Criterion New Releases

[jkholm]

Mad World I will get beacuse it will be nice to dispense with the LD transfer insomuch as that this new cut will retain every new scene that was part of the LD cut and give more (this is different from what's been proposed for "1776" where even the most optimistic of scenarios will NOT duplicate the LD cut). I think as a film it is more miss than hit in the laughs department ("The Great Race" always struck me as a funnier film) but as an epic film of the early 60s it has an irresistible quality to it, especially with that ensemble of names.

It has been a long time since I've seen MAD WORLD but I suspect Eric is right in that it is more miss than hit. Still, it would be a nostalgic pick for me. It is one of my dad's favorite movies and I saw it several times growing up.

THRONE OF BLOOD is one of my all-time favorites. I'll probably get that one as well.

[mkaroly]

I love THRONE OF BLOOD - Mifune is so powerful and charismatic, and very "epic" in his acting (when it called for that). One of the great actors in all of cinematic history, no matter what country one is from.

[John Johnson]

The Criterion Collection has announced seven titles for Blu-ray release in February: On February 4th, the studio will release François Truffaut's Jules and Jim. On February 11th, it will release Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color. On February 18th, it will release Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. And on February 25th, it will release Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill and Roman Polanski's Tess. On the same date, Criterion will also rerelease Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless as a Dual Format Edition.

Jules et Jim

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules and Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession. The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring and willful Catherine, whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema's most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, Jules and Jim was a worldwide smash in 1962 and remains every bit as audacious and entrancing today.

Special Features: •New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Two audio commentaries: one featuring screenwriter Jean Gruault, François Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouché, and film scholar Annette Insdorf; the other featuring actor Jeanne Moreau and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana
•Excerpts from The Key to "Jules and Jim" (1985), a documentary about author Henri-Pierre Roché and the real-life relationships that inspired the novel and film
•Interviews with Truffaut, Gruault, and cinematographer Raoul Coutard
•Conversation between scholars Robert Stam and Dudley Andrew
•Excerpt from a 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps dedicated to Truffaut
•Segment from a 1969 episode of the French television program L'invité du dimanche featuring Truffaut, Moreau, and filmmaker Jean Renoir
•Excerpts from Truffaut's first appearance on American television, a 1977 interview with New York Film Festival director Richard Roud
•Excerpts from a 1979 American Film Institute seminar given by Truffaut
•Audio interview with Truffaut from 1980, conducted by film scholar Claude-Jean Philippe
•Trailer
•One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic John Powers, a 1981 piece by Truffaut on Roché, and script notes by Truffaut

Blue is the Warmest Color

The colorful, electrifying romance that took the Cannes Film Festival by storm courageously dives into a young woman's experiences of first love and sexual awakening. Blue Is the Warmest Color stars the remarkable newcomer Adèle Excharpoulos as a high schooler who, much to her own surprise, plunges into a thrilling relationship with a female twentysomething art student, played by Léa Seydoux. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, this finely detailed, intimate epic sensitively renders the erotic abandon of youth. It has captivated international audiences and been widely embraced as a defining love story for the new century.

Special Features: •New high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Abdellatif Kechiche, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
•Trailer and TV spot
•New English subtitle translation
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic B. Ruby Rich
•*A full special edition treatment of this film will follow at a later date.

Foreign Correspondent

In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock made his official transition from the British film industry to Hollywood. And it was quite a year: his first two American movies, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, were both nominated for the best picture Oscar. Though Rebecca prevailed, Foreign Correspondent is the more quintessential Hitch film. A full-throttle espionage thriller, starring Joel McCrea as a green Yank reporter sent to Europe to get the scoop on the imminent war, it's wall-to-wall witty repartee, head-spinning plot twists, and brilliantly mounted suspense set pieces, including an ocean plane crash climax with astonishing special effects. Foreign Correspondent deserves to be mentioned alongside The 39 Steps and North by Northwest as one of the master's greatest adventures.

Special Features: • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
•New piece on the visual effects in the film with effects expert Craig Barron
•Hollywood Propaganda and World War II, a new interview with writer Mark Harris
•Interview with director Alfred Hitchcock from a 1972 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
•Radio adaptation of the film from 1946, starring Joseph Cotten
•Have You Heard? The Story of Wartime Rumors, a 1942 Life magazine "photo-drama" by Hitchcock
•Trailer
•One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar James Naremore

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the story of a clever, quick, nimble, and exceptionally well-dressed wild animal. A compulsive chicken thief turned newspaper reporter, Mr. Fox settles down with his family at a new foxhole in a beautiful tree directly adjacent to three enormous poultry farms—owned by three ferociously vicious farmers: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. Mr. Fox simply cannot resist. This adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic children's novel from Wes Anderson is a meticulous work of stop-motion animation featuring vibrant performances by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe, Michael Gambon, and Bill Murray.

Special Features: • New digital master, approved by director Wes Anderson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring Anderson
• Storyboard animatics for the entire film
• Footage of the actors voicing their characters, puppet construction, stop-motion setups, and the recording of the score
• Interviews with cast and crew
• Puppet animation tests
• Photo gallery of puppets, props, and sets
• Animated awards acceptance speeches
• Audio recording of author Roald Dahl reading the book on which the film is based
• Gallery of Dahl's original manuscripts
• Discussion and analysis of the film
• Stop-motion Sony robot commercial by Anderson
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay; a 2002 article on Dahl's Gipsy House by Anderson; White Cape, a comic book used as a prop in the film; and drawings, original paintings, and other ephemera

King of the Hill

For his first Hollywood studio production, Steven Soderbergh (whose independent debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival a few years earlier) crafted this small jewel of a growing-up story. Set in St. Louis during the Depression, King of the Hill follows the daily struggles of a resourceful and imaginative adolescent (Jesse Bradford) who, after his tubercular mother is sent to a sanatorium, must survive on his own in a run-down hotel during his salesman father's long business trips. This evocative period piece, faithfully adapted from the memoir by the novelist A. E. Hotchner, is among the ever versatile Soderbergh's most touching and surprising films.

Special Features: • New high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Steven Soderbergh and supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer Larry Blake, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
•New interviews with Soderbergh and A. E. Hotchner, author of the memoir on which the film is based
•Against Tyranny, a new video essay by ::kogonada in which he explores Soderbergh's unique approach to character subjectivity
•The Underneath (1995), Soderbergh's follow-up feature to King of the Hill, with an interview with the director
•Trailers
•One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Peter Tonguette, a 1993 interview with Soderbergh, and an excerpt from Hotchner's 1972 memoir

Tess

This multiple-Oscar-winning film by Roman Polanski is an exquisite, richly layered adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. A strong-willed peasant girl (Nastassja Kinski, in a gorgeous breakthrough) is sent by her father to the estate of some local aristocrats to capitalize on a rumor that their families are from the same line. This fateful visit commences an epic narrative of sex, class, betrayal, and revenge, which Polanski unfolds with deliberation and finesse. With its earthy visual textures, achieved by two world-class cinematographers—Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet—Tess is a work of great pastoral beauty as well as vivid storytelling.

Special Features: • New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Roman Polanski, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
•Once Upon a Time . . . "Tess," a 2006 documentary on the film
•Three programs on the making of the film—From Novel to Screen, Filming "Tess," and "Tess": The Experience—featuring interviews with Polanski, actors Nastassja Kinski and Leigh Lawson, producer Claude Berri, costume designer Anthony Powell, composer Philippe Sarde, and others
•Interview with Polanski from a 1979 episode of The South Bank Show
•Forty-five-minute documentary shot on location for French television during the making of the film
•Trailer
•One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Colin MacCabe

Breathless

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.

Special Features: •Restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director of photography Raoul Coutard, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
•Archival interviews with director Jean-Luc Godard and actors Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and Jean-Pierre Melville
•Contemporary interviews with Coutard, assistant director Pierre Rissient, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker
•Two video essays, one on Seberg and one on Breathless as film criticism
•Chambre 12, Hôtel de suède, an eighty-minute 1993 documentary about the making of Breathless
•Charlotte et son Jules, a 1959 short by Godard starring Belmondo
•Trailer
•One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
•PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Dudley Andrew, writings by Godard, François Truffaut's original treatment, and Godard's scenario.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=12610

[John Johnson]

The Criterion Collection has announced six titles for Blu-ray release in March: On March 11th, the studio will release David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000). On March 18th, it will release Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Errol Morris's A Brief History of Time (1991). And on March 25th, it will release Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor's The Freshman (1925), Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2011).

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=12830

[AndyDursin]

My review copy of MAD WORLD came in -- I haven't checked it out, but the booklet notes (or seems to indicate that) the newly reconstructed 197 min. cut has both audio only (with still photos) for some material as well as material derived from a standard-definition source.

[Eric Paddon]

I think those handicaps were already announced ahead of time because the idea was simply to try and find the best way to reassemble the original roadshow cut from all possible sources regardless of quality. I'll be looking forward to this and having at last the reason to retire the LD transfer for good!

[AndyDursin]

Could be, I may have forgotten, but in general, I'm not a big fan of the practice. If there's no film footage in existence, then don't do it. I found it distracting during A STAR IS BORN.

[Eric Paddon]

In this case though, the intent is to provide a totally separate version for the die-hards who want to see things reassembled this way and not use it in place of the "standard" version that will still play on TV and in theatrical screenings. That I'm perfectly comfortable with (now if only they'd do "1776" the right way as well).

[AndyDursin]

It's certainly an impressive restoration, there's no doubt about that. Reading up on this over at the HTF and watching the restoration featurette, it's remarkable what they were able to find, and it's at least a big step up from the old MGM/UA laserdisc which I owned back in the day (scenes are placed back in their proper place, the aspect ratio is fuller, scenes that were "warped" for Cinerama have been corrected back, scenes with Japanese subtitles that were zoomed-in and cropped have been fixed as best they can be, etc.). They also did a much better job with the stills and audio than A STAR IS BORN for those scenes that they don't have footage for.

The attempt to use the laserdisc color as a reference for the re-scanned added material (via the same process that converts 2D movies to 3D) is fascinating by itself, if a bit uneven in the final execution. You have black and white borders around the image during most (though not all) of those scenes and color that tends to degrade the image -- making it look like standard-definition even though these trims were rescanned in HD. It's a trade-off I understand -- you either have some color or an HD image in black-and-white seeing most of these trims have faded even further over the last 20 years since the laserdisc was produced (the B&W bordering is due to the trims having been scanned at a slightly cropped aspect ratio for laserdisc -- therefore, no color guide existed for that part of the frame). I'm not sure if it wouldn't have been less distracting if those scenes were in full B&W because the image, as it stands, looks less "HD" with its coloring and there's B&W around the edges anyway. There's obviously no ideal solution here and I'm quibbling for sure, because the work Robert Harris and Criterion undertook here is nothing short of one of the most notable restorations of any kind we've seen on home video in years.

The 1080p image itself otherwise is just brilliant -- working from the same recent master MGM produced for their earlier Blu-Ray release, which had pinpoint detail. This is what every catalog release ought to look like on Blu-Ray but seldom does, and the supplemental package is tremendous as expected.

[mkaroly]

You have piqued my interest in this title. Normally I do not buy something I am absolutely committed to, but this might be a nice thing to have and watch every now and then since it sounds like they did a great job with it.

[AndyDursin]

Amazing reading the fascinating story of how the film was restored at the Home Theater Forum -- then going over to Blu-ray.com and seeing juvenile d-bags trashing it, calling it an embarrassment and that it never should've been restored in the first place.

It's incredible to see the difference between maturity and petulant little children whining about something they haven't even seen, much less understand.

And people wonder why the site has the rep it does?