The fall-festival season is underway, bringing cinephiles the latest restorations alongside buzzy new films. It’s all kicked off with Stephanie Rothman.

Hot on that fest’s heels, Toronto is making an event out of the world premiere of a new 4K of Jonathan Demme’s celebrated Talking Heads concert extravaganza, Stop Making Sense. With a whopping 4.6-out-of-five average rating, it’s long been in the top-rated anythings around here. Nothing to stress about if you can’t get to TIFF: the film will simulcast in IMAX around the world; for tickets and showtimes for satellite events, this must be the place.

Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival has announced its Revivals program, featuring the world premiere of a new restoration of Nancy Savoca’s underrated 1993 gem, Household Saints.

It’s a lot to keep up with, particularly as these restorations start trickling outward to arthouse theaters and physical media—and Shelf Life will be tracking them all. Meantime, on with the collectibles!

Vengeance Is Mine

On Blu-ray now from The Film Desk via Vinegar Syndrome.

Also known as Haunted, Vengeance Is Mine was originally shuffled off to a one-time airing on PBS, after which it vanished for more than 30 years. Now, it’s new on Blu-ray from The Film Desk following its rediscovery, restoration and theatrical revival last year.

The Wicker Man

On 4K Blu-ray out September 25 from Studiocanal.

Speaking of repression, the folk-horror subgenre is all about those things that society wishes to forget and their refusal to stay buried forever. The ultimate folk horror movie from the country that pioneered the genre, The Wicker Man (1973) brings ancient pagan practices into the warm spring sunlight. The plot of Robin Hardy’s chiller is straightforward, and has been used in many horror films since: An outsider comes to an isolated community. The community regards him with suspicion. The outsider starts poking around anyway. The outsider is punished for his arrogance.

Point is, this isn’t a movie that’s primarily valuable for its plot. The Wicker Man captures folk rituals that have been practiced in Europe since the Neolithic era—Maypoles and animal masks and nude bonfire-jumping, mainly, although Roman observers did write about Celtic tribes burning “Wicker Men” during springtime festivities. These anthropological sequences are presented without creepy musical cues or unnerving angles to underline them as horrific. “For large parts of it, you wouldn’t even consider it to be a horror movie,” reads one review.

That’s what’s so interesting about The Wicker Man: Up until the stunner of an ending, where “where one tiny bit of emphasis… turns the tables and changes the viewer’s perception forever,” this tale is unsettling, to be sure. But it’s only truly horrific if the viewer is, like our outsider, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), horrified by the nature-worship (and its offshoot, casual sexual freedom) on the remote Scottish island of Summerisle. From other perspectives, it’s all quite satisfying, as when JustDan writes that “my appetite for watching a self-righteous Christian cop getting f—ked with knows no bounds”.

Pagan or Christian or whatever denomination you please, there are plenty of reasons why viewers flock to The Wicker Man every summer as if they’re at the beach watching Jaws. For one thing, everyone loves the folk soundtrack (which was written for the movie, and has no historical basis). Heksedoktor expresses a common sentiment when they write that this is a “really underrated musical.” StudioCanal’s new 50th-anniversary 4K package includes a disc featuring Bristol-based singer-songwriter Kay J. Pearson performing music from the film, along with three different cuts: the 84-minute theatrical, the 99-minute director’s cut, and the 91-minute “Final Cut” sourced from a 35mm “release print” that was discovered by the Harvard Film Archive in 2013.

Touch of Evil

On 4K Blu-ray September 25 from Eureka Entertainment.

Streamers beware: that last one is the version that you’ll get if you rent Touch of Evil on iTunes. Luckily, however, the 109-minute version (initially released in the ’70s) and the 1998 “restoration cut” (which runs 110 minutes and attempts to get as close to Welles’ original vision as possible) are readily available on physical media. All three cuts are not just included, but upgraded to 4K UHD, on Eureka’s limited-edition set.

The darkness in Touch of Evil permeates every frame of the film, especially the night scenes, where the skies are blacker than Vantablack in 4K. But even the daytime shots have a lurid feel: “The cinematography is off the charts, with the combination of light and dark equaling a dreamscape that is impossible to tear your eyes away from,” writes SilentDawn. This is a story where cowardice and craven self-interest triumph over nobility and good intentions. Although he plays the character with moments of devastating clarity, Welles’ performance as police captain Hank Quinlan embodies this darkness with puffy-eyed, slurring entitlement. He’s the walking embodiment of corruption, rotting from the inside out. “As he does behind the camera, Welles dominates Touch of Evil in front of it,” Aaron highlights.

Because this is an Orson Welles movie, the camerawork is genius as well. Revisiting Touch of Evil after a decade away, I was struck by how many films I’ve since seen have been influenced by shots such as the approach to a chaotic construction site Welles presents from the back seat of a car, or the overview of a crowded, bawdy house filmed from between an exotic dancer’s legs. The three-and-a-half-minute opening crane shot is a marvel, too, considering the technical restrictions of the late ’50s. Its masterful cinematography comes up periodically in Letterboxd reviews, as does the dated choice of putting Charlton Heston in brownface to play Quinlan’s righteous Mexican counterpart. The most prominent thread is effusive praise, however, as in this review from Darren: “Touch of Evil couldn’t start any better, and what’s amazing is that it doesn’t get worse… [it’s] a perfect movie, in basically every way that matters.”

Fatal Femmes

Two-film Blu-ray collection available September 12 from Fun City Editions.

Snow is new on Blu-ray alongside another femme-helmed French noir of the era, The Bitch (La Garce), a movie that frankly baffled me but does feature a young Isabelle Huppert looking fierce and bitchy (in a good way) in her role as a fashion designer with a shady past. Both are included in the Fatal Femmes set from our friends at Fun City Editions, which comes with a much-needed 4K upgrade for both titles, new commentary, and essays from Jessica Felrice, Steve Macfarlane and another friend of this column, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

Blackhat

Originally scheduled for September, Arrow Video has delayed this release to November 28, 2023 to ensure the remastered Director’s Cut can be included. 

Although there’s only so much a legend can grow in eight years, the director’s cut of Michael Mann’s Blackhat has gained a remarkable amount of traction in that time. Mann first presented his alternate cut in February 2016, a little over a year after its disastrous theatrical release. This new version doesn’t add a ton of screen time, as it’s only three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but it does significantly restructure the story, amping up the ion between Chris Hemsworth and Tang Wei’s characters and moving a key scene from the beginning to the middle of the film. The result has a “much clearer sense of thematic purpose,” as Jake puts it, establishing the impersonal emptiness of digital commerce as Blackhat’s true villain.

Both versions are quintessentially Mann, full of doomed romance and principled professionals facing existential irrelevance in an increasingly automated and amoral world. “In this world dominated by banks and money—which no longer even exist in a tangible form—we see how truly valuable interpersonal human connection really is,” Neil details.

Blackhat divided Mann lovers upon its initial release—the Letterboxd histogram very much favors the middle—and the new cut is unlikely to change anyone’s mind on that point. Still, the lore behind the director’s cut (which also aired on FX back in 2017) is pervasive enough that Arrow Video pushed back the release of its 4K UHD version of the film to accommodate requests for this additional cut. Mann’s obsession with the greenish, matte aesthetics of digital video—used to thematically appropriate effect here—is also highlighted in 4K, playing up what Josh calls “the texture of concrete, metal, screens, security-cam footage, reflective surfaces, shipping barges, server rooms and shrapnel-pierced flesh.”