This August, we’re celebrating the expansive, archetype-exploding films of Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as the career of his frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, ten years after his tragic death, is widely recognized as one of the greatest, most versatile actors of his generation. A collection of Vacation Noir classics luxuriates in the dark side of late-summer getaways, while Photographer’s Gaze explores cinema’s connection to the shutterbug’s art. Plan a retrospective tour through the eclectic films of Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, the devastating melodramas of Mikio Naruse, or Preston Sturges’s gleefully iconoclastic comedies. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a Brazilian love letter to movie theaters, a Hong Kong action spectacular, a restored treasure from Mexican cinema’s golden age, and a pair of documentary portraits of punk’s most legendary performers.

* indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Licorice Pizza will be streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel

The great cinematic mythmaker of the San Fernando Valley, Paul Thomas Anderson stages uniquely American tales of ambition, destiny, downfall, and redemption on an epic scale. Full of bold camera movement, expressive compositions, and attention-grabbing music, and featuring showstopping performances from regular collaborators like Daniel Day-Lewis, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John C. Reilly, his output ranges from dark, weighty explorations of moral corruption like There Will Be Blood and The Master to lighter (but no less intricately constructed) comedies like Punch-Drunk Love and Licorice Pizza, all stamped with his unique feeling for the ways in which the forces of fate and chance govern human lives.

FEATURING: Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007)*, The Master (2012)*, Licorice Pizza (2021)

The inextricable link between cinema and photography has long made the latter a subject of intense fascination for filmmakers, who have found in the adjacent medium a means to explore heady themes of voyeurism and obsession, perception and identity, and the relationship between art and reality. In Rear Window, a photographer’s confinement to his apartment transforms him into an unwitting observer of his neighbors’ secret lives; in Blow-Up, a fashion photographer inadvertently captures a potential crime; and One Hour Photo hauntingly portrays a photo technician’s fixation with a family whose pictures unlock his deep isolation and yearning. By turns provocative, perverse, and thrilling, these films reach deep into our compulsive relationship with images and, by extension, with cinema itself.

FEATURING: Rear Window (1954), Peeping Tom (1960), Blow-Up (1966), La prisonnière (1968), Baba Yaga (1973), The Story of O (1975), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Close-up (1990), The Public Eye (1992)*, Smoke (1995)*, Pecker (1998), One Hour Photo (2002), Delirious (2006)

One of the great artists of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman captured the essence of human frailty and resilience with extraordinary range and nuance. Specializing in portrayals of troubled, flawed, and sometimes downright malevolent characters, he managed to bring authenticity and humanity to even the most damaged of souls in art-house hits like Synecdoche, New York; The Savages; and Capote (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor). Ten years after his untimely passing, we salute a consummate actor’s actor whose soul-baring vulnerability and deep commitment to his craft have been sorely missed.

FEATURING: Magnolia (1999), State and Main (2000), 25th Hour (2002), Love Liza (2002)*, Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Capote (2005), The Savages (2007), Synecdoche, New York (2008)*, Jack Goes Boating (2010)*, The Master (2012)*

Unlucky vacationers discover that crime doesn’t take a holiday in these deceptively sunny, seductively dark thrillers set amid scenic beaches, luxury resorts, and picture-postcard locales. Honeymooners find themselves caught up in a disturbing domestic drama in the lurid, Technicolor Marilyn Monroe sizzler Niagara. Languorous days by the pool with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider take a deadly turn in the sultry suspense master class La piscine. And a Mediterranean cruise is the setting for a most delicious murder mystery in the diabolically entertaining, all-star whodunnit The Last of Sheila. With gorgeous scenery, swimsuit-clad stars, and shadowy intrigue, these lusciously overheated entertainments are the perfect summer escape—no sunscreen required.

FEATURING: Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Desert Fury (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Brighton Rock (1948), His Kind of Woman (1951), Kansas City Confidential (1952), Dangerous Crossing (1953), Inferno (1953), Niagara (1953), Female on the Beach (1955)*, Purple Noon (1960), La piscine (1969), The Last of Sheila (1973)

Featuring a new introduction by film scholar Richard Peña

For more than half a century, Youssef Chahine drew from the multicultural, cosmopolitan spirit of his home city of Alexandria to forge a passionate, extravagant, iconoclastic oeuvre that merged a quintessentially Egyptian sensibility with international influences ranging from Hollywood musicals and melodramas to European neorealism. With films like his international breakthrough, the florid psychosexual noir Cairo Station, and the searing portrait of rural class struggle The Land, Chahine displayed his willingness to court controversy through daring social and political critique, while in works like Alexandria . . . Why? (the first in a quartet of autobiographical films centered around the city) he turned inwards to examine his own life, sexuality, and fluctuating position toward the political establishment. Replete with vibrant visuals, color, and music and shot through with an unwavering humanist spirit, Chahine’s films—which feature some of the Arab world’s biggest talents of their day, including a young Omar Sharif—are bold expressions of the many sides of the Egyptian soul.

FEATURING: Father Amin (1950), Lady of the Train (1952), The Blazing Sun (1954), The Devil of the Desert (1954), Dark Waters (1956), Farewell My Love (1956), My One and Only Love (1957), Cairo Station (1958), Saladin the Victorious (1963), Dawn of a New Day (1965), The Land (1970), Return of the Prodigal Son (1976), Alexandria . . . Why? (1979), An Egyptian Story (1982), Adieu Bonaparte (1985), The Sixth Day (1986), Alexandria: Again and Forever (1989), The Emigrant (1994), Destiny (1997), The Other (1999)

From capitalism to patriotism to politics to marriage, there was virtually no pillar of American life that escaped unscathed during screwball auteur Preston Sturges’s whirlwind heyday in the 1940s. One of the first Hollywood filmmakers to direct his own scripts (a deal he negotiated by selling his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Great McGinty to Paramount for just $10), Sturges took screwball comedy to new heights of sublime absurdity with his elegantly cockeyed dialogue, free-form approach to narrative, and subversive skewering of conventional morality. These immortal comedy classics—including the zingy Barbara Stanwyck vs. Henry Fonda showdown The Lady Eve, the rocket-speed romantic romp The Palm Beach Story, and the topsy-turvy small-town satire Hail the Conquering Hero—were the result of a brief but dazzling run of creativity that remains virtually unmatched in Hollywood history.

FEATURING: The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

COMING IN OCTOBER: Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

CRITERION ORIGINALS

Premiering August 15: Spotlight on Mikio Naruse

In this new program, critic Imogen Sara Smith introduces one of Japanese cinema’s classical masters—a virtuoso of melodrama who specialized in portraying the personal and social struggles of women with supreme sensitivity. In a career that spanned four decades, he directed nearly ninety films, including silent dramas like Apart from You, Every-Night Dreams, and Street Without End, in which he poignantly etched the experiences of working women carrying on in the face of everyday disappointments and compromises in an often cruelly sexist society. Continuing to explore these themes throughout his career, Naruse’s artistry reached its zenith in the 1950s, when, working with renowned leads like Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara, he directed a string of devastating melodramas—including Late Chrysanthemums, Floating Clouds, Flowing, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs—that elevated the genre to heartrending new heights, abetted by a feeling for delicate, rhythmic editing that could build with subtle but shattering emotional force.

FEATURING: Flunky, Work Hard (1931), No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933), Every-Night Dreams (1933), Street Without End (1934), Ginza Cosmetics (1951), Repast (1951), Mother (1952), Wife (1953), Late Chrysanthemums (1954), Sound of the Mountain (1954), Floating Clouds (1955), Flowing (1956), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), Yearning (1964), Scattered Clouds (1967)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

Featuring a new interview with director Bertrand Bonello, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

Léa Seydoux stars in this visually audacious, mind-bending epic as a woman who falls in love with the same man (George MacKay) across three different incarnations of their lives: in belle-epoque Paris, in contemporary Los Angeles, and in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Inspired by Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, the latest film from Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent, Nocturama) is a haunting mystery suffused with mounting dread.

The latest from acclaimed Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, Aquarius) is a multidimensional journey across time, sound, architecture, and filmmaking that explores the rich, complicated history of the filmmaker’s home city of Recife—the coastal capital of the state of Pernambuco—through the great movie theaters that served as spaces of conviviality during the twentieth century. Paeans to dreams and progress, these temples of cinema have also come to reflect major shifts in Brazilian society and politics. Combining archival documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories, Pictures of Ghosts is a map of a city through the lens of cinema, offering a delightful tour in the company of a master storyteller.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Patrick Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave’s most daring modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar Wai, teams with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a stylish “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With deliriously pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection of Wong’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance, standing as one of the high-water marks of Hong Kong crime cinema.

Investigating revolutionary Patrice Lumumba’s brief tenure as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the machinations behind his shocking assassination, legendary Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) discovers critical flashpoints where a nation’s officially curated narratives intersect with repressed truths. At eight years old, Peck was brought by his family to the newly independent DRC, where his father worked for the United Nations as an agricultural professor and his mother served as secretary to the mayor of Kinshasa. Sifting through his childhood recollections and interviewing Belgian journalists and politicians who witnessed the country’s descent into internecine violence, Peck fashions a prismatic meditation on the elusiveness of political objectivity and the ethics of personal remembrance in chronicling the traumas of history.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted blend of gritty noir, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo musical is a dazzling showcase for the fierce charisma of iconic star Ninón Sevilla.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with filmmaker and archivist Viviana Garcia Besné and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and an archival documentary on cine de rumberas featuring interviews with Sevilla.

Chaos lurks in every corner of this giddily off-kilter romantic comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Adam Sandler in a profound dramatic twist on his man-child persona.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An interview with composer Jon Brion, a Cannes Film Festival press conference from the film’s premiere, deleted scenes, and more.

A fashion photographer unknowingly captures a death on film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film; interviews with Antonioni and actors Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin, and David Hemmings; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

The rhythms, rituals, and richness of life in rural Mexico come into revelatory focus in the meditative, exquisitely observed films of Juan Pablo González. Turning his ever-patient camera on the people and landscapes of his hometown in the state of Jalisco, González works across documentary and narrative—often in collaboration with his subjects—to tell intimate stories of family, grief, and resilience that touch on wider issues of globalization, politics, and the tension between tradition and modernity. From an evocative immersion into a village haunted by suicide (Caballerango) to a poignant portrait of a woman struggling to keep her tequila factory afloat (Dos Estaciones), González’s films counter prevailing stereotypes to show a rarely seen slice of Mexico in all its complexity.

FEATURES: Caballerango (2018), Dos Estaciones (2022)

SHORTS: The Solitude of Memory (2014), La espera (2016), Las nubes (2017)

MUSIC FILMS

Follow the Sex Pistols on their doomed 1978 U.S. tour in a vividly grainy, stained portrait of the punk movement at its peak.

Veteran chronicler of the punk scene Julien Temple illuminates the many layers of the legendary frontman of the Clash, one of the most electrifying and complicated figures in rock history.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Steven Soderbergh constructs an unstoppably entertaining, clockwork-precise action thriller around the ass-kicking charisma of MMA superstar Gina Carano, who leads an all-star cast that includes Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, and Ewan McGregor.

Pioneering punk filmmaker Amos Poe brings a surfeit of style and attitude to this luridly expressionistic gangster saga set on the neon-splashed mean streets of New York’s East Village in the 1980s.