September kicks the festival circuit back into gear for another season, as the glamor of Venice bleeds into the bustle of TIFF and beyond. The spotlight at these festivals is on splashy new contenders for the awards season: As of this writing, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is being hailed online as the hefty masterpiece du jour. (Literally: the 70mm print of this three-and-a-half-hour movie weighs more than 300 pounds.) That’s all very exciting, of course, but another signature of fall film festivals is not being able to get tickets to the hottest screenings—which is where the modest charms of a restoration program come in.

Italy is home to the Venice Classics sidebar—which brings new restorations of films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Nagisa Ōshima and François Truffaut to the capital city. That lineup also features the unveiling of a new 4K of Frederick Wiseman’s Model from 1980, continuing the rollout of a historic project to digitize the legendary documentarian’s filmography. (Until fairly recently, many of Wiseman’s movies were only available on DVD through the filmmaker himself.)

Another Wiseman, Essene, premieres its restoration at TIFF, where you can also find a 100th-birthday celebration for Awaara filmmaker and Bollywood showman Raj Kapoor, plus the North American release of legendary Filipino director Lino Brocka’s Bona, presented by Shelf Life regulars Kani Distribution. If you can’t make it to any of these cities, don’t stress—Shelf Life will be following these films, and the rest of the fall’s restoration slate, all the way to their physical-media debuts.

Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To

Screening September 12 to October 13 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Each one of the titles mentioned above is rated highly on Letterboxd: Exiled (pictured above) is the highest with an impressive 4.0, but none of them drop below a 3.8 average. All of them are also screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September and October, part of a retrospective that’s notable for even attempting to wrap its arms around the sheer breadth of To’s work.

Sitting alongside the classics we’ve already talked about are wild efforts like To’s all-star 1993 superhero fantasy as students of To’s predecessor John Woo already know.) In fact, the only thing missing from MoMa’s lineup is To in tearjerker mode: his 2012 romantic drama Romancing in Thin Air is among the highest-ranked of his films on Letterboxd.

Happiness

4K UHD and Blu-ray available September 24 from The Criterion Collection.

There are a handful of movies whose premiere I desperately wish I could have attended. Takashi Miike’s Audition. John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Given a time machine, one of the first things I’d do is crash the 1998 Cannes Film Festival just to hear the audience’s reaction to this masterpiece of discomfort, which has the audacity not only to depict humanity at its most pathetic and repulsive but to be devastatingly funny about it. Initially slapped with an NC-17 certificate purely for themes and language—it’s not a particularly graphic film, but wow, it’s dark—it was released unrated, sparked controversy for a while, and then disappeared. Now, it’s coming back into circulation through The Criterion Collection.

With a new wave of viewers set to (re)discover the film, I do get to live my daydream online in the form of Letterboxd writing about Happiness. “It’s one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen, but hands down the most awkward, most uncomfortable, and most disturbing comedy I’ve ever seen,” Silent J writes, echoing Michael’s statement that “this was so consistently depressing and grim and miserable and uncomfortable that it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen.” He adds, “The glowy suburban utopia look of it all really sells it as a dark fucking comedy. Watch if you’re a sick one.”

Those are two of the more verbose reviews. More often, Letterboxd are simply stunned—like Andre, who simply writes: “Jesus fucking Christ, Todd.” Pair it with François Ozon’s Sitcom (a recent Shelf Life pick) for a fun evening of destroying the grotesque hypocrisies of the bourgeois nuclear family. TW for, well, everything.

Body Double

4K UHD and Blu-ray available September 24 from Sony Pictures.

Like a giallo, Body Double’s connection to workaday reality is questionable: the plot that leads Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) to the temple of neon and chrome—complete with rotating circular bed—where much of the film takes place is incidental. His profession, a mildly successful actor with a lead role in a movie called Vampire’s Kiss (not that one), is just an excuse to play with the aesthetics and imagery of ’80s low-budget horror. What’s important here is De Palma’s “clever and entertaining reflection (and satire) on filmmaking, Hollywood, genre cinema, observation, and desire,” Kat describes, making for a film that “ultimately revolves around itself, just like the bed, the camera and the drill.” (Shoutout to Shelf Life pick The Slumber Party Massacre.)

Mirrors, reflections, unseen vantage points, and different ways of seeing and being seen abound. “You the viewer are the peeper—it’s only the tenuous presence of a ‘plot’ that allows you to excuse yourself from your own voyeurism. Oh, you’re not here as a voyeur? This director disagrees,” Thomas writes, adding, “it’s never quite clear if De Palma wants to implicate us or himself. Perhaps both. It doesn’t really matter, he’s just trying to get you to watch.” And just when you thought this movie simply could not get any more ’80s, Patrick quips that “scientists have confirmed that the Frankie Goes to Hollywood scene”—in which De Palma’s camera ogles a punk-themed porn set that’s about a half-step away from a musical number—“is the peak of 1980s cinema.” I’m inclined to agree.

Bringing Out the Dead

4K UHD and Blu-ray available September 17 from Paramount Presents.

We even get one of those famous Scorsese tracking shots, this one snaking through the goth club where Frank and Marcus have been summoned to revive a musician named I.B. Bangin who OD’ed in VIP. If that doesn’t make you want to see this movie, then we have fundamentally different cinema priorities.

Thieves Like Us

4K UHD and Blu-ray available now from Cinématographe.

Another director whose lesser-known works have more going on than some filmmakers’ major ones is Robert Altman. One of those titles is Thieves Like Us, a low-key Depression-era crime picture that was released in between The Long Goodbye and California Split, and often gets lost in their midst. Thieves also echoes Shelf Life veteran McCabe & Mrs. Miller in the sense that it reimagines a genre film as a tender outlaw romance. It’s cynical like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, too, but cut with a sweetness that gives it a strange, wistful aftertaste.

What makes Thieves Like Us such a gem is the recently departed, much loved Shelley Duvall, who brings her inimitable wide-eyed charm to her role as Keechie, the daughter of a gas-station owner in love with a similarly starry-eyed junior bank robber named Bowie (Keith Carradine). “There will never be someone like Duvall starring in a studio movie ever again,” Laura writes of the actress in this film. “There’s never been a movie star that has felt less like a movie star while still retaining the magnetism required for the job.”

Much of Thieves Like Us takes place behind closed doors, with Bowie and the gang reading about themselves in the paper as Keechie plays house in sparse Mississippi cabins that looked much the same in the 1930s as they did in the early ’70s. “Duvall’s chemistry with Keith Carradine here is something to behold,” Evan gushes, calling them “one of cinema’s all-time sweetest couples.” One might even say they’re sweet as Coca-Cola, which functions as a visual metaphor both for our core couple’s naïveté and for the all-permeating hustle that defines American life then and now.

Letterboxd’s managing editor Mitchell Beaupre wrote an essay for the 4K debut of Thieves Like Us from Cinématographe, the new Vinegar Syndrome partner label previously featured in Shelf Life for its inaugural release, Little Darlings.