The surreal nature of life in the 2020s makes it difficult to say for sure whether one year is more eventful than another (how many historical events can you experience through a screen without your grip on reality loosening, you know?) but 2023 felt like a big year for the movies. We covered some of the major beats here on Shelf Life: Marty Scorsese ing Letterboxd. (One event we didn’t cover was Barbenheimer, but Journal had that covered.)

In the column itself, we talked about 135 films from seventeen countries, from such major filmmakers as Jane Campion, Andrzej Żuławski, Lars von Trier and Paul Verhoeven. Aside from boxed sets, the only filmmakers to appear twice in this column in 2023 were Walter Hill and John Woo, two giants of the form. We’ve covered lost films and commercial flops, cult obscurities and genre cornerstones. If anything, the repertory and home-video scenes are even more robust now than when we started—thanks, in no small part, to the ionate community of Letterboxd who keep the conversations around these films going. See you in 2024, friends.

eXistenZ

4K Blu-ray available now from Vinegar Syndrome.

Days of Heaven

4K restoration in theaters December 8 at Film Forum. 4K Blu-ray available December 5 from The Criterion Collection.

All that being said, The Criterion Collection remains the 500-pound gorilla of the boutique home-video world. Although Criterion has expanded its purview in recent years (it will never not be weird to me that Frankenhooker streamed on the Criterion Channel), a physical release from them is still an unofficial induction into the canon. Not that Terrence Malick would have that problem anyway, but a gorgeous 4K restoration of one of his films is never anything to complain about.

The filmmaker’s second feature, Days of Heaven, gets a 4K UHD upgrade from the label in December, while the restoration hits theaters at Film Forum. Set in the Texas panhandle circa 1910, little is stated directly by the film’s characters, who prefer to leave their ions unspoken—except for young Linda (Linda Manz, in her feature debut), who narrates the film in a plain-spoken Chicago accent. But the natural world speaks for them: a plague of locusts accompanies a crescendo in the film’s love-triangle plot, for example.

Days of Heaven was nominated for an Oscar for Néstor Almendros’s golden-hour cinematography, which foregrounds the elements of fire—not just in the masterful sequence of burning wheat fields teased in Criterion’s promo for the film but also in its exquisite sunrises and sunsets. “Shooting this movie for only [twenty] minutes a day to get the perfect light is insane but also totally worth it,” Patrick notes. It’s a sentiment echoed by none other than Roger Ebert, who called Days of Heaven “one of the most beautiful films ever made”. That’s what makes Malick Malick: in the end, you have to trust that it will all be worth it—and it usually is.

Face/Off

4K Blu-ray available December 12 from Kino Lorber.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Blu-ray available December 12 from Fun City Editions.

Being a millennial type, I never really stopped to consider a young Richard Dreyfuss. Seeing him as a sweaty social climber barely old enough to drink in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was like discovering that Helen Mirren was a sexpot in her youth—a feeling I can only describe in of the childhood realization that your parents had whole lives before you were born. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is like this as well, opening a door to a lost world—Jewish Montreal in the 1940s—through extensive location photography. (Legendary cheap-eats spot Wilensky’s Light Lunch is practically a character in the film.)

Many Letterboxd reviewers seem to find Duddy annoying (it’s that Richard Dreyfuss laugh). “Duddy Kravitz earns the dubious honor of being one of the most simultaneously contemptible, annoying, and watchable characters I’ve ever seen in a movie… the film lays bare an empty void of a man devoid of meaning,” goes The Pieper Review’s four-star review. But I found his working-class striving relatable, if not necessarily laudable, particularly when he reveals that he’s motivated more by spite than by his stated desire to provide a better life for his family. He takes all the wrong lessons about what it means to “make it”, but that’s capitalism, baby!

Director Ted Kotcheff lays out his satirical cards in short vignettes that comment on both capitalism and anti-Semitism, as in the scene where a blacklisted British film director turns a bar-mitzvah video into an ethnographic film. Duddy’s desperate need to get rich quick leads some on Letterboxd to compare the film to a more celebrated portrait of a Jewish f—kup: “Strong slow-motion Uncut Gems anxiety vibes from this,” Andrew writes. That ties The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz back to its label, Shelf Life favorite Fun City Editions, whose name comes from a moniker for the old, fun, dangerous NYC but which features films set in other metropolises as well. (The label’s other recent release, T.R. Baskin, starring an incredible Candice Bergen, calls Chicago home.)

World Noir Vol. 1

Blu-ray collection available December 18 from Radiance Films.

My personal favorite of the three is Witness in the City (pictured above), an enigmatic proto-New Wave thriller that revolves around a Parisian taxi dispatch and the street people who are drawn to it. The noose of fate tightens around our protagonist, slowly but steadily, until it’s inescapable: “Through snaking streets and subway tunnels, by foot and by car, the hunt persists, each crossed path another test of morality or another close call,” More_Badass writes, describing the climactic chase as “an anxiety-wracked full-throttle manhunt not unlike a noirish Rush.” I’d compare it to Phone Booth or Shelf Life alum The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as well, thanks to a terrifically tense scene where a dispatcher listens helplessly over the radio as a colleague (who’s also her lover) is held hostage by a enger bent on revenge.

All three of the films in World Noir Vol. 1 hit Blu-ray—two of them for the first time ever—in either new transfers or full 2K and 4K restorations. The Facts of Murder was restored by the (in)famous L’Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna, but don’t worry: it’s in black-and-white, which mitigates the old paperback-yellow tint issue.