White Dog:

Synopsis
Samuel Fuller’s throat-grabbing exposé on American racism was misunderstood and withheld from release when it was made in the early eighties; today, the notorious film is lauded for its daring metaphor and gripping pulp filmmaking. Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German shepherd, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people, and Paul Winfield plays the animal trainer who tries to cure him. A snarling, uncompromising vision, White Dog is a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.

Special Features

* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the uncut version, approved by producer Jon Davison
* - New video interviews with producer Davison, co-writer Curtis Hanson, and Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang-Fuller
* - An interview with dog trainer Karl Lewis-Miller
* - Rare photos from the film’s production
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critics J. Hoberman and Armond White, plus a rare 1982 interview in which Fuller interviews the canine star of the film

Single Disc
SRP
$29.95


Europa:

Synopsis
"You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa . . ." So begins Max von Sydow's opening narration to Lars von Trier’s hypnotic Europa (known in the U.S. as Zentropa), a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. With its gorgeous black-and-white and color imagery and meticulously recreated (if then nightmarishly deconstructed) costumes and sets, Europa is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works, a runaway train ride to an oddly futuristic past.

Special Features

* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer
* - Audio commentary featuring director Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen (in Danish, with English subtitles)
* - The Making of “Europa” (1991), a documentary following the film from storyboarding to production
* - Trier’s Element (1991), a documentary featuring an interview with von Trier, and footage from the set and Europa’s Cannes premiere and press conference
* - Anecdotes from Europa (2005), a short documentary featuring interviews with film historian Peter Schepelern, actor Jean-Marc Barr, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, assistant director Tómas Gislason, co-writer Niels Vørsel, and prop master Peter Grant
* - 2005 interviews with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, composer Joachim Holbek, costume designer Manon Rasmussen, film-school teacher Mogens Rukov, editor/director Tómas Gislason, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, art director Peter Grant, actor Michael Simpson, production manager Per Arman, actor Ole Ernst
* - A conversation with Lars von Trier from 2005, in which the director speaks about the "Europa" trilogy
* - Europa—The Faecal Location (2005), a short film by Gislason
* - New and improved English subtitle translation
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Howard Hampton

2-Disc Set
SRP
$39.95

Criterion has just announced a release of the DVD version with lots of special features for the end of this year. I’m going to be doing the audio commentary for that, which I’m pretty excited about.