Blu-ray Release: Coup de torchon

By
Laurence
– July 30, 2026Find Others: Blu-ray, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , , , ,

Blu-ray Release Date: Aug. 11, 2026
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion Collection

With the 1981 existential crime thriller Coup de torchon, legend of French cinema Bertrand Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country) transforms Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled novel Pop. 1280 into a darkly comic, philosophically provocative exploration of the brutality and absurdity of colonialism.

Moving the story’s setting from the American South to 1930s French West Africa, Coup de torchon features a frighteningly enigmatic performance from Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso) as a police chief whose seeming ineptitude masks a cold-blooded pursuit of revenge and control that draws his opportunistic mistress (a fiery Isabelle Huppert of Elle fame) into an escalating spiral of violence.

With each chilling revelation, Tavernier plunges us ever deeper into an abyss of madness and corruption, laying bare the decaying soul of empire.

Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition contains the following:

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2001 with director Bertrand Tavernier
  • New interview with critic and poet Robert Polito about source-novel author Jim Thompson
  • Making-of program featuring on-set footage and interviews with members of the cast and crew
  • Alternate ending
  • Trailers
  • New English subtitle translation
  • An essay by scholar Lynn Anthony Higgins
Buy or Rent Coup de torchon

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.