10 NEW TO NETFLIX
“American Pie“
“Apollo 13“
“Clueless“
“Dazed and Confused“
“The Departed“
“Hostiles“
“Jurassic Park“
“On Swift Horses“
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre“
“Wet Hot American Summer”
7 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD
Australian duo Danny and Michael Philippou followed up their breakout hit “Talk to Me” with one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the year, now available on Blu-ray exclusively through A24’s online shop. This column is designed mostly for highlights, but since enough people like this movie significantly more than I do, I’ll make an exception. I think it wallows in way too many of the tropes of “Grief Horror,” and is just cruel when it comes to most of them. Still, Sally Hawkins is incapable of delivering a subpar performance, and A24 has handled the movie’s transfer to home media well, including a commentary, a featurette with Hawkins and the brothers, and even postcards. Consider carefully the message you’re sending if you use them.
Special Features
- A commentary with the directors
- One deleted scene
- In-depth making-of featurette
- Six collectible postcards
“Cairo Station” (Criterion)
Criterion continues to endeavor to expand its catalog beyond white, European, and typically male directors, making significant progress this month with releases from Egypt, Taiwan, and a female director in the American South. The first of those alphabetically is largely considered an essential film in Egyptian cinema and the neorealist movement of the ’50s. Yousseh Chahine’s 1958 noir is a stunner, a movie that tells the story of a man who becomes obsessed with a soda seller at the titular station, eventually turning that obsession into violence. Dismissed at the time by a country that wasn’t ready for anything this intense in their cinema, it took generations to find a responsive audience, and now has a 4K physical release that should grow that admiration even more.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New 2K digital restoration of Cairo as Seen by Chahine (1991), a short documentary by Youssef Chahine, with an introduction by film scholar Joseph Fahim
- New interview with Fahim
- Chahine . . . Why? (2009), a documentary on the director and Cairo Station
- Excerpt from Chahine’s appearance at the 1998 Midnight Sun Film Festival
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by Fahim
“Compensation” (Criterion)
Inspired by the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem of the same name, Zeinabu irene Davis’ 1999 drama was relatively buried for a generation, only recently receiving its well-deserved flowers with releases in 2024, when it was also named to the Library of Congress’s Film Registry. In fact, after playing TIFF in 1999 and Sundance in 2000, “Compensation” was entirely unavailable until Criterion included it on their streaming platform in 2021. They then undertook a restoration, which screened at NYFF and CIFF in 2024. Now that restoration is available on physical media, it’s a stunning collection that also includes a commentary, Q&As, two short films by Davis (made 37 years apart), and more. The best thing that Criterion does is to be an essential lifeline for films that would have otherwise been lost to history. This is a great example of how well they continue to do that.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Zeinabu irene Davis, in collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Wimmin with a Mission Productions, and in conjunction with the Sundance Institute, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Davis, screenwriter Marc Arthur Chéry, and director of photography Pierre H. L. Désir Jr.
- Q&As with members of the cast and crew
- Two short films by Davis, Crocodile Conspiracy (1986) and Pandemic Bread (2023), the latter with audio commentary featuring Davis and cast and crew members, and descriptive audio
- Interview with Davis from 2021
- New program about select archival photographs and adinkra and vèvè symbols in the film
- Trailer
- English subtitles and intertitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and English descriptive audio
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Racquel Gates, a director’s note, and a conversation between Davis and artist Alison O’Daniel about the process of captioning the film
“A Confucian Confusion”/”Mahjong” (Criterion)
Criterion has released Edward Yang’s films in the past, including essential editions of “A Brighter Summer Day” and “Yi Yi,” his most acclaimed films. They’ve now accompanied those with a double feature of the Taiwanese director’s fifth and sixth works, 1994’s “A Confucian Confusion” and 1996’s “Mahjong.” Both films have been given the 4K restoration treatment with a new interview and a new conversation between Michael Berry and one of the best living film critics, Justin Chang.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restorations, with 5.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
- Excerpts of director Edward Yang speaking after a 1994 screening of A Confucian Confusion
- New interview with editor Chen Po-wen
- New conversation between Chinese-cultural-studies scholar Michael Berry and film critic Justin Chang
- Performance of Yang’s 1992 play Likely Consequence
- PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim and a 1994 director’s note on A Confucian Confusion
Wes Anderson’s feels like it came and went rather quickly, launching at Cannes in May, in worldwide theaters right after, and on home media before the end of July (with a truly hideous cover). While Mr. Anderson will be a part of the biggest Blu-ray release of 2025 later this year when Criterion drops a box set of most of his work, this one gets a pretty standard bare-bones edition release that includes only three mini-featurettes. There’s no way this is the final word on one of the more purely enjoyable films of 2025, so consider this a placeholder until Criterion gets around to it in 2026 or 2027.
Special Features
- The Cast
- The Airplane
- Marseille Bob’s
- Zsa-zsa’s World
“Shoeshine” (Criterion)
Vittorio de Sica’s final masterpiece boasts a bit of trivia that could win you the next contest at your local watering hole: This is the first movie to win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, an award introduced in 1947. And yet it doesn’t have the same legacy as subsequent winners from the early years, such as “Bicycle Thieves,” “Rashomon,” and “La Strada.” And yet this one had its loyal fans, including Pauline Kael and none other than Orson Welles, who said, “…the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life.” Criterion has remastered the film in 4K and included a new program about its place in the Italian Neorealism movement. The coolest special feature is a radio broadcast from 1946 featuring De Sica himself.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary
- New program on Shoeshine and Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe
- Radio broadcast from 1946 featuring director Vittorio De Sica
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica
From “Shoeshine” to another Italian work of realism made eight decades later (but set in the 1940s). Maura Delpero’s gorgeous drama was the Italian entry for the award that “Shoehine” inaugurated last year and took home the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, winning Best Film at the Italian equivalent of the Oscars. Delpero tells the story of a mountain village in Northern Italy in 1944, when a World War II deserter happens upon the town, falling in love with a local girl named Lucia. With relatively ordinary lives set against gorgeous painterly backdrops, “Vermiglio” is a haunting piece of work, a movie that takes Delpero to a new level of respect. Again, the Janus Contemporaries line of releases might raise some controversy here, as this release is gorgeous but lacks the special features that the Criterion proper release might have eventually included.
Special Features
- Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Maura Delpero
- Trailer
