Coming this December: A tender portrait of Black teens in 1960s Chicago, Cooley High, directed by Michael Schultz; a dazzling doc about one of the most iconic rock groups in history, The Velvet Underground, directed by Todd Haynes; and three films each from two provocative voices—long-overlooked Swedish pioneer of feminist cinema Mai Zetterling and Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, who probes the void of modern existence.
Michael Haneke: Trilogy (#1163) out Dec 6
One of contemporary cinema’s most original, provocative, and uncompromising filmmakers, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke dares viewers to stare into the void of modern existence. With his first three theatrical features, The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—a trilogy depicting a coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise—Haneke established the rigorous visual style and unsettling themes that would recur throughout his work. Exploring the relationships among consumerism, violence, mass media, and contemporary alienation, these brilliant, relentlessly probing films open up profound questions about the world in which we live while refusing the false comfort of easy answers. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- High-definition digital masters, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
- New interview with actor Arno Frisch
- New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
- Interviews from 2005 with Haneke
- Documentary about Haneke’s career featuring interviews with the director and actors Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and Jean-Louis Trintignant
- Deleted scenes from Benny’s Video
- Trailers
- New English subtitle translations
- PLUS: An essay by novelist John Wray
Three Films by Mai Zetterling (#1162) out Dec 13
A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent state of twentieth-century Europe. Her peerless ability to render subjective psychological states with startling immediacy is on display in Loving Couples, Night Games, and The Girls—three provocative, taboo-shattering works from the 1960s featuring some of Swedish cinema’s most iconic stars. With their audacious narrative structures that fuse reality and fantasy, their elaborate use of metaphor and symbolism, and their willingness to delve into the most fraught realms of human experience, these movies are models of adventurous, passionately engaged filmmaking. The Special Features are:
- New 2K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
- New interview with author Alicia Malone
- Maybe I Really Am a Sorceress, a 1989 documentary on director Mai Zetterling, featuring interviews with Zetterling; her coscreenwriter, David Hughes; and actors Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom
- Lines from the Heart, a 1996 documentary reuniting The Girls actors Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Lindblom
- Interview with Zetterling from 1984 on Loving Couples and The Girls
- Swedish television footage from 1966, filmed on location during the production of Night Games and at the film’s premiere
- New English subtitle translations
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Mariah Larsson
The Velvet Underground (#1164) out Dec 13
Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York’s 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band’s incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol’s fabled Factory, and the explosive tension between pop and the avant-garde that propelled the group and ultimately consumed it. Never-before-seen performances, interviews, rare recordings, and mind-blowing transmissions from the era’s avant-garde cinema scene come together in an ecstatic swirl of sound and image that is to the traditional music documentary what the Velvets were to rock: utterly revolutionary. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New 4K digital master, approved by director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Haynes and editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz
- Outtakes of interviews shot for the film with musicians John Cale, Jonathan Richman, and Maureen Tucker; filmmaker Jonas Mekas; and actor Mary Woronov
- Conversation from 2021 among Haynes, Cale, and Tucker
- Complete versions of some of the avant-garde films excerpted in the movie, including Piero Heliczer’s Venus in Furs (1965)
- Teaser
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Optional annotated subtitle track that identifies the avant-garde films seen in the movie
- PLUS: A 2021 essay by critic Greil Marcus
Cooley High (#1165) out Dec 13
Chicago, 1964: it’s the last weeks of high school for aspiring poet Preach (Glynn Turman) and his best friend, Cochise (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), and they have a full slate of extracurricular activities: swinging dance parties, late-night joyrides, and the stumbling pursuit of romance. Of course, when you’re a young Black man in America, your coming-of-age story is far from complication-free. With Cooley High, director Michael Schultz and screenwriter Eric Monte—who drew on his own experiences growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project—arrived at something truly unique in 1970s cinema: an endearingly funny, tender, and authentic portrait of Black teens striving toward a brighter tomorrow, brought to life by a dynamic ensemble cast and set to a heavenly hit parade of Motown classics. The Director-Approved Special Features are:
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Michael Schultz, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New conversation between Schultz and film scholar Racquel J. Gates
- Program on the making of the film
- Panel discussion from the 2019 tribute to Cooley High at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, featuring Schultz, actor and filmmaker Robert Townsend, casting director Gloria Schultz, and actors Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and Garrett Morris
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
