Criterion For Feb 2010

[HGervais]

Interesting mix of both new titles and classics. All but Make Way For Tomorrow will also see Blu-ray editions with Howards End already being available in hi-def. Artwork for all titles here at the Criterion Collection web site.

#488-Howards End/James Ivory
The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Howards End is a luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England. Emma Thompson won an Academy Award for her dynamic portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, a flighty yet compassionate middle-class intellectual whose friendship with the dying wife (Vanessa Redgrave) of rich capitalist Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) commences an intricately woven tale of money, love, and death that encompasses the country’s highest and lowest social echelons. With a brilliant, layered script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who also won an Oscar) and a roster of gripping performances, Howards End is a work of both great beauty and vivid darkness, and one of cinema’s best literary adaptations.

•High-definition digital transfer, supervised by cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts and approved by director James Ivory (with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
•New video appreciation of the late Ismail Merchant by director Ivory (available only on the Blu-ray edition)
•Building “Howards End,” a documentary featuring interviews with Ivory, Merchant, Helena Bonham Carter, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and Academy Award–winning production designer Luciana Arrighi
•The Design of “Howards End,” a detailed look at the costume and production designs for the film, including original sketches
•The Wandering Company, a 50-minute documentary about the history of Merchant Ivory Productions
•Original 1992 behind-the-scenes featurette
•Original theatrical trailer
United Kingdom
1992
142 minutes
Color
2.35:1
English


#502-Revanche/Götz Spielmann
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex (the mesmerizing Johannes Krisch) works as an assistant in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara. Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop and his seemingly content wife. With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

•New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Götz Spielmann (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
•New video interview with Spielmann
•The Making of “Revanche,” a half-hour documentary shot on the film’s set
•Foreign Land, Spielmann’s award-winning student short film, with an introduction by the director
•U.S. theatrical trailer
•New and improved English subtitle translation
•PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Wood
Austria
2008
122 minutes
Color
1.85:1
German

#503-Lola Montès/Max Ophuls
Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts Montès’s scandalous past through the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she ends up performing. Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a meticulous, one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

•New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
•Audio commentary featuring Max Ophuls scholar Susan White
•“Max Ophuls ou le plaisir de tourner,” a 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps, featuring interviews with many of Ophuls’s collaborators
•Max by Marcel, a new documentary by Marcel Ophuls about his father and the making of Lola Montès
•Silent footage of actress Martine Carol demonstrating the various glamorous hairstyles in Lola Montès
•Theatrical rerelease trailer from Rialto Pictures
•New and improved English subtitle translation
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Gary Giddins film info
France, Germany
1955
115 minutes
Color
2.55:1
English, German, French

#504-Hunger/Steve McQueen
With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners, rather than as ordinary criminals. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.

•New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Steve McQueen (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
•Video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender
•A short documentary on the making of Hunger, including interviews with McQueen, Fassbender, actors Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, and Brian Milligan, writer Enda Walsh, and producer Robin Gutch
•“The Provo’s Last Card?” a 1981 episode of the BBC program Panorama, about the causes and effects of the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze prison and the political and civilian reactions across Northern Ireland
•Theatrical trailer
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Chris Darke
United Kingdom
2008
90 minutes
Color
2.35:1
English

#505-Make Way For Tomorrow/Leo McCarey
Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi headline a cast of incomparable character actors, starring as an elderly couple who must move in with their grown children after the bank takes their home, yet end up separated and subject to their offspring’s selfish whims. An inspiration for Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Make Way for Tomorrow is among American cinema’s purest tearjerkers, all the way to its unflinching ending, which McCarey refused to change despite studio pressure.

•New, restored high-definition digital transfer
•Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Today, a new video interview featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich discussing the career of Leo McCarey and his thoughts on Make Way for Tomorrow
•New video interview with critic Gary Giddins in which he talks about McCarey’s artistry and the political and social context of the film
•PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic Tag Gallagher and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, as well as an excerpt from film scholar Robin Wood’s 1998 piece “Leo McCarey and ‘Family Values’”
United States
1937
92 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
English

[BenSaylor]

Very excited for Hunger; I rented this from Blockbuster about a month ago and was floored.

[HGervais]

There was so much Criterion stuff I missed the Eclipse set, Eclipse Series 20: George Bernard Shaw on Film:

The hugely influential Nobel Prize–winning critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw was notoriously reluctant to allow his writing to be adapted for the cinema. Yet thanks to the persistence of Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, Shaw finally agreed to collaborate on a series of screen versions of his witty, social-minded plays, starting with the Oscar-winning Pygmalion. The three other films that resulted from this famed alliance, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion, long overshadowed by the sensation of Pygmalion, are gathered here for the first time on DVD. These clever, handsomely mounted entertainments star such luminaries of the big screen as Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, Wendy Hiller, and Rex Harrison.

Major Barbara
Filmed in London in 1941 during the Blitz bombing, Major Barbara emerged from a troubled production to become a major success for George Bernard Shaw and producer-director Gabriel Pascal. _Pygmalion_’s Wendy Hiller returns, this time as one of Shaw’s most memorable, controversial characters, Barbara Underschaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her Christian charity organization. Rex Harrison, Robert Newton, and Deborah Kerr co-star in this playfully satirical morality play.

Caesar and Cleopatra
Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains pop off the screen in vivid Technicolor in Gabriel Pascal’s adaptation of Shaw’s 1901 play about love and politics in ancient Rome and Egypt. At the time the most expensive British film ever produced (complete with real imported Egyptian sand), Caesar and Cleopatra is a lavish epic, featuring a screenplay adapted by Shaw himself and mesmerizing performances by its two stars.

Androcles and the Lion
George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of the classic fable—about a Christian captive saved from death at the Colosseum because of his kind act of pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values. And Pascal’s final Shaw production plays it broadly, casting comic character actor Alan Young as the titular naïf; he’s given able support by Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Robert Newton, and Elsa Lanchester.

[Boba Fett]

Looks like Criterion is just taking the current 2-Disc DVD of Howard's End and slapping the Criteiron label and spine number on it. I guess they can charge more for it though and get completists to shell out bucks for a disc they may already own.

[HGervais]

Looks like Criterion is just taking the current 2-Disc DVD of Howard's End and slapping the Criteiron label and spine number on it. I guess they can charge more for it though and get completists to shell out bucks for a disc they may already own.

Yeah it looks like all the new stuff went to the Blu-ray edition.

And as a side note, on facebook yesterday someone from Criterion was saying we can expect to see quite a few catalouge titles being released on blu-ray in 2010.

[cdouglas]

Looks like Criterion is just taking the current 2-Disc DVD of Howard's End and slapping the Criteiron label and spine number on it. I guess they can charge more for it though and get completists to shell out bucks for a disc they may already own.

Yeah it looks like all the new stuff went to the Blu-ray edition.

Actually, the content on this DVD is exactly the same as that on the Blu-ray version.

[HGervais]

Looks like Criterion is just taking the current 2-Disc DVD of Howard's End and slapping the Criteiron label and spine number on it. I guess they can charge more for it though and get completists to shell out bucks for a disc they may already own.

Yeah it looks like all the new stuff went to the Blu-ray edition.

Actually, the content on this DVD is exactly the same as that on the Blu-ray version.

•High-definition digital transfer, supervised by cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts and approved by director James Ivory (with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
•New video appreciation of the late Ismail Merchant by director Ivory (available only on the Blu-ray edition)
So did they just recycle the Blu-ray press release?