The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment are delighted to confirm the titles to be released on Blu-ray in October 2019.

On 14 October Polyester is released.  One of John Water's most hilarious inventions and starring his muse Divine, the film is replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.

On 21 October Eating Raoul arrives. A sleeper hit of the early 1980s, starring Warhol superstar Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel (who also directed), the film is a bawdy, gleefully amoral tale of conspicuous consumption.

28 October brings the The Before Trilogy, Richard Linklater's celebrated 3-part romance starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight capture a relationship as it begins, begins again, deepens, strains, and settles over the course of almost two decades.

Polyester (1981) | Blu-ray | 14 October 2019

For his first studio picture, filth maestro John Waters (Female Trouble) took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine (Hairspray) to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart—until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow (vintage heartthrob Tab Hunter). Enhanced with Odorama technology that enables you to scratch and sniff along with Francine, Polyester is one of Waters’ most hilarious inventions, replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.

Director-Approved Special Edition contents:

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director John Waters, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring Waters from the 1993 Criterion laserdisc release of the film
• New conversation between Waters and critic Michael Musto
• New program featuring interviews with Waters collaborators Tab Hunter, Dennis Dermody, Pat Moran, Vincent Peranio, Mink Stole, Mary Garlington, and Greer Yeaton
• Interviews from 1993 with cast and crew members Waters, Divine, Moran, Peranio, Edith Massey, and Van Smith, featuring footage from the making of the film
• Archival interviews
• Deleted scenes and alternate takes
• Trailer
• Scratch-and-sniff Odorama card
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Elena Gorfinkel

Eating Raoul (1982) | Blu-ray | 21 October 2019

A sleeper hit of the early 1980s, Eating Raoul is a bawdy, gleefully amoral tale of conspicuous consumption. Warhol superstar Mary Woronov and cult legend Paul Bartel (who also directed) portray a prudish married couple feeling put upon by the swingers who live in their apartment building; one night, by accident, they discover a way to simultaneously realize their dream of opening a little restaurant and rid themselves of the “perverts” down the hall. A mix of hilarious, anything-goes slapstick and biting satire of me-generation self-indulgence, Eating Raoul marks the end of the sexual revolution with a thwack.

Special Edition contents:

• New, restored digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Gary Thieltges, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary featuring screenwriter Richard Blackburn, art director Robert Schulenberg, and editor Alan Toomayan
• The Secret Cinema (1968) and Naughty Nurse (1969), two short films by director Paul Bartel
• Cooking Up “Raoul,” a new documentary about the making of the film, featuring interviews with stars Mary Woronov, Robert Beltran, and Edie McClurg
• Gag reel of outtakes from the film
• Archival interview with Bartel and Woronov
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic David Ehrenstein

The Before Trilogy | Blu-ray | 28 October 2019

The cornerstone of the career-long exploration of cinematic time by director Richard Linklater (Boyhood), this celebrated three-part romance captures a relationship as it begins, begins again, deepens, strains, and settles over the course of almost two decades. Chronicling the love of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), from their first meeting as idealistic twentysomethings to the disillusionment they face together in middle age, The Before Trilogy also serves as a document of a boundary-pushing and extraordinarily intimate collaboration between director and actors, as Delpy and Hawke, who co-wrote two of the films, imbue their characters with a sense of raw, lived-in experience, and as they age on-screen along with them. Attuned to the sweeping grandeur of time’s passage as well as the evanescence of individual moments, the Before films chart the progress of romantic destiny as it navigates the vicissitudes of ordinary life.

Before Sunrise (1995)

An exquisitely understated ode to the thrill of romantic possibility, the inaugural instalment of The Before Trilogy opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Celine and the scrappy American tourist Jesse impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love, from the first awkward stirrings of attraction to the hopeful promise that Celine and Jesse make upon their inevitable parting.

Before Sunset (2004)

In the breathtaking follow-up to Before Sunrise, Celine tracks down Jesse, now a newly minted author, at the tail end of his book tour in Paris, with only a few hours left before his flight back home to the States. Meeting almost a decade  after their short-lived romance in Vienna, the pair find their chemistry rekindled by increasingly candid exchanges about professional setbacks, marital disappointments, and the compromises of adulthood. Impelled by an urgent sense of the transience of human connection, Before Sunset remains Linklater’s most seductive experiment with time’s inexorable passage and  the way love can seem to stop it in its tracks.

Before Midnight (2013)

The bittersweet conclusion of The Before Trilogy finds Celine and Jesse several years into a relationship and in the midst of a sun-dappled Greek retreat with their twin daughters and a group of friends. The couple soon find their vacation upended, however, by the aggravations of committed monogamy, which have long since supplanted the initial jolt of their mutual seduction. Marked by the emotional depth, piercing wit, and conversational exuberance that Linklater and his actors had honed over two decades of abiding with these characters, Before Midnight grapples with the complexities of long-term intimacy, and asks what becomes of love when it no longer has recourse to past illusions.  

Director-Approved Special Edition contents:

• New, restored 2K digital transfers of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset and a 2K digital master of Before Midnight, approved by director Richard Linklater, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Before Sunrise Blu-ray and 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks on the Before Sunset and Before Midnight Blu-rays
• New discussion featuring Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, moderated by critic Kent Jones
• Behind-the-scenes footage and interviews from the productions of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset
• Audio commentary on Before Midnight by Delpy, Linklater, and Hawke
• Dream Is Destiny, a 2016 feature-length documentary about Linklater by Louis Black and Karen Bernstein
• New documentary about the making of Before Midnight in Greece by filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari
• 3x2, a new conversation between scholars Dave Johnson and Rob Stone about Linklater’s work
• Linklater // On Cinema & Time, a video essay by filmmaker “:: kogonada”
• PLUS: An essay on the trilogy by critic Dennis Lim