Criterion has announced their lineup of new releases for May 2015 and leading the way is Howard Hawks‘ Red River (5/27) starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. I’ve only seen Red River once and it was not an impressive transfer so I’m really looking forward to seeing what Criterion has done with this new 4K digital restoration of the original theatrical release version, plus a 2K restoration of the longer version, though the original is said to be Hawks’ preferred cut.
Additionally the release includes new interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, critic Molly Haskell and western scholar Lee Clark Mitchell and more. Get the full details here.
The next release I’m most interested in is Stuart Cooper‘s 1975 film Overlord (5/13), which is getting a Blu-ray upgrade after being released on Criterion DVD back in 2007. The film apparently interweaves archival war footage and a fictional narrative as it follows one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-Day.
Two other films getting the Blu-ray upgrade treatment are Wes Anderson‘s The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (5/20), which was previously a collaborative release between Criterion and Touchstone Home Entertainment as well as Billy Wilder‘s stinging look at exploitative journalism in Ace in the Hole (5/6) starring Kirk Douglas.
Finally, Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone in Love (5/13) will get the Criterion treatment. I caught the film at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, but as I noted in my commentary I was so tired from a long day of movie watching that I never actually wrote a formal review of the film, which tells the story of a young woman who finances her studies through prostitution and her relationship with a brilliant, elderly academic who is also one of her clients.
