The Criterion Collection keep pumping out award-winning films on Blu-ray and it’s having a negative impact on our bank accounts. Fast Times at Ridgemont High was one of our favorite films from the 1980s as it perfectly captured our high school experience (some more than others) and it always needed some form of restoration.
Merrily We Go to Hell is a rather harsh and unpleasant look at marriage that might not be the best film to watch with your spouse if the past 14 months of COVID-19 lockdowns were not kind to your marriage. It’s a hard hitting film that was way ahead of its time.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
The wild world of adolescence has rarely been captured with as sharp an observational eye as in this refreshingly smart, frank spin on the teen comedy by director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe.
Special Features: Audio commentary by Heckerling and Crowe, a television version of the film, a new conversation with Heckerling and Crowe moderated by Olivia Wilde, and more.
Merrily We Go to Hell
Dorothy Arzner, the only woman to work as a director in 1930s Hollywood, explores addiction, nonmonogamy, and female sexual liberation in this scathing early-feminist commentary on modern marriage.
Special Features: A new video essay by film historian Cari Beauchamp and Dorothy Arzner: Longing for Women, a 1983 documentary by Katja Raganelli and Konrad Wickler.
Flowers of Shanghai
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous period reverie recreates late-nineteenth-century Shanghai’s “flower houses,” where courtesans live confined to a gilded cage, in an intoxicating vision of decadence and cruelty.
Special Features: A new introduction by critic Tony Rayns, a new documentary by Daniel Raim and Eugene Suen on the making of the film, and excerpts from a 2015 interview with Hou.
Nightmare Alley
Darkness lurks behind the bright lights of a traveling carnival in one of the most haunting and perverse film noirs of the 1940s, starring Tyrone Power as a charlatan spiritualist on a downward slide into existential oblivion.
Special Features: Audio commentary by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver, new interviews with critic Imogen Sara Smith and performer and historian Todd Robbins, and more.
Trances
The groundbreaking Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating, one-of-a-kind documentary by Ahmed El Maanouni, both a concert movie and a free-form audiovisual experiment.
Special Features: An introduction by Martin Scorsese and an interview program featuring director Ahmed El Maanouni, producer Izza Génini, musician Omar Sayed, and Scorsese.
Don’t forget: for the month of May, all Blu-rays and DVDs are 30% off SRP, including preorders.
