March 2020. Releases from the Criterion Collection

Leave Her to Heaven

Shot in blazing Technicolor, this singular Hollywood masterpiece directed by John M. Stahl draws freely from the women’s picture and film noir alike, telling the chilling tale of a beautiful socialite (Gene Tierney) who steers a novelist (Cornel Wilde) into marriage before he has a chance to notice her lethally possessive streak.

Special Features: A new interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith

Show Boat

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s immortal musical adaptation of Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel receives its most faithful and enduring cinematic treatment under the elegant direction of James Whale, featuring the great Paul Robeson’s soul-shaking rendition of “Ol’ Man River.”

Special Features: An Oscar-winning documentary about Robeson, excerpts from the 1929 film version of Show Boat, and more

Bamboozled

Spike Lee issued a daring provocation with this blisteringly funny, unapologetically confrontational satire about a TV executive (Damon Wayans) who comes up with an explosively offensive idea: bringing back blackface with The New Millennium Minstrel Show.

Special Features: A conversation between Lee and critic Ashley Clarke, interviews with cast and crew, deleted scenes, audio commentary featuring Lee, and more

The Prince of Tides

For her acclaimed second feature as a director, Barbra Streisand crafted this life-affirming tale of healing and renewal, a sumptuous, emotionally wrenching adaptation of Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel—which she also produced and starred in.

Special Features: Audio commentary featuring Streisand, deleted scenes, interviews with Streisand and Conroy, a making-of featurette, and more

The Cranes Are Flying

A superbly crafted drama with impassioned performances and viscerally emotional, gravity-defying cinematography, this landmark of Soviet cinema by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov tells the story of a couple wrenched apart by World War II.

Special Features: Interviews with Kalatozov, scholar Ian Christie, and filmmaker Claude Lelouch; a program on the cinematography; and a documentary portrait of Kalatozov

Salesman

Revolutionizing the art of nonfiction storytelling with its nonjudgmental, observational style, this landmark documentary tracks four dogged door-to-door Bible salesmen on a seemingly futile quest to sell luxury editions of the Good Book to working-class Catholics.

Special Features: Audio commentary featuring directors Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, an episode of the television series Documentary Now! that parodies the film, and more