
How is it after all these many years (
cue that old Titanic lady meme) I can still be surprised when the 15th rolls around and it's suddenly New Criterion Announcement Day? And yet here we are and I'm wholly unprepared for it. For real though -- I've got a screening in an hour that I'm cutting out early for so let's see if I can pound this sucker out and still say something worthwhile about them (as if that's stopped me before). The "them" being
Criterion's releases for March of next year -- these things always being three mon ths ahead of time always give me this weird tunnel telescoped idea of time; like oh okay we're already living in the spring of 2026! (Is he dead yet? Fingers and toes crossed.) Which brings us to the biggun outta this batch -- Martin Scorsese's 2023 masterpiece
Killers of the Flower Moon. Yes I was very much Team This Movie, as
my review at the time let on -- I know some people have other opinions but I don't care for those in general. This is a great movie and man oh man is Lily Gladstone incredible in it.

Next up two I have never seen -- Claude Sautet's 1960 crime thriller
Classe tous risques, which stars a post-
Breathless Jean-Paul Belmondo as the sidekick to a fugitive slicing n' dicing his way through Paris' criminal underworld -- anybody seen it? Seeing as how Belmondo was at Peak Hotness right here you'd best believe it's just been added to my To Watch list. Then there's the 1995 Hong Kong actioner
The Blade from director Tsui Hark about a one-armed sword-maker hellbent on revenge -- I guess this was a flop when it came out but is now considered an expressionist action masterpiece? Now see, when people praise action movies for being "expressionist" I get worried it's some Michael Bay butchered nonsense -- deranged people have used that term for his cinema-barf and poisoned it for me. But we'll see. I'll give it a chance.

Next up two more 1960s classics with Claude Lelouche's 1966 romance
A Man and a Woman starring Jea-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée as widowed single parents falling for one another along the gorgeous Normandy coast, and Luis Buñuel’s deliciously blasphemous 1961 masterpiece
Viridinia with Catherine Deneuve. I only saw
Viridinia a few years ago for the first time and man oh man does it live up to its reputation as So Fucking Good. Wanna know why? Becaue it is So Fucking Good! That Buñuel. Whatta guy. And then, finally, we have the sixth title for the month, another one I have never seen but which sounds incredible and I can't believe I haven't seen this --
Lynne Littman's 1983 film Testament, which stars Jane Alexander as a small-town mother of three surviving the day after a nuclear explosion. I guess Alexander was nominated for an Oscar for this? Any fans? Sounds very intriguing to me!