Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy

The coolest of recent cinema's deadpan humorists, Finland's Aki Kaurismäki is known for his disarming—and hard-drinking—tragi-comedies about working-class outcasts, such as sanitation men, assembly line jockeys and longshoremen. All three can be found in Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and, most notably, The Match Factory Girl (1990), which stars Kati Outinen as a sadly inert employee of a you-know-what who embarks on a loveless romance that takes a poisonous but strangely sympathetic turn for the fatal. The Kaurismäki films that comprise this triptych, which are clearly influenced by such legendary European auteurs as Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville, are compelling in their dourness and have, in turn, gone on to make their mark on such stateside directors as Jim Jarmusch.

Shelf Talk: Nineties arthouse favorite Kaurismäki is poorly represented on DVD, and this release on the Criterion Eclipse imprint represents the U.S. digital premiere of three of his most popular films. The Finn Man has been awfully quiet of late (he has made only two features in the last eight years), so it's the right time to get a trio of his finest films out on DVD for hungry fans and other arthouse lovers who've yet to fall under his bleak spell.