No Bad Movie

"No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough." -Roger Ebert

Criterion: July 2025 Titles Announced

Christopher Haskell
6–9 minutes

JULY 1, 2025

THE BIG HEAT

United States • 1953 • 89 minutes • Black & White • 1.37:1 • English • Directed by Fritz Lang

SPINE #1269

4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY
BLU-RAY

Noir doesn’t get any more hard-boiled than this scorching tale of vice and retribution, a film that finds director Fritz Lang working at the peak of his Hollywood style—stripped to the bone, simmering with outrage, and fatalistic to the core. A tightly wound Glenn Ford stars as a homicide detective whose investigation into a sprawling crime syndicate becomes a shockingly personal, hate-fueled quest for revenge. Costarring an iconic Gloria Grahame as the mink-coated gangster’s moll with her own axe to grind, and featuring a supporting cast led by a sensationally sleazy Lee Marvin, The Big Heat hits with raw, unstoppable force.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • New audio commentary by film-noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini
  • New video essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme on the women in the film
  • Audio interviews with director Fritz Lang, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
  • Interviews with filmmakers Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by author Jonathan Lethem

    New cover by Drusilla Adeline/Sister Hyde

JULY 8, 2025

Barry Lyndon

United States, United Kingdom • 1975 • 185 minutes • Color • 1.66:1 • English • Directed by Stanley Kubrick

SPINE #897

4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY
BLU-RAY

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
  • Interviews with the cast and crew as well as archival audio featuring director Stanley Kubrick on the film’s cinematography, costumes, editing, and production
  • Interview featuring historian Christopher Frayling on production designer Ken Adam
  • Interview with critic Michel Ciment
  • Interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised
  • Interview with curator Adam Eaker about the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film
  • Trailers
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and two pieces about the look of the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer

    Cover by F. Ron Miller based on an original theatrical poster by Saul Bass

JULY 15, 2025

The Adventures of Antoine Doinel

(The 400 Blows (#5) | Stolen Kisses (#186) | Bed and Board (#187) | Love on the Run (#188) | Antoine and Colette)

France • 1959-1979 • 99/91/97/95 minutes • Black & White/Color • 2.35:1/1.66:1 • French • Directed by François Truffaut

SPINE #185

4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY
BLU-RAY

The release of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959 shook world cinema to its foundations. The now-classic portrait of troubled adolescence introduced a major new director in the cinematic landscape and was an inaugural gesture of the revolutionary French New Wave. But The 400 Blows not only introduced the world to Truffaut—it also unveiled his most indelible creation, Antoine Doinel. Initially patterned closely after Truffaut himself, the Doinel character (played by the irrepressible and iconic Jean-Pierre Léaud) reappeared in four subsequent films that knowingly portrayed his myriad frustrations and romantic entanglements, from his stormy teens through marriage, children, divorce, and adulthood. This box set presents Truffaut’s celebrated saga in its entirety: the feature films The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run, and the short subject Antoine and Colette.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
  • 4K digital restorations of all five films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
  • In the 4K UHD edition: Four 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and four Blu-rays with the films and special features
  • New 4K restoration of Les mistons, Truffaut’s 1957 short film, with commentary by Claude de Givray, Truffaut’s then assistant director
  • Two audio commentaries for The 400 Blows, one featuring film scholar Brian Stonehill and the other Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay
  • Archival interviews with Truffaut and his collaborators, including actors Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, and Marie-France Pisier and cowriters de Givray and Bernard Revon
  • Video essays by film historian Serge Toubiana for Stolen Kisses and Les mistons
  • Introducing My Father, François Truffaut, a 2019 interview with Laura Truffaut by filmmaker Daniel Raim
  • Trailers
  • PLUS: Essays by Annette Insdorf, Kent Jones, Andrew Sarris, Noah Baumbach, and Chris Fujiwara, and a 1971 piece by Truffaut

    Covers by Lucien S. Y. Yang

JULY 22, 2025

Carnal Knowledge

United States • 1971 • 98 minutes • Color • 2.35:1 • English • Directed by Mike Nichols

SPINE #1270

4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY
BLU-RAY

Amid the sexual revolution and social upheaval of the early 1970s, acclaimed director Mike Nichols delivered a zeitgeist-defining examination of American mores. Sharply written by Jules Feiffer, this acerbic drama flashes through more than twenty years in the lives of two college buddies (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) whose casual chauvinism is all fun and games—until it’s not. As the women who suffer and see through the friends’ insecure posturing, Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane, and Cynthia O’Neal form an extraordinary ensemble that gives the film its soul. So controversial it became embroiled in an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Carnal Knowledge remains startling for its unnervingly frank look at postwar masculinity.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • New audio commentary featuring filmmaker and playwright Neil LaBute
  • New program with Mike Nichols biographer Mark Harris and film critic Dana Stevens
  • New interview with film-editing historian Bobbie O’Steen
  • Conversation from 2011 between Nichols and filmmaker Jason Reitman
  • Q&A with screenwriter Jules Feiffer
  • Radio spot and trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by scholar Moira Weigel and a 1971 piece from American Cinematographer about the look of the film

    New cover by Catarina Sampaio

JULY 22, 2025

You Can Count on Me

United States • 2000 • 111 minutes • Color • 1.85:1 • English • Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

SPINE #1271

4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY
BLU-RAY

Celebrated playwright Kenneth Lonergan first brought his rich, humanist vision to the screen with this soulful look at the complexities of a sibling relationship whose roots are as knotted as they are deep. Years after Sammy (Laura Linney) and her younger brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo), lost their parents in a car crash, small-town single mother Sammy is plunged into another crisis when the troubled, adrift Terry comes home for what turns out to be an extended stay—one that could either bring them closer together or tear them apart. With infinite grace and his peerless ear for dialogue, Lonergan offers something all too rare on-screen: beautifully flawed human beings whose journeys offer achingly relatable insight into what changes when you grow up—and what doesn’t.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
  • New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Kenneth Lonergan, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • 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 Lonergan
  • New interviews with Lonergan and actors Matthew Broderick, Laura Linney, and Mark Ruffalo
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by playwright Rebecca Gilman and the script of the original one-act play

    New cover by Eric Skillman

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