The Criterion Collection

[The Chosen One]

Decided to make a separate thread from the movie thread...


April Releases were just announced yesterday.

THE 400 BLOWS (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) Spoiler:  The unforgettable debut feature by François Truffaut (Jules and Jim) is a wrenchingly personal coming-of-age story that introduced the character that would become the director’s lifelong cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud, in one of the screen’s great child performances). With the utmost sensitivity, The 400 Blows dramatizes the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, characterized by aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime. The film marks its maker’s official transition from influential critic to one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs, and is considered the first true work of the French New Wave. 1959 • 99 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitle • 2.35:1 aspect ratio DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray • Two audio commentaries, one by cinema professor Brian Stonehill and another by François Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay • Rare audition footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud, Patrick Auffay, and Richard Kanayan • Newsreel footage of Léaud at Cannes in 1959 • Excerpt from a 1965 French television program in which Truffaut discusses his youth, his critical writing, and the origins of Antoine Doinel • Television interview with Truffaut from 1960 about the global reception of The 400 Blows and his own critical impression of the film • Trailer • One Blu-ray and one DVD, with all content available in both formats • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Annette Insdorf TITLE: THE 400 BLOWS (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) CAT. NO: CC2349BDDVD UPC: 7-15515-11431-8 ISBN: 978-1-60465-830-9 SRP: $39.95 STREET: 4/8/14 BREAKING THE WAVES (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) Spoiler:  Lars von Trier (Antichrist) became an international sensation with this galvanizing realist fable about sex and spiritual transcendence. Emily Watson (Punch-Drunk Love) stuns, in an Oscar-nominated performance, as Bess, a simple, pious newlywed in a tiny Scottish village who gives herself up to a shocking form of martyrdom after her husband (Insomnia’s Stellan Skarsgård) is paralyzed in an oil-rig accident. Breaking the Waves, both brazen and tender, profane and pure, is an examination of the expansiveness of faith and of its limits. 1996 • 159 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray • Selected-scene audio commentary featuring director Lars von Trier, editor Anders Refn, and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle • New interview with filmmaker and critic Stig Björkman • New interviews with actors Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård • Interview from 2004 with actor Adrian Rawlins • Watson’s audition tape, with commentary by von Trier • Deleted and extended scenes, with commentary by von Trier • Deleted scene featuring the late actor Katrin Cartlidge • Cannes Film Festival promotional clip • Trailer • New English subtitle translation • One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats • PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt TITLE: BREAKING THE WAVES (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) CAT. NO: CC2320BDDVD UPC: 7-15515-11471-4 ISBN: 978-1-60465-833-0 SRP: $39.95 STREET: 4/15/14 MASTER OF THE HOUSE (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) Spoiler:  Before he got up close and personal with Joan of Arc, the Danish cinema genius Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) fashioned this finely detailed, ahead-of-its-time examination of domestic life. In this heartfelt story of a housewife who, with the help of a wily nanny, turns the tables on her tyrannical husband, Dreyer finds lightness and humor; it’s a deft comedy of revenge that was an enormous box-office success and is considered an early example of feminism on-screen. Constructed with the director’s customary meticulousness and stirring sense of justice, Master of the House is a jewel of silent cinema. 1925 • 111 minutes • Black & White • Silent • 1.33:1 aspect ratio DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 2K digital restoration, with a recent score by Gillian Anderson, presented in uncompressed stereo on the Blu-ray • New interview with Dreyer historian Casper Tybjerg • New visual essay on Dreyer’s camera work and editing by film historian David Bordwell • New English intertitle translation • One Blu-ray and one DVD, with all content available in both formats • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Mark Le Fanu TITLE: MASTER OF THE HOUSE (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) CAT. NO: CC2352BDDVD UPC: 7-15515-11481-3 ISBN: 978-1-60465-834-7 SRP: $39.95 STREET: 4/22/14 RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) Spoiler:  Early in his career, Don Siegel (The Killers) made his mark with this sensational and high-octane but economically constructed drama set in a maximum-security penitentiary. Riot in Cell Block 11, the brainchild of producer extraordinaire Walter Wanger (Foreign Correspondent), is a ripped-from-the-headlines social-problem picture about prisoners’ rights that was inspired by a recent spate of uprisings in American prisons. In Siegel’s hands, the film is at once brash and humane, showcasing the hard-boiled visual flair and bold storytelling for which the director would become known and shot on location at Folsom State Prison, with real inmates and guards as extras. 1954 • 80 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray • New audio commentary by film scholar Matthew Bernstein • Excerpts from the director’s 1993 autobiography, A Siegel Film, read by his son Kristoffer Tabori • More! • One Blu-ray and one DVD, with all content available in both formats • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Chris Fujiwara, a 1954 article by coproducer Walter Wanger, and a 1974 tribute to Siegel by filmmaker Sam Peckinpah TITLE: RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) CAT. NO: CC2351BDDVD UPC: 7-15515-11461-5 ISBN: 978-1-60465-832-3 SRP: $39.95 STREET: 4/22/14 IL SORPASSO (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) Spoiler:  The ultimate Italian road comedy, Il sorpasso stars the unlikely pair of Vittorio Gassman (Big Deal on Madonna Street) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Z) as, respectively, a waggish, free-wheeling bachelor and the bookish law student he takes on a madcap trip from Rome to rural Southern Italy. An unpredictable journey that careers from slapstick to tragedy, this film, directed by Dino Risi (the original Scent of a Woman), is a wildly entertaining commentary on the pleasures and consequences of the good life. A holy grail of commedia all’italiana, Il sorpasso is so fresh and exciting that one can easily see why it has long been adored in Italy. 1962 • 105 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray • New interviews with screenwriter Ettore Scola and film scholar and professor Rémi Fournier Lanzoni • Interview from 2004 with director Dino Risi by film critic Jean A. Gili • Introduction by actor Jean-Louis Trintignant from a 1983 French television broadcast of the film • A Beautiful Vacation, a 2006 documentary on Risi featuring interviews with the director and his collaborators and friends • Excerpts from a 2012 documentary that returns to Castiglioncello, the location for the film’s beach scenes, featuring rare on-set color footage • Trailer • New English subtitle translation • One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats • PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics Phillip Lopate and Antonio Monda, as well as excerpts from Risi’s writings, with an introduction by film critic Valerio Caprara TITLE: IL SORPASSO (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition) CAT. NO: CC2353BDDVD UPC: 7-15515-11491-2 ISBN: 978-1-60465-835-4 SRP: $39.95 STREET: 4/29/14

