1960 was a momentous year for horror movies. Just a few months before Alfred Hitchcock changed the nature of exhibition forever with Psycho, Michael Powell diagnosed the voyeuristic condition known as “cinephilia” in Peeping Tom, a film whose ghastly tone and taboo psychosexual throb almost ended its director’s to-that-point celebrated career. (Meanwhile, Psycho was a hit, as Chavel mentions in their review.) Powell didn’t have to live in exile long, however, as Martin Scorsese led the campaign to rehabilitate Peeping Tom with a 1979 re-release.

Now, as his Film Foundation co-sponsors a new 4K restoration with StudioCanal and the BFI National Archive, Scorsese says in a press release: “Peeping Tom is set at the rock-bottom level of low culture, with a protagonist who has already crossed the line. On a plot level, it’s about a serial killer who murders women as he films them. On a deeper level, it’s a portrait of self-destruction by means of cinema—the lenses are scalpels, the splices are real cuts that bleed, the celluloid razor wire, and the light of the projector blinding.”

The picture opens with a first-person view of a back-alley murder, as seen through the split-viewfinder window of a film camera. It’s a device that both distances the viewer from the on-screen death and implicates them in it. This type of self-reflexive commentary on voyeurism and the capital-G Gaze is digestible… in a post-Peeping Tom world. But critics at the time condemned the film—and Powell by extension—as ghoulish and immoral. Still, the formula proved irresistible: “You can argue that Michael Powell’s greatest gift to cinema was inventing the slasher,” Allistair writes.

Peeping Tom came about after Powell split from his co-director Emeric Pressburger, with whom he made classics including A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, but his first solo venture still has that sheen of exquisite theatrical craft. “The Eastman Color film brings forth an exaggerated palette, with colors taking on an almost hyper-real saturation,” WraithApe describes. In retrospect, the film’s colored lighting design feels especially prophetic, pre-dating similar jewel-toned schemes from Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. But the milieu is particular to a specific time and place: the seedy back alleys of pre-swinging ’60s London, a filthy stew of post-war cynicism and festering misogyny.

Combining the gritty honesty of post-war neorealism with the enigmatic dream logic of experimental cinema seems like an impossible task, but “the beast of the Cinema Novo somehow miraculously… make[s] them coexist,” Edgar writes. Director Glauber Rocha was the preeminent filmmaker of that particular movement, which—like its cinematic comrades in the French New Wave—flourished amid the restless revolutionary atmosphere of Brazil in the 1960s. And Rocha’s landmark Black God, White Devil is indeed a political film—and a cynical one. It highlights the absurdity of blind faith: in God, in charismatic bandits, or in anyone that claims to have all the answers.

When the Cat Comes (AKA The Cassandra Cat) is as revolutionary of a film as Black God, White Devil. It just takes a different approach. Rather than a blunt object, this 1963 Czech fantasy is a mischievous magic show. It’s just as much of a troublemaker, though: the moral of this allegorical fairy tale is that adults are corrupted by their own selfish ambitions, and that children—whose capacity for imagination makes them inherently superior to grown-ups—must band together to defend magic and truth from the forces of hypocrisy and boredom. Or, as Your Neighbor says, “Fuck school, cats rock, Czechoslovakia wins again!”

The key promotional still for the film (above) shows a woman with a black updo holding a cat in little rectangular sunglasses, which make him look like the touring keyboardist for a New Wave band. The actual movie is a little more fairy tale and a little less sci-fi: the basic idea is that there’s a magical cat named Mourek traveling the Czech countryside, accompanied by some equally magical circus folk. Mourek’s human friends take off his little sunglasses at the end of every show so that he can use his power, which is to turn humans into different colors that illuminate their character flaws. (Liars turn purple, cheaters yellow, and so on.)

This particular title was digitally restored at L’Immagine Ritrovata for Janus Films, and it does have that yellow tint that’s become a Ritrovata signature. That being said, the color in the fantastical transformation sequences remains bright, saturated and clear. “This world is vibrant and alive and I wish I could live in it,” Parker writes, and Nathan adds: “A live-action version of a Fantasia sequence is the closest comp I can think of—though its surfeit of visual tricks is honestly without comparison.”

November is a great month for Janus Films, whose new restorations take up more than half of this month’s Shelf Life. Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture Show (pictured above) is a little ahead of When the Cat Comes and Black God, White Devil, in that it’s already being prepared for a home-video release alongside its lesser-known 1990 sequel featuring the same actors and characters, Texasville. Both films are coming-of-age classics: The Last Picture Show in the traditional adolescent sense, and Texasville in a looser, coming-of-middle-age type of way. And they’re both bleak as hell.

“It’s one of those movies that doesn’t seem like anything extraordinary until you’re sitting through the credits trying to absorb what you just watched,” Nakul observes about The Last Picture Show. And this is a film whose impact sneaks up on you over the course of its 127-minute run time. It’s a combination of the nuanced, naturalistic performances—Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her role as Ruth, a depressed fortysomething housewife who has an affair with one of the film’s teenage protagonists—and the ambient sadness that hangs over the movie’s one-horse (or, in this, case, one-theater-screen) West Texas town.

“Stark black-and-white cinematography matches characters who walk around as if shell-shocked, be it young folks staring down the barrel of no future or their elders having long ago lived past a point of no return,” Jake notes. All this despair builds up, like poison in the blood from lead water pipes, as the film’s characters drift together and apart out of sheer boredom. It’s “the quintessential film for me about the process of youth and realizing only after it’s too late how much of it you wasted,” Coffee says, calling it “one of the saddest movies ever made. I adore it to absolute death.”

Middle age is melancholy for most people anyway, so one might expect Texasville to be even sadder. But that’s part of the beauty of this pairing: Zenmichael says it’s “somehow funnier and more depressing than The Last Picture Show,” while Sydney describes it as “a beautiful Sunday morning type of picture, effortlessly moving between chill and funny and heartbreaking in a dusty little town.” Both features contemplate life in all its tragic irony on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, from new 4K restorations. Texasville also comes in an alternate black-and-white version, just to make the whole thing a little more austere.