them apart. With infinite grace and his peerless ear for dialogue, Lonergan offers something all too rare on-screen: beautifully flawed human beings whose journeys offer achingly relatable insight into what changes when you grow up—and what doesn’t.

 

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Kenneth Lonergan, with 5.1 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
• Audio commentary featuring Lonergan
• New interviews with Lonergan and actors Matthew Broderick, Laura Linney, and Mark Ruffalo
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by playwright Rebecca Gilman and the script of the original one-act play

Available July 22, 2025

 

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

2024 • 118 minutes • Color • 5.1 Surround/Stereo • In Malayalam, Hindi, and Marathi with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio

 

Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction-feature debut is a radiant ode to hope-giving connections forged amid big-city anonymity. Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, All We Imagine as Light follows three very different women working at the same hospital—Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam)—each contending with personal and material struggles amid a modernizing India riven by gentrification and rising Hindu nationalism. When eviction drives Parvathy back to her childhood village, the trio embark on an enchanting getaway by the sea, where they shake loose their remaining secrets and—in one otherworldly sequence—a lingering ghost. Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, All We Imagine as Light is a deep-rooted study of the fortifying power of friendship, propelled by moving performances and the director’s compassionate eye.

 

INCLUDES

• Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Payal Kapadia
• Trailer

 

Available July 22, 2025