DVD Talk Forum - Criterion releases for June 2010

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Criterion releases for June 2010

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Red Desert - Spine 522

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red Desert, his first color film, remains one of his greatest. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age—about a disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti, wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker, played by Richard Harris—continues to exert force over viewers. With one startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, overwhelming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.

Disc Features

* New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
* Audio commentary by Italian film scholar David Forgacs
* Archival video interviews with director Michelangelo Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti
* Outtakes from the film’s production
* Original theatrical trailer
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film historian Mark Le Fanu, an interview with Antonioni by Jean-Luc Godard, and a reprinted essay by Antonioni on his use of color
* More!

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Mystery Train - Spine 521

Aloof teenage Japanese tourists, a frazzled Italian widow, and a disgruntled British immigrant all converge in the city of dreams—which, in Mystery Train, from Jim Jarmusch, is Memphis. Made with its director’s customary precision and wit, Mystery Train is a triptych of stories that pay playful tribute to the home of Stax Records, Sun Studio, Graceland, Carl Perkins, and, of course, the King himself, who presides over the film like a spirit. Mystery Train is one of Jarmusch’s very best movies, a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to an iconic American ghost town and a paean to the music it gave the world.

Disc Features

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION

* New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Jim Jarmusch (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
* Two video Q&As with Jarmusch, one from the 2009 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in New York and one in which he responds to questions sent in by fans
* Original documentary on Mystery Train’s locations and Memphis’s rich social and musical history
* On-set photos by Masayoshi Sukita, and behind-the-scenes photos
* New and improved English subtitle translation
* PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by writers Peter Guralnick and Dennis Lim, as well as a collectible poster

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Close-up - Spine 519

Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up continues to resonate with viewers around the world.

Disc Features

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DVD SET

* New, restored high-definition digital transfer
* Audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, authors of Abbas Kiarostami
* The Traveler, a notable early feature by director Abbas Kiarostami
* “Close-up” Long Shot, a forty-five-minute documentary on Close-up’s central figure, Hossein Sabzian, five years after Kiarostami’s film
* A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), a thirty-two-minute documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akram
* New video interview with Kiarostami
* New and improved English subtitle translation
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Godfrey Cheshire

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Everlasting Moments - Spine 520

Swedish master Jan Troell, director of the beloved classics The Emigrants and The New Land, returns triumphantly with Everlasting Moments, a vivid, heartrending story of a woman liberated through art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though poor and abused by her alcoholic husband, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen, in a beautifully nuanced portrayal) finds an outlet in photography, which opens up her world for the first time. With a burnished bronze tint that evokes faded photographs, and a broad empathetic palette, Everlasting Moments—based on a true story—is a miraculous tribute to the power of image making.

Disc Features

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DVD SET

* New high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Jan Troell
* Jan Troell’s Magic Mirror, an hour-long documentary about Troell’s life and career
* Short documentary on the making of Everlasting Moments, featuring interviews with Troell, cast,
and crew
* Documentary featuring photographs by the real Maria Larsson, accompanied by narration telling her story
* Theatrical trailer
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Armond White

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Night Train to Munich - Spine 523

A twisting, turning, cloak-and-dagger delight, Night Train to Munich is a gripping, occasionally comic confection from writers Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat and director Carol Reed. Paced like an out-of-control locomotive, Night Train takes viewers on a World War II–era journey from Prague to England to the Swiss Alps, as Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter (Margaret Lockwood), who are being aided by a debonair British undercover agent, played by Rex Harrison. This captivating, long-overlooked adventure—which also features Paul Henreid—mixes comedy, romance, and thrills with enough skill and cleverness to give the master of suspense himself pause.

Disc Features

* New, restored high-definition digital transfer
* New video conversation between film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babington about director Carol Reed, screenwriters Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and the social and political climate
in which Night Train to Munich was made
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Philip Kemp

Plus "The Leopard", "Mystery Train", and "Red Desert", "Close-up", and "Everlasting Moments" on Blu-ray.