1946 - onvideo• visual essay by french film scholar ginette vincendeau • original theatrical...

now AVAILABLE In A BLU-RAY EdItIon!

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THE CRITERION COLLECTION PRESENTS

BEAUtY And thE BEAst

“One of the most magical of all films.”—Roger Ebert

“A sensuously fascinating film, a fanciful poem in movement.”

—The New York Times

CINEMA’S MOST GLORIOUS FAIRY TALE COMES TO NEW LIFE ON CRITERION BLU-RAY!

The sublime adaptation by JEAN COCTEAU (Orpheus) of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy-tale masterpiece—in which the true love of a beautiful girl melts the heart of a feral but gentle beast—is a landmark feat of motion picture fantasy, with unforgettably romantic performances by JEAN MARAIS (Orpheus) and JOSETTE DAY (Les parents terribles). The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES• High-definition digital transfer from restored film

elements, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

• Composer Philip Glass’s opera La Belle et la Bête, presented in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio as an alternate soundtrack

• Two commentaries: one by film historian Arthur Knight and one by writer and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling

• Screening at the Majestic, a 1995 documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew

• Interview with cinematographer Henri Alekan

• Rare behind-the-scenes photos and publicity stills

• Film restoration demonstration

• Original trailer, directed and narrated by director Jean Cocteau, plus restoration trailer from 1995

• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Geoffrey O’Brien, a piece on the film by Cocteau, excerpts from Francis Steegmuller’s 1970 book Cocteau: A Biography, and an introduction to Glass’s opera by the composer

BLU-RAY EDITION SRP $39.95 PREBOOK 6/21/11 STREET 7/19/11 CAT. NO. CC2016BD ISBN 978-1-60465-429-5 UPC 7-15515-08131-3

1946 • 93 mInUtEs • BLAck & whItE • monAURAL • In FREnch wIth EngLIsh sUBtItLEs • 1.33:1 AspEct RAtIo

WINNER

PRIx LOUIS DELLUC, 1946

Summary and design © 2011 The Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com

A F I L M B Y A K I R A K U R O S A W A


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HIGH And Low

“Brilliant. A taut moral drama . . . and a nail-biting tale of detection.”

—Village Voice

“Kurosawa blows up the genre and puts the pieces back together

in a completely new way.”—New York Times

KUROSAWA’S HARROWING TALE OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, STARRING TOSHIRO MIFUNE

NOw IN a CRITERION BLU-Ray SPECIaL EdITION!

TOSHIRO MIFUNE (Seven Samurai) is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose

family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku), the

highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director AKIRA KUROSAWA (Rashomon).

adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling

race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and

contemporary Japanese society.

BLU-RAy SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES• High-definition digital restoration, with original

four-track surround sound presented in dTS-Hd Master audio

• audio commentary by akira Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince

• documentary on the making of High and Low, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create

• Rare video interview with actor Toshiro Mifune

• Video interview with actor Tsutomu yamazaki, who plays the kidnapper

• Theatrical trailers from Japan and the U.S.

• PLUS: a booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a reprinted on-set account by Japanese film scholar donald Richie

BLU-RAy EDITION SRP $39.95 PREBOOK 6/28/11 STREET 7/26/11 CaT. NO. CC2039BD ISBN 978-1-60465-473-8 UPC 7-15515-08591-5

1963 • 143 mInUtEs • BLAck & wHItE/coLoR • sURRoUnd • In JApAnEsE wItH EnGLIsH sUBtItLEs • 2.35:1 AspEct RAtIo

Under exclusive license from Toho Co., Ltd. © 1963 Toho Co., Ltd. all rights reserved. English subtitled version © 2008 Toho Co., Ltd. all rights reserved. Summary and design © 2011 The Criterion Collection. all rights reserved. www.criterion.com

AVAILABLE on BLU-RAY AnD DVD!

196

1 LÉONMORIN,PRIESTA film by Jean-Pierre Melville


Léon MoRIn, PRIEst

“Extraordinary . . . Often thrilling, always surprising.”

—Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Melville’s masterpiece . . . A giddy bit of blasphemy.”

—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO SMOLDERS IN A CONTROVERSIAL DRAMA ABOUT WAR AND FAITH

FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ARMY OF SHADOWSON BLU-RAY AND DVD!

JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO (Breathless) dons clerical robes and delivers a subtly sensual performance for

the hot-under-the-collar Léon Morin, Priest, directed by JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE (Army of Shadows). The

French superstar plays a devoted man of the cloth who is the crush object of all the women of a small

village in Nazi-occupied France. He finds himself most drawn to a sexually frustrated widow—played by

EMMANUELLE RIVA (Hiroshima mon amour)—a borderline heretic whose relationship with her confessor is a

confrontation with both God and her own repressed desire. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon

Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of French cinema’s towering virtuosos.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New high-definition digital restoration, with

uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition

• Archival interview with director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo

• Visual essay by French film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

• Original theatrical trailer

• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana

DVD EDITION SRP $29.95 PREBOOK 6/28/11 STREET 7/26/11 CAT. NO. CC2038D ISBN 978-1-60465-456-1UPC 7-15515-08471-0



1961 • 117 MInUtEs • BLAck & WhItE • MonAURAL • In FREnch WIth EngLIsh sUBtItLEs • 1.66:1 AsPEct RAtIo


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LIfE DURIng WARtImE

“Deep-dish pleasure . . . Todd Solondz may have made his best film with Life During Wartime.”

—Todd McCarthy, Variety

“Genuine, all-enveloping . . . This might be some kind of goddamned masterpiece.”

—David Edelstein, New York

ToDD SolonDz’S ShockinGly funny exploraTion of The bounDarieS

of forGiveneSS, family, anD loveIN CRITERION BLU-RAY AND DVD EDITIONS!

In Life During Wartime, independent filmmaker ToDD SolonDz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) explores contemporary American existence and the nature of forgiveness with his customary dry humor and queasy precision. The film functions as a distorted mirror image of Solondz’s acclaimed 1998 dark comedy Happiness, its emotionally stunted characters now groping for the possibility of change in a post-9/11 world. Happiness’s grim New Jersey setting is transposed to sunny Florida, but the biggest twist is that new actors fill the roles originated in the earlier film—including Shirley henDerSon (Topsy-Turvy), alliSon Janney (The Ice Storm), and ally SheeDy (The Breakfast Club) as alarmingly dissimilar sisters, and ciarán hinDS (Persuasion) hauntingly embodying a reformed pedophile. Shot in expressionistic tones by cinematographer extraordinaire eD lachman (Far from Heaven), Solondz’s film finds the humor in the tragic and the tragic in the everyday.

DirecTor-approveD Special eDiTion feaTureS • New digital transfer, supervised and approved by

director of photography Ed Lachman, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition

• Ask Todd, an audio Q&A with director Todd Solondz in which he responds to viewers’ questions

• Making “Life During Wartime,” a new documentary featuring interviews with actors Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Michael Lerner, Paul Reubens, Ally Sheedy, and Michael Kenneth Williams, and on-set footage of the actors and crew

• New video piece in which Lachman discusses his work on the film


• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic David Sterritt

DvD eDiTion SRP $29.95 PREBOOK 6/28/11 STREET 7/26/11 CAT. NO. cc2036D ISBN 978-1-60465-454-7UPC 7-15515-08451-2

blu-ray eDiTion SRP $39.95 PREBOOK 6/28/11 STREET 7/26/11 CAT. NO. cc2035bD ISBN 978-1-60465-453-0 UPC 7-15515-08441-3

2010 • 97 mInUtEs • CoLoR • sURRoUnD • 1.78:1 AspECt RAtIo

Winner BEST SCREENPLAY,

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL, 2009



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ThE MUsIc RooM

“Overpowering . . . A double-edged study in the refinement and absurdity of aristocracy.”

—Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice

“One of Ray’s most magnificently visual films . . . Superb camera work . . . Ravishing score.”

—Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

“His most evocative film.” —Roger Ebert

SATYAJIT RAY’S POWERFUL TRAGIC DRAMA— A CORNERSTONE OF THE MONUMENTAL

DIRECTOR’S CAREERIN CRITERION BLU-RAY AND DVD EDITIONS!

With The Music Room (Jalsaghar), SATYAJIT RAY (Pather Panchali) brilliantly evokes the crumbling opulence of the world of a fallen aristocrat (the beloved actor CHHAbI bISWAS) desperately clinging to his way of life. His greatest joy is the music room in which he has hosted lavish concerts over the years—now a shadow of its former vivid self. An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India’s most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural

soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition

• Satyajit Ray (1984), a feature documentary by Shyam Benegal that chronicles Ray’s career and includes interviews with the filmmaker, family photographs, and extensive clips from his films

• New interview with filmmaker Mira Nair

• New interview in which Ray biographer Andrew Robinson discusses the making of The Music Room and the film’s cultural significance

• Excerpt from a 1981 French roundtable discussion with Ray, film critic Michel Ciment, and filmmaker Claude Sautet

• New and improved English subtitle translation

• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp as well as reprints of a 1963 essay by Ray and a 1986 interview with the director about the film’s music

2-DVD EDITION SRP $29.95 PREBOOK 6/21/11 STREET 7/19/11 CAT. NO. CC2034D ISBN 978-1-60465-452-3UPC 7-15515-08401-7

bLU-RAY EDITION SRP $39.95 PREBOOK 6/21/11 STREET 7/19/11 CAT. NO. CC2033bD ISBN 978-1-60465-451-6 UPC 7-15515-08431-4

1958 • 100 MInUTEs • BLAck & WhITE • MonAURAL • In BEngALI WITh EngLIsh sUBTITLEs • 1.33:1 AspEcT RATIo



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NAKEDa film by mike leigh


nAkEd

“A masterpiece . . . Mike Leigh’s finest work and arguably the best British

film in recent history.”—The Guardian

“A brilliant somersault of a movie.” —Vincent Canby, The New York Times

MIKE LEIGH’S ELECTRIFYING CANNES AWARD WINNER

NOW IN A CRITERION BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION!

The brilliant and controversial Naked, from director MIKE LEIGH (Topsy-Turvy), stars DAvID THEWLIS (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself through a nocturnal odyssey around London, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars KATRIN CARTLIDGE (Before the Rain) and LESLEY SHARp (The Full Monty), Leigh’s picture of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes International Film Festival.

DIRECTOR-AppROvED BLU-RAY SpECIAL EDITION FEATURES • Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and

approved by director Mike Leigh, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

• Audio commentary by Leigh and actors David Thewlis and Katrin Cartlidge

• Exclusive video interview with director Neil LaBute

• An episode of the BBC program The Art Zone in which author Will Self interviews Leigh

• The Short and Curlies, a short comedy from 1982 directed by Leigh and starring Thewlis, with audio commentary by Leigh


• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by film critics Derek Malcolm and Amy Taubin


1993 • 131 mInUtEs • CoLoR • sURRoUnd • 1.85:1 AspECt RAtIo

WINNER BEST DIRECTOR, BEST ACTOR (DAVID

THEWLIS), CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, 1993

WINNER BEST ACTOR (DAVID THEWLIS),

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AND NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS, 1993


1946 - onvideo• visual essay by french film scholar ginette vincendeau • original theatrical...

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