[jpx7]

Cool list here of Akira Kurosawa's favorite Criterion titles, culled from a discussion with his daughter regarding his favorite one-hundred films (one per direction).

[The Chosen One]

Not a criterion film but it was filmed in 1902... before 50pound and OKHawk were even born.

[Hawk]

Not a criterion film but it was filmed in 1902... before 50pound and OKHawk were even born.

Here's a colorized version with a soundtrack that was created especially for the film by one of my favorite (French) electronic musical duos, Air:

http://vimeo.com/39275260

If you want to take a 'trip', this is certainly an interesting starting point.

[jpx7]

Recently purchased and watched the Criterion Collection version of The Rock on dvd, for reasons beyond the usual Criterion Collection collecting criteria*.

The film honestly does hold up pretty well.

Then I watched it through again with commentary. Michael Bay really is a craven, classless, cash-obsessed asshole who can barely string two coherent sentences together; almost every anecdote he begins ends confusingly, at best, but mostly reach a point of withering pointlessness. Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, is actually extraordinarily lucid—something I would not have necessarily anticipated, given his acting performances.

*(I've been undertaking a pretty rigorous interrogation of Cage's oeuvre over the past few weeks—and, in case you're wondering, yes: the project began before the pertinent Community episode.)

[The Chosen One]

List of Criterion Releases for May

ACE IN THE HOLE (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition)

Spoiler: 

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas (Spartacus) gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time.

1951 • 111 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio

DUAL-FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• Restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary by film scholar Neil Sinyard
• Portrait of a “60% Perfect Man”: Billy Wilder, a 1980 documentary featuring interviews with Wilder by film critic Michel Ciment
• Interview with actor Kirk Douglas from 1984
• Excerpts from a 1986 appearance by Wilder at the American Film Institute
• Excerpts from an audio interview with Wilder’s coscreenwriter Walter Newman
• Video afterword by filmmaker Spike Lee
• Stills gallery
• Trailer
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: Essays by critic Molly Haskell and filmmaker Guy Maddin

TITLE: ACE IN THE HOLE (dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition)
CAT. NO: CC2355BDDVD
UPC: 7-15515-11571-1
ISBN: 978-1-60465-837-8
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 5/6/14

Overlord

Spoiler: 

Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage and a fictional narrative, this immersive account by Stuart Cooper of one twenty-year-old's journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings to life all the terrors and isolation of war with jolting authenticity.Overlord, impressionistically shot by Stanley Kubrick's longtime cinematographer John Alcott, is both a document of World War II and a dreamlike meditation on human smallness in a large, incomprehensible machine.

Special Features:

• Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Stuart Cooper, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary featuring Cooper and actor Brian Stirner
• Mining the Archive, a 2007 video piece featuring archivists from London's Imperial War Museum detailing the footage used in the film
• Capa Influences Cooper, a 2007 photo essay featuring Cooper on photographer Robert Capa
• Cameramen at War, the British Ministry of Information's 1943 film tribute to newsreel and service film unit cameramen
• A Test of Violence, Cooper's 1969 short film about the Spanish artist Juan Genovés
• Germany Calling, a 1941 Ministry of Information propaganda film, clips of which appear in Overlord
• Excerpts from the journals of two D-day soldiers, read by Stirner
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Kent Jones, a short history of the Imperial War Museum, and excerpts from the Overlord novelization by Cooper and Christopher Hudson

Like Someone In Love

Spoiler: 

Abbas Kiarostami has spent his incomparable movie career exploring the tiny spaces that separate illusion from reality and the simulated from the authentic. At first blush, his extraordinary, sly Like Someone in Love, which finds the Iranian director in Tokyo, may appear to be among his most straightforward films. Yet with this simple story of the growing bond between a young part-time call girl and a grandfatherly client, Kiarostami has constructed an enigmatic but crystalline investigation of affection and desire as complex as his masterful Close-up and Certified Copy in its engagement with the workings of the mercurial human heart.

Special Features:

• New 2K digital film transfer, supervised by director Abbas Kiarostami, with 3.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Forty-five-minute documentary on the making of the film
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar and critic Nico Baumbach

Red River

Spoiler: 

No matter what genre he worked in, Howard Hawks played by his own rules, and never was this more evident than in his first western, the rowdy and whip-smart Red River. In it, John Wayne found one of his greatest roles as an embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher whose tensions with his independent-minded adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift in a breakout performance, reach epic proportions during a cattle drive to Missouri, which is based on a real-life late nineteenth-century expedition. Yet Hawks is less interested in historical accuracy than in tweaking the codes of masculinity that propel the myths of the American West. The unerringly macho Wayne and the neurotic, boyish Clift make for an improbably perfect pair, held aloft by a quick-witted, multilayered screenplay and Hawks's formidable direction.

Special Features:

• New 4K digital restoration of the rarely presented original theatrical release version, the preferred cut of director Howard Hawks, with monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• 2K restoration of the longer version of Red River
• New interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich about Red River and the two versions
• New interview with critic Molly Haskell about Hawks and Red River
• New interview with western scholar Lee Clark Mitchell about western genre literature
• Audio excerpts of a 1972 conversation between Hawks and Bogdanovich
• Excerpts from a 1970 audio interview with novelist and screenwriter Borden Chase
• More!
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O'Brien and a 1991 interview with Hawks's longtime editor Christian Nyby; a new paperback edition of Chase's original novel, previously out of print

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Spoiler: 

Internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew—Team Zissou—set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. They are joined on their voyage by a young airline copilot (Owen Wilson); a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett); and Zissou's estranged wife, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston). Wes Anderson has assembled an all-star cast that also includes Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Noah Taylor, Seu Jorge, and Bud Cort for this wildly original adventure comedy.

Special Features:

• New, restored digital transfer, approved by director Wes Anderson, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Commentary by Anderson and cowriter Noah Baumbach
• New interviews with actors Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, and Jeff Goldblum
• This Is an Adventure, a documentary by Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles, and Matthew Prinzing chronicling the production of the movie
• Mondo Monda, an Italian talk show featuring an interview with Anderson and Baumbach, hosted by Antonio Monda
• Interview with composer and Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh
• Ten performances of David Bowie songs in Portuguese by Brazilian recording artist and actor Seu Jorge
• Intern video journal by actor Matthew Gray Gubler
• Multiple interviews with the cast and crew, featuring behind-the-scenes footage
• Making-of featurette
• Nine deleted scenes
• Behind-the-scenes photos and original artwork from the film
• Trailer
• PLUS: An insert featuring a cutaway view of The Belafonte, the ship from the film, Eric Anderson's original illustrations, and a conversation between Wes and Eric conducted in 2005