May is the month when the international cinematic community converges on the south of France for Cannes, arguably the world’s most prestigious and influential film festival. Letterboxd members like Ana A. and Sean Liu have been diligently keeping track of the festival’s evolving lineup, including sidebars like Critic’s Week and Director’s Fortnight, as well as the main competition; you can take advantage of their archival work through the lists linked above. But for Shelf Life, we’re taking a closer look at the lineup for Cannes Classics, a section of the festival spotlighting “celebrations” and restorations of classic films.

This year’s centerpiece is a new restoration from Japanese studio Toho Co. of Akira Kurosawa’s all-time classic Seven Samurai, which marks its 70th anniversary in 2024. Also celebrating milestone birthdays at Cannes this year are Paris, Texas (which turns 40) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1964. These will screen alongside less famous but equally weighty titles like Abel Gance’s Napoleon, an expanded restoration of the hard-to-find silent masterpiece that the press release calls “sixteen years in the making.”

With films by Dalton Trumbo, Tsui Hark, Ousmane Sembène (also featured in this month’s column!), Shyam Benegal and a little-known auteur of the New American Cinema named Steven Spielberg also on this year’s docket, it’s safe to say that, in time, these movies will trickle outwards from Cannes to art houses around the world and eventually onto physical media. Shelf Life will be there, following them every step of the way.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Available on 4K UHD May 14 from Paramount Presents.

It’s shifted from iconoclastic upstart to revered classic, in short, a status that is further cemented by the restoration featured on Paramount Presents’ new 4K UHD disc. Now, Paramount Presents titles aren’t the most deluxe releases out there in terms of packaging and extras. But the restoration is legit, featuring both the HDR 10 and Dolby Vision versions of the film sourced from the original camera negative as restored by Paramount, Italy’s L’immagine Ritrovata and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. Ritrovata restorations tend to be a little yellow, but Marty himself advised this one, and the result is ravishing—just the sweat beading on the cowboys’ upper lips is beautiful enough to make you cry.

Stop Making Sense

Available now on Blu-ray and 4K UHD from A24.

“I have a tape I’d like to play.” The image of rubber man David Byrne bopping and bouncing across the stage is iconic enough to build a whole movie around—as Jonathan Demme (with an assist from Byrne, who gets a “conceived for the stage by” credit) did in their now equally iconic 1984 movie Stop Making Sense. Beginning with Byrne alone on stage playing along to his cassette tape, the film adds layers (and players) with each subsequent musical number, building to an ensemble ten musicians strong. Demme’s camera snakes around them and among them, spotlighting touring players like Bernie Worrell and Lynn Mabry (both of Parliament-Funkadelic) before drawing the eye back to the core band members purely through staging and camera movement.

I saw the new restoration at home and couldn’t help bopping around my living room: the energy of this film is nothing short of electrifying, and the debut of Byrne’s iconic Big Suit an hour and four minutes in made me giddy. Irmavep also had a euphoric experience while watching, writing: “Too many perfect beautiful eternal moments to count. When the organ hit in ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ I felt transcendence.” So did Maris, who simply says it was “blissful as f—k.”

Stop Making Sense’s review arc on Letterboxd is as miraculous as the film, with an astonishing 63% of members awarding it a perfect five stars. Three of those five-star ratings come from comedian Demi Adejuyigbe, who calls it “the most joyous film ever made” in one review and shares a transcendent experience dancing along to a screening at Los Angeles movie theater Vidiots in another.

Indie juggernaut A24 actually supervised a new 4K restoration of the film, which made its debut at last year’s TIFF. A24 isn’t particularly known for its archival work, but IHE was impressed with their restoration work here, noting that the visuals and editing were noticeably cleaner and several musical numbers featured new footage and extended cuts. It’s true, two new extended cuts of Stop Making Sense are bowing on Blu-ray and 4K UHD in May through A24, whose merch game remains untouchable.

Seeing Red: Three French Vigilante Thrillers

Available on Blu-ray May 7 from Fun City Editions.

No one embodies these films’ aesthetic better than Black List star Annie Girardot. Her close-cropped red hair and long black vinyl trench coat are iconic, and her revenge scenes are as ice-cold as Christina Lindberg’s in Thriller: A Cruel Picture a decade earlier. Black List is relatively unseen on Letterboxd, with only two English-language member reviews on the site—one of which is from Letterboxd senior editor Mitchell Beaupre.

It’s a real hidden gem, as is Street of the Damned. A sweaty, oddly paced and plotted film in the Walking Tall “just can’t take it anymore” mold, Travis Woods says it “plays like a subdued version of Walter Hill’s The Warriors with less action and more wearily existential smoking.” Similarly, Shot Pattern comes from the Death Wish school of revenge thrillers, but with a Gallic twist that Travis (who recorded two feature commentaries for the set) describes as “a French cousin to Abel Ferrara’s early ’80s gutter sleaze art-pulp.” Crime just feels different en français, you know? It’s all the psychosexual ennui and bladed weapons, I think.

By the way, if you’re like us and love what Fun City Editions are doing, be sure to check out their brand new Letterboxd HQ account.

Cemetery Man

Available on 4K UHD from Severin Films.

Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène

Available on Blu-ray May 21 from The Criterion Collection.

Black Girl —Ousmane Sembène’s best known movie abroad, and his sole appearance on the most recent Sight and Sound poll—is a modest, humanist character study. It’s a great film, but it’s an outlier in his’s filmography. Most of the work produced by the “father of African cinema,” who Sally says “should be heralded as one of cinema’s most powerful voices,” is explicitly political and dialectical—like the films in Criterion’s new box set Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène.

If you’re not already familiar, New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote an impassioned and informative overview of Sembène’s career last fall, when NYC’s Film Forum debuted the 4K restorations of the three titles in this set. All hailing from the 1970s, each of them showcases a different facet of the filmmaker’s explorations of Senegal’s colonialist past and neocolonialist present: Emitaï, released in 1971, decolonizes World War Two movies by drawing on the Sembène’s memories of that period. The result, Elyes writes in a five-star review, “is anti-colonial but also feminist, and wrestles with notions of tradition and culture in the face of a changing landscape, a changing world.”

1977’s Ceddo is similarly weighty in its approach to history and African identity, an approach teamgal compares to “a piece of theater”, adding that “as is his wont, Ousmane Sembène works expertly with a cast of non-professionals, leaning heavily into his beautifully constructed, highly politicized screenplay.” In this group, Xala (pictured above) from 1975 is the outlier, an absurdist satire that blends a trenchant political statement with an extended boner joke. Now that’s range! If you dug previous Shelf Life picks Black God, White Devil or West Indies—or, ideally, both—this set should be just your artistic speed.