Criterion rings in the year 2022 with Director-Approved Special Features all around. The new additions are Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, Garrett Bradley’s Time, Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead, and Jane Campion’s The Piano. They also upgrade Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night to 4K UHD. Read on to learn more about them.
The Celebration (#1108) out Jan 11
Adapted by Kemp Powers from his acclaimed play, the feature directorial debut of Academy Award–winning actor The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with The Celebration, the international breakthrough by Thomas Vinterberg, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity. On a wealthy man’s sixtieth birthday, a sprawling group of family and friends convenes at his country estate for a celebration that soon spirals into bedlam, as bombshell revelations threaten to tear away the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath. The dynamic handheld camera work, grainy natural lighting, cacophonous diegetic sound, and raw performance style that would become Dogme hallmarks enhance the shattering visceral impact of this caustic indictment of patriarchal failings, which swings between blackest comedy and bleakest tragedy as it turns the sick soul of a family inside out. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- 2K digital restoration, approved by director Thomas Vinterberg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary from 2005 featuring Vinterberg
- New interview with Vinterberg
- Two early short films by Vinterberg: Last Round (1993) and The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1995)
- The Purified, a 2002 documentary about Dogme 95, featuring interviews with Vinterberg and filmmakers Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring, and Lars von Trier
- Program in which Vinterberg discusses the real-life inspiration for the film
- Documentaries featuring members of the cast and crew at the film’s premiere in Copenhagen and reflecting back on the production
- ADM:DOP, a 2003 documentary profile of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle
- Deleted scenes, with optional audio commentary by Vinterberg
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic and author Michael Koresky
Time (#1109) out Jan 18
What does the weight of time’s passage feel like for a family caught in the jaws of a brutal carceral system? Both a breathtaking cinematic love story and a bruising indictment of American injustice, the Academy Award–nominated feature documentary debut of Garrett Bradley traces the decades-long quest of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six and a fiercely outspoken prison abolitionist, to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he is serving a sixty-year sentence for robbery. Gracefully interweaving twenty years’ worth of Richardson’s own intimate home movies with luminously expressive monochrome footage of her present-day joys and struggles, Bradley crafts in Time a transcendentally poetic, soul-shaking look at the devastating toll of mass incarceration and one family’s extraordinary efforts to stay whole. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New 4K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New audio commentary featuring director Garrett Bradley
- New interview with Time’s subjects, Sibil Fox and Robert Richardson
- New conversation between Bradley and critic and author Hilton Als
- Alone (2017), a short documentary by Bradley, with optional 2021 commentary by the film’s subject, Aloné Watts
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- English descriptive audio
- PLUS: An essay by critic Doreen St. Félix
A Hard Day’s Night (#711) out Jan 18
Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, John, Paul, George, and Ringo began working on a project that would bring their revolutionary talent to the big screen. This film, in which the bandmates play slapstick versions of themselves, captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever. Directed with raucous, anything-goes verve by Richard Lester (The Knack . . . and How to Get It) and featuring a slew of iconic pop anthems—including the title track, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Should Have Known Better,” and “If I Fell”—A Hard Day’s Night, which reconceived the movie musical and exerted an incalculable influence on the music video, is one of the most deliriously entertaining movies of all time. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Richard Lester, with three audio options—a monaural soundtrack as well as stereo and 5.1 surround mixes supervised by sound producer Giles Martin at Abbey Road Studios—presented in uncompressed monaural, uncompressed stereo, and DTS-HD Master Audio on the 4K UHD and Blu-ray
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring cast and crew (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- In Their Own Voices, a program featuring 1964 interviews with the Beatles with behind-the-scenes footage and photos
- “You Can’t Do That”: The Making of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a 1994 documentary by producer Walter Shenson including an outtake performance by the Beatles
- Things They Said Today, a 2002 documentary about the film featuring Lester, music producer George Martin, screenwriter Alun Owen, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- Picturewise, a program about Lester’s early work, featuring a 2014 audio interview with the director (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960), Lester’s Oscar-nominated short (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- Anatomy of a Style, a 2014 program on Lester’s methods (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- Interview from 2014 with Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Howard Hampton and excerpts from a 1970 interview with Lester (dual-format and 4K UHD only)
Dick Johnson Is Dead (#1111) out Jan 25
This playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director’s beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative tableaux interwoven with raw vérité footage capturing the pair’s tender but increasingly fragile bond. Tackling taboo questions of aging, mortality, and grief with subversive humor and surprising grace, Dick Johnson Is Dead is ultimately a triumphant celebration of life, and of the gentle, funny, unforgettable man at its center. Long live Dick Johnson. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New 2K digital master, approved by director Kirsten Johnson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New audio commentary featuring Johnson, cowriter and editor Nels Bangerter, and documentary sound recordist Judy Karp
- New conversation among Johnson and her fellow producers Katy Chevigny and Marilyn Ness and coproducer Maureen A. Ryan
- New interview with sound designer Pete Horner
- New program featuring Johnson in conversation with fellow filmmakers about redefining what a documentary can be
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- English descriptive audio
- PLUS: An essay by author So Mayer
The Piano (#1110) out Jan 25
With this sublimely stirring fable of desire and creativity, Jane Campion became the first woman to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Holly Hunter is achingly eloquent through silence in her Academy Award–winning performance as Ada, an electively mute Scottish woman who expresses her innermost feelings through her beloved piano. When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter (Anna Paquin, in her Oscar-winning debut) to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her ineffectual husband (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. With its sensuously moody cinematography, dramatic coastal landscapes, and sweeping score, this uniquely timeless evocation of a woman’s inner awakening is an intoxicating sensory experience that burns with the twin fires of music and erotic passion. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Stuart Dryburgh and approved by director Jane Campion, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New conversation between Campion and film critic Amy Taubin
- New interviews with Dryburgh and production designer Andrew McAlpine
- Interview with actor Holly Hunter on working with Campion
- “The Piano” at 25, a program featuring a conversation between Campion and producer Jan Chapman
- Excerpts from an interview with costume designer Janet Patterson
- Water Diary, a 2006 short film by Campion
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray
