Indeed! Veronica Lake, hubba hubba!

its an eye marrying a witch, cant be anything else.

Criterion tweeted out a production still of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I wonder if it's getting a Blu-ray upgrade announcement on Monday? The DVD came out in 1998, so it's due.

God I hope so. It's definitely my favorite movie in the collection and I've been waiting impatiently for an upgrade ever since they started releasing blu-rays.

Monday? Shouldn't the announcement be Wednesday?

They made it their cover photo on facebook. If they don't announce it this month I'm going to cry forever.

yeah - should be Wednesday the 15th

I always thought their announcements were on the second Monday of every month. That's what I get for assuming.

...And it's announcement time:


Seconds

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged businessman dissatisfied with his suburban existence, who elects to undergo a strange and elaborate procedure that will grant him a new life. Starting over in America, however, is not as easy as it sounds. This paranoiac symphony of canted camera angles (courtesy of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe), fragmented editing, and layered sound design is a remarkably risk-taking Hollywood film that ranks high on the list of its legendary director’s major achievements.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary featuring director John Frankenheimer
• Actor Alec Baldwin on Frankenheimer and Seconds
• New program on the making of Seconds, featuring interviews with Evans Frankenheimer, the director’s widow, and actor Salome Jens
• Interview with Frankenheimer from 1971
• New visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
• PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt

The Big City

The Big City (Mahanagar), set in mid-1950s Calcutta and directed by the great Satyajit Ray, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray gradually builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the contemporary Indian woman.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee
• Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview program featuring Ray historian Suranjan Ganguly
• The Coward (1965), a feature film directed by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and an interview with Ray from the 1980s by his biographer Andrew Robinson

Charulata

This film about a woman’s artistic and romantic yearning by Satyajit Ray is set in late nineteenth-century, pre-independence India. It takes place in the gracious home of a liberal-minded, workaholic newspaper editor and his lonely, stifled wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), whose exquisitely composed features mask a burning creativity. When her husband’s poet cousin comes to stay with them, Charulata finds herself both inspired by him to pursue her own writing and dangerously drawn to him physically. Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview program with actors Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
• Adapting Tagore, a new interview program featuring Indian film scholar Moinak Biswas and Bengali literature historian Supriya Chaudhuri
• Archival audio interview with director Satyajit Ray by film historian Gideon Bachmann
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson

To Be or Not to Be

As nervy as it is hilarious, this screwball masterpiece from Ernst Lubitsch stars Jack Benny and, in her final screen appearance, Carole Lombard as husband-and-wife thespians in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who become caught up in a dangerous spy plot. To Be or Not to Be is a Hollywood film of the boldest black humor, which went into production soon after the U.S. entered World War II. Lubitsch manages to brilliantly balance political satire, romance, slapstick, and urgent wartime suspense in a comic high-wire act that has never been equaled.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New audio commentary featuring film historian David Kalat
• Lubitsch le patron, a 2010 French documentary on director Ernst Lubitsch’s career
• Two episodes of The Screen Guild Theater, a radio anthology series: Variety (1940), starring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Lubitsch, and To Be or Not to Be (1942), an adaptation of the film, starring William Powell, Diana Lewis, and Sig Ruman
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
• More!

The Ray films are pretty cool, but there is still no P@HR, so it looks like I will indeed be crying forever.

That cover art for To Be is pretty clever.

SECONDS and TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Not so sure about some of the covers, but these are all great movies. Pleasantly surprised to see more Satyajit Ray so soon after hearing about their deal to restore something like 20 of his films. (Also note The Coward among the extras for The Big City).

The only disappointment is the Fassbinder Eclipse set - you can buy more thorough sets from the UK for about the same price. Wait for a sale and you can probably even get them for about $20 shipped per set. (Now if they'd just start releasing the Eclipse sets on Blu-ray it would be an instant purchase.)

Great announcements, but I'm especially excited about To Be or Not to Be.

I'll get To Be Or Not To Be, can't use any of the others.

p@hr?

Picnic At Hanging Rock

I'm thrilled to see Seconds announced...

all 5 are must haves really.

Description says "science fiction", but what style would this be comparable to? The description above reminds me of Total Recall/We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

If I remember it correctly, it's more akin to an old Twilight Zone episode where it was sci-fi but not with your typical sci-fi trappings and more of a weird drama.

Hmm, maybe grab that one a little later. I love TZ, but not sure about paying Criterion prices for something like that.

according to this article...janus films has acquired THE BROOD.

That's good news. Great news would be if they acquired Shivers.

With The Brood acquired those rumors of an "Early Cronenberg" set with Shivers, The Brood, Rabid and Scanners are looking better