The CRITERION DVD and Blu-ray Thread

[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

https://store.hmv.com/store/film-tv/criterion-offers

[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

I'll be going to Fopp on Friday,as the lazy feckers in Argyle St HMV had only labelled a fraction of those titles listed.

[MrBarlow]

I may pop to our HMV and see what they have on their shelves

[Susan Foreman]

'Daddy Longlegs' (2009) - Pre-order available from Criterion Films direct - Blu-Ray - $27.96

Release date: August 16

"Mining the emotional sense memories of their own fractured childhoods, Josh and Benny Safdie craft a by turns empathetic and disquieting portrait of parental dysfunction poised between fierce love and terrifying irresponsibility. Manic Manhattan movie theater projectionist Lenny (cowriter and longtime Safdie collaborator Ronald Bronstein) is perhaps the last person who should be raising kids, yet here he is, trying (and failing) to keep it together as his life unravels over the two whirlwind weeks that he has custody of his young boys (real-life brothers Sage and Frey Ranaldo), with an impromptu road trip, a sleeping-pill mishap, and a night in jail all part of the chaos. Vérité New York naturalism gives way to flights of surreal lyricism in Daddy Longlegs, a blearily impressionistic anti–fairy tale that finds unexpected humanity in the seemingly most irredeemable of fathers."

Special features:

• New 4K digital transfer, approved by directors Josh and Benny Safdie, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack
• New interviews with actors Sage and Frey Ranaldo and their parents, photographer Leah Singer and musician Lee Ranaldo
• Documentary from 2017 about the Safdies
• Footage of Sage and Frey Ranaldo’s first meeting with actor Ronald Bronstein
• Making-of program
• There’s Nothing You Can Do (2008), a short film by the Safdies featuring members of the Daddy Longlegs cast and crew
• Deleted scenes
• Promotional films and trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: A 2009 print interview with the Safdies

[Susan Foreman]

'Frownland' (2007) - Pre-order available from Criterion Films direct - Blu-Ray - $27.96

Release date: Aug 16

"A nightmare transmission from the grungiest depths of the New York indie underground, the visceral, darkly funny, and totally sui generis debut feature from Ronald Bronstein is a dread-inducing vision of misfit alienation at its unhinged extreme. In a maniacal performance of almost frightening commitment, Dore Mann plays Keith, a disturbingly maladjusted social outcast and self-described “troll” whose neuroses plunge him into an unstoppable spiral of self-obliteration as his crummy coupon-selling job, pitiful living situation (featuring the roommate from hipster Brooklyn hell), and last remaining human relationships disintegrate around him. As captured in the grimy expressionist grain of Sean Price Williams’s claustrophobic camera work, Frownland is DIY cinema at its most fearless, uncompromising, and unforgettable."

Special features:

• New 2K digital transfer, supervised by director Ronald Bronstein, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Introduction by Bronstein
• Conversation between Bronstein and filmmaker Josh Safdie
• Deleted scenes
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Richard Brody and an oral history of the making of the film

[Susan Foreman]

'Hotel Du Nord' (1938) - Pre-order available from Criterion Films direct - Blu-Ray - $27.96 / DVD - $20.96

Release date: August 23

"Anguished young lovers, fallen women, wanted criminals, and all manner of social castoffs: these are the disreputable denizens of the Hôtel du Nord, an atmospherically seedy boardinghouse on the bustling banks of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, whose lives collide in Marcel Carné’s bittersweet rhapsody of romance, betrayal, revelry, and violence. Featuring evocative production design by the famed Alexandre Trauner and a colorful ensemble cast of some of classical French cinema’s most illustrious stars—including Annabella, Louis Jouvet, and a divinely dissolute Arletty in one of her most iconic roles—poetic-realist jewel Hôtel du Nord is a sublime exemplar of Carné’s celebrated poetic realism, imbuing working-class lives and dramas with a touching nobility."

Special features:

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New conversation between filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and journalist Philippe Morisson
• Television program from 1972 on the making of the film
• Documentary from 1994 on the life and career of director Marcel Carné
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film and theater scholar Edward Baron Turk

[Susan Foreman]

'Buck And The Preacher' (1972) - Pre-order available from Criterion Films direct - Blu-Ray - $27.96

Release date: August 23

"With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Harry Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of recently freed enslaved people. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation."

Special features:

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• New interview with Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western
• Behind-the-scenes footage featuring actor-director Sidney Poitier and actor Harry Belafonte
• Interviews with Poitier and Belafonte from 1972 episodes of Soul! and The Dick Cavett Show
• New interview with Gina Belafonte, daughter of Harry Belafonte
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Aisha Harris

[Susan Foreman]

'Faya Deyi' (2021) - Pre-order available from Criterion Films direct - Blu-Ray - $27.96 / DVD - $20.96

Release date: August 30

"A sublime work of personal vision, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic documentary immersion in the world of Ethiopia’s Oromo and Harari communities, places where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties—holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the influence of the drug itself, Faya dayi unfurls as intoxicating, trance state cinema, capturing intimate moments in the existence of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region’s political strife. The director’s exquisite monochrome cinematography—each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow—and the film’s time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming."

Special features:

• New 4K digital master, approved by director Jessica Beshir, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Three short films by Beshir: He Who Dances on Wood (2016); Heroin (2017); and Hairat (2017), featuring an introduction by Beshir
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price

[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by Susan Foreman

'Pink Flamingos' (1971)

Release date: June 28

"John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word filthy. Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending — Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability."

Special features:

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Waters, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Two audio commentaries featuring Waters, from the 1997 Criterion laserdisc and the 2001 DVD release
• New conversation between Waters and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
• Tour of the film’s Baltimore locations, led by Waters
• Deleted scenes, alternate takes, and on-set footage
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• And more!
• PLUS: An essay by critic Howard Hampton and a piece by actor and author Cookie Mueller about the making of the film, from her 1990 book Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

Full extras and Specs:

• Audio commentary by John Waters (1997)
• Audio commentary by John Waters (2001)
• Divine Trash 1998 documentary (97:18)
• 2022 conversation with John Waters and Jim Jarmusch (30:20)
• Tour of the Film’s Baltimore Locations (22:24)
• 25th Anniversary Footage (13:32)
• Outtakes (25:38)
• Trailer (2:08)
• Subtitles: English HoH
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Picture Format: 1080p24 AVC MPEG-4
• Soundtrack(s): English LPCM 1.0
• Case type: Digipak
• Includes an essay by critic Howard Hampton and a piece by actor and author Cookie Mueller about the making of the film, from her 1990 book Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, plus a reproduction of a “Pink Phlegm-ingo Barf Bag”.

[Justin101]

That’s a really good package, Divine Trash is a great bonus!!