Criterion has some major releases hitting the market in 2015. Here are a few that are getting released during the first quarter of the year.
Don’t
Look Now 2-10-15
With a majority of British maestro Nicolas Roeg’s
filmography having made its way to Criterion, back from the days of laserdisc
to the modern era of Blu-Ray, it’s surprising that his most celebrated and
revered masterpiece Don’t Look Now has
had yet to receive the Criterion treatment.
Now that it’s finally here, it’s a cause for celebration! Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie
as a grieving couple trying to find closure over their daughter’s untimely
death over an extended vacation in Venice only to find steadily mounting
tension and bizarre scenarios represents one of the finest horror films ever
made. Containing the revered montage of
sexual healing between Sutherland and Christie and some of Venice’s greatest
highlights, Don’t Look Now is a film
for the ages! Criterion’s forthcoming
edition sports gorgeous cover art, plentiful extras including new documentaries
on the nature of Roeg’s cinema, and a brand new digital transfer supervised and
approved by Roeg himself! Essential to
any home video library!
Fellini
Satyricon 2-24-15
The playful, fantastical Italian master Federico
Fellini, the man behind 8½ and La Dolce Vita, unleashed this bawdy,
satirical anthology of episodes chronicling the life of pre-Christian Rome and
all the good and bad associated with it.
Less factual than a fictitious celebration of the work of Petronius, a
bygone era realