The month of June is a massive month of Criterion releases because an astounding six films and a miniseries are all coming out. From a piece of Mexico’s golden age of cinema to a contemporary portrait of gender fluidity, these releases really stack up well into the middle of summer. It is becoming all the more important as physical media dies a slow death and this preservation of old and contemporary films keeps the dream alive of collecting them all like Carrie Coon and Tracy Betts (owning 10,000 DVDs makes them heroes). Here’s the list for this June.
Victims of Sin (1951)
In his own version of film noir, director Emilio Fernández tells the story of a cabaret dancer (Ninon Sevilla) who rescues an infant from abandonment despite her boss (Rodolfo Acosta) disapproving of her sudden motherhood. When a rival nightclub owner (Tito Junco) is willing to help and falls for her, it sets up an explosive love triangle and climatic crime of passion. It is considered one of the best Mexican films during their Golden Age and a standout of cinema south of America’s border early after the end of WWII.
Querelle (1982)
The last film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder before his untimely death, Jean Genet’s gay erotica was Fassbinder’s only English-speaking film with Brad Davis as a sailor in a 1930s French port. He kills a man during a drug deal and uses his bisexual seduction to frame others for the killing. With screen legends Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero, Fassbinder takes an expressionist route in telling Genet’s story with the complete absorption of desire and masculinity hiding the gay love underneath it all.
Blue Velvet (1986)
One of two rereleases this month, David Lynch’s shocking masterpiece still haunts with this disruption of quiet suburbia through the eyes of a young man (Kyle MacLachlan) after he discovers a severed ear. As he gets close to the detective’s daughter (Laura Dern), he gets sucked into the bosom of a singer (Isabella Rosselini) and her captor, the psychotic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Rich in cinematography, Lynch opens up a much darker side of life that lures us with the titular melody and slaps us with a dose of harsh realism in such seedy quarters.
Bound (1996)
Before The Matrix, sibling duo Lana and Lilly Wachowski made a splashy, sexy debut about a conwoman (Gina Gershon) who catches the eye of her neighbor (Jennifer Tilly). They start an affair in which they target a mobster (Joe Pantoliano) and steal money, but they find themselves perilously close to being found out about their plan and the affair. It is a neo-noir that cackles with delight in this exciting and dangerous tale that gave the Wachowski’s the power to make something so influential, a franchise came out of it.
Fear And Loathing Las Vegas (1998)
The second re-release is the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo novel about a journalist (Johnny Depp) and his lawyer (Benicio Del Toro) covering a motorcycle race, only to suddenly embark on an LSD-soaked nightmare of a trip. Director Terry Gilliam makes the best of a very difficult book and explodes on the screen a radical story of society’s neurosis living in a capsule during the 1970s, the height of Thompson’s language-changing work. While it failed at the box office, Fear And Loathing has remained a cult classic 26 years later.
The Underground Railroad (2021)
Barry Jenkins took Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning book about a historical reimagining during the era of slavery and transformed it into a magical realistic miniseries. A slave named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) witnesses the brutal death of an escapee, but this does not deter her from making her own escape. She eventually finds the underground railroad – an actual train underneath in secret – to take her stop-by-stop out of the South towards liberation while a slave catcher (Joel Edgerton) remains on her tail. All ten episodes are a journey, completely different to what we would expect, courtesy of Jenkins and company.
Orlando: My Political Biography (2023)
Spanish writer and academic Paul B. Preciado took his first shot at filmmaking with this personal essay on gender by having numerous trans and nonbinary people (like himself) to reenact Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography. Everyone reads passages that very much shape them as it does in the book on giving their identity as a human regardless of being trans in an era of hostility. It’s a transcendent piece of a story from across the centuries that resonates to this day.
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