Friday, December 15, 2023

All the Bloodshed Money Can Buy To Die For


Happy Criterion Announcement Day! As goes every 15th of the month (or sometimes therebaouts) we have gotten the new slate of Criterion blu-rays and 4Ks for an upcoming month, which in today's case means March of 2024. And what a slate it is! Starting with the happiest shock of the bunch -- on March 26th they're dropping Gus Van Sant's satical masterpiece To Die For onto 4K! Definitely my favoritew movie of Van Sant's (with all due apologies to the very close runner-up My own Private Idaho) and possibly still my favorite Nicole Kidman performance -- all that's a long list and it would depend on the day and my mood. Anyway there weirdly aren't a ton of special features on this -- some commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and an essay -- but when the movie itself is this good and it's been newly restored I don't really care. Next up...

... we have Iranian director Amir Naderi's 1984 film The Runner, which is based on his own childhood in that post-revolutionary country and stars child actor Madjid Niroumand as an orphan determined to rise above his circumstances, and we have Senegalese director Alice Diop's 2022 masterful Saint Omer, a courtroom drama about a novelist following the trial in France of an immigrant accused of murdering her own daughter. 

And then we have William Dieterle's 1941 classic retelling of The Daniel and Devil Webster called All That Money Can Buy, which memorably stars Walter Huston as the devil himself and has a grand score from Bernard Herrmann. And to top it all off we've got my #8 favorite film of last year, Laura Poitras' documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about photographer and activist Nan Goldin, which is a goddamned masterpiece and one of the most important documents of our age. This is not a light bunch of movies, y'all! Great great stuff coming from Criterion in March -- pre-order everything at the links provided. 

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