While the battle lines over digital ownership keep shifting, physical media is still out here slugging it out, refusing to go quietly into that good night. Thankfully, heavy hitters like The Criterion Collection continue to treat cinema with the reverence it deserves. Case in point: John Boorman’s brutal survival thriller Deliverance is getting a gorgeous new Criterion release, flanked by fresh 4K editions of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.
Deliverance
- Release Date: January 26
- The Setup: Boorman’s harrowing shock to the pop-culture system follows four Atlanta weekend warriors—brought to life by Burt Reynolds in his breakout turn, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox—on a canoe trip through rural Georgia that spirals into absolute nightmare fuel. Shot on location in Appalachia with near-mythic resonance (including that iconic, tension-soaked dueling-banjos sequence), it remains one of the most blistering, morally complex dissections of masculinity ever captured on film.
Specs & Special Features:
- Two-disc 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo pack
- New 4K restoration supervised and approved by director John Boorman, featuring uncompressed monaural and alternate 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio tracks
- Dolby Vision HDR presentation
- Audio commentary featuring Boorman
- New interview with critic Mark Harris
- Audio reading of Charles Bethea’s 2011 article, “Mountain Men: An Oral History of Deliverance”
- James Dickey reading from his novel
- The Dangerous World of “Deliverance” (1972 making-of documentary)
- Interview with Dickey from a 1977 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
- The Making of “Deliverance” (2007), a four-part documentary by Laurent Bouzereau
- The Cast Looks Back, a 2012 roundtable discussion
- Theatrical trailer & English SDH subtitles
- Plus: An essay by author Francine Prose
Parasite
- The Setup: Bong Joon Ho’s genre-shredding, dark-comic masterpiece laid bare the brutal mechanics of class inequality with blistering precision. Following the entwined fates of the impoverished Kim family and the obscenely wealthy Parks in Seoul, it’s a masterclass in tension, architectural paranoia, and cinematic subversion. It rightly shattered glass ceilings by sweeping Cannes and becoming the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
Specs & Special Features:
- Four-disc combo pack (two 4K UHDs / two Blu-rays)
- 4K digital master of the color version, approved by Bong Joon Ho and cinematographer Hong Kyung Pyo, presented in HDR with Dolby Atmos
- 4K digital master of the black-and-white version, approved by Bong and Hong, complete with a Dolby Atmos track and an introduction by the director
- Audio commentary with Bong and critic Tony Rayns
- Conversation between Bong and critic Darcy Paquet
- Interviews with Hong, production designer Lee Ha Jun, and editor Yang Jinmo
- A deep-dive program on the New Korean Cinema movement featuring Bong and Park Chan-wook
- 2019 Cannes Film Festival press conference and a masterclass from the Lumière Festival
- Storyboard comparisons & trailers
- Plus: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin
Midnight Cowboy
- The Setup: When British New Wave veteran John Schlesinger touched down in late-60s New York, he captured a city rotting at the edges and birthed a seismic shift in American cinema. Jon Voight delivers an all-timer as Joe Buck, a starry-eyed Texas hustler trying to crack the NYC high-life code, who finds an unlikely lifeline in Dustin Hoffman’s iconic, coughing, broken-down street hustler “Ratso” Rizzo. Despite triggering the MPAA with its “homosexual frame of reference,” it famously muscled its way to becoming the first (and only) X-rated film to win Best Picture.
Specs & Special Features:
- Two-disc 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo pack
- Gorgeous 4K restoration supervised and approved by cinematographer Adam Holender, featuring uncompressed monaural and alternate 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio tracks
- HDR presentation
- Audio commentary from 1991 with Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
- Nancy Buirski’s acclaimed 2022 documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of “Midnight Cowboy”
- Video essay and commentary by Holender
- Photo gallery with commentary by photographer Michael Childers
- The Crowd Around the Cowboy (1969 on-location short film)
- Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (1990 documentary)
- Two archival making-of featurettes
- 1970 Jon Voight interview on The David Frost Show & Voight’s original screen test
- Archival interviews and tributes featuring Schlesinger
- Theatrical trailer & English SDH subtitles
- Plus: An essay by critic Mark Harris
Damn, that Criterion drop for Parasite is calling my name. That movie completely scrambled my brain in the best possible way, and the idea of owning a definitive edition that picks apart its absolute insanity piece by piece is too good to pass up. Criterion rarely misses when it comes to packing releases with killer supplements, and their physical packaging is always top-tier shelf candy. I might have just pre-ordered a stack of movies at my local shop, but I’m definitely carving out some room in the budget for this one.
The post The Criterion Collection Details Its Upcoming 4K Blu-ray Releases for Deliverance, Parasite, and Midnight Cowboy appeared first on JoBlo.
