David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,’ & Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ Highlight Criterion’s October Slate

The Criterion Collection, one of the preeminent distribution labels of eclectic classic, current, and avant garde releases, has announced its October 2017 slate of releases, and I must say this is an exceptional list of titles coming to its catalog.

The biggest highlights are David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Stanley Kubrick’s period classic Barry Lyndon. Other titles include contemporary releases The Lure (from Agnieszka Smoczyńska) and Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper starring Kristen Stewart. Rounding out the October releases are Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr and the newly dated Othello from Orson Welles, which was pushed back from its announcement several months ago.

Below you will find artwork and descriptions for all October releases.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (arrives October 17th)

In the town of Twin Peaks, everyone has their secrets—but especially Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder. Homecoming queen by day and drug-addicted thrill seeker by night, Laura leads a double life that pulls her deeper and deeper into horror as she pieces together the identity of the assailant who has been terrorizing her for years. Nightmarish in its vision of an innocent torn apart by unfathomable forces, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is nevertheless one of Lynch’s most humane films, aching with compassion for its tortured heroine—a character as enthralling in life as she was in death.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

NEW Restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director David Lynch
7.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, supervised by Lynch
Alternate original 2.0 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
The Missing Pieces, ninety minutes of deleted and alternate takes from the film, assembled by Lynch
New interview with actor Sheryl Lee
Interviews from 2014 by Lynch with actors Lee, Ray Wise, and Grace Zabriskie
More!
PLUS: An interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch

Barry Lyndon (arrives October 17th)

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of brutal 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.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

NEW 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
New documentary featuring cast and crew interviews as well as excerpts from a 1976 audio interview with director Stanley Kubrick
New program about the film’s groundbreaking visuals, featuring focus puller Douglas Milsome and gaffer Lou Bogue, as well as excerpts from a 1980 interview with cinematographer John Alcott
New program about Academy Award–winning production designer Ken Adam with historian Sir Christopher Frayling
New interview with editor Anthony Lawson
French television interview from 1976 with Oscar-winning costume designer Ulla-Britt Söderlund
New interview with critic Michel Ciment
New interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised
New piece analyzing the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film with art curator Adam Eaker
PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and two pieces about the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer

Vampyr (arrives October 3rd)

With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer channeled his genius for creating mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, unsettling imagery into the horror genre. The result—a chilling film about a student of the occult who encounters supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside Paris—is nearly unclassifiable. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creates a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema’s greatest nightmares.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

High-definition digital transfer of the original German version of the film, from the 1998 restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate version with English text
Audio commentary featuring film scholar Tony Rayns
Carl Th. Dreyer, a 1966 documentary by Jørgen Roos chronicling Dreyer’s career
Video essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer’s influences in creating Vampyr
Radio broadcast from 1958 of Dreyer reading an essay about filmmaking
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, a piece by Koerber on the restoration, and a 1964 interview with producer and actor Nicolas de Gunzburg
AND: A book featuring Dreyer and Christen Jul’s original screenplay and Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 story “Carmilla,” a source for the film

The Lure (arrives October 10th)

This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczyńska’s imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” in which the girls’ bond is tested and their survival threatened after one sister falls for a human. A coming-of-age fairy tale with a catchy synth-fueled soundtrack, outrageous song-and-dance numbers, and lavishly grimy sets, The Lure explores its themes of emerging female sexuality, exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with savage energy and originality.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

High-definition digital master, supervised by director of photography Kuba Kijowski, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New program about the making of the film, featuring interviews with director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, actors Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska, screenwriter Robert Bolesto, Kijowski, composers Barbara and Zuzanna Wroński, sound designer Marcin Lenarczyk, and choreographer Kaya Kołodziejczyk
Deleted scenes
Aria Diva (2007) and Viva Maria! (2010), two short films directed by Smoczyńska
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by writer Angela Lovell

Othello (October 10th)

Gloriously cinematic despite its tiny budget, Orson Welles’s Othello is a testament to the filmmaker’s stubborn willingness to pursue his vision to the ends of the earth. Unmatched in his passionate identification with Shakespeare’s imagination, Welles brings his inventive visual approach to this enduring tragedy of jealousy, bigotry, and rage, and gives a towering performance as the Moor of Venice, alongside Suzanne Cloutier as the innocent Desdemona, and Micheál MacLiammóir as the scheming Iago. Shot over the course of three years in Italy and Morocco and plagued by logistical problems, this fiercely independent film joins Macbeth and Chimes at Midnight in making the case for Welles as the cinema’s most audacious interpreter of the Bard.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

NEW, restored 4K digital transfers of two versions of the film, the 1952 European one and the 1955 U.S. and UK one, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray
NEW interview with Welles biographer Simon Callow
NEW interview with scholar François Thomas on the two versions
NEW interview with Ayanna Thompson, author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America
Audio commentary from 1995 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles scholar Myron Meisel
Return to Glennascaul, a 1953 short film made by actors Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton
Edwards during a hiatus from shooting Othello
Souvenirs d'”Othello,” a 1995 documentary about actor Suzanne Cloutier by François Girard
Interview from 2014 with scholar Joseph McBride
Optional English SDH subtitles
PLUS: An essay by film critic Geoffrey O’Brien

Personal Shopper (arrives October 24th)

With this intimate supernatural drama, the celebrated French filmmaker Olivier Assayas conjures a melancholy ghost story set in the world of haute couture. Starring Kristen Stewart, whose performance in Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria made her the first American actor to win a César Award, this evocative character study tells the story of a young American fashion assistant and spiritual medium who is living in Paris and searching for signs of an afterlife following the sudden death of her twin brother. A stirring depiction of grief in the form of a psychological thriller, Personal Shopper—which won Assayas the best director award at Cannes—is a chilling meditation on modern modes of communication and the way we mourn those we love.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

2K digital master, supervised by director of photography Yorick Le Saux and approved by director Olivier Assayas, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interview with Assayas
2016 festival press conference featuring members of the film’s cast and crew, including actor Kristen Stewart
PLUS: An essay by critic Glenn Kenny