THE CRITERION COLLECTION With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis (White Material) firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Mauvais sang’s Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (35 Shots of Rum’s Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard (Let the Sunshine In) fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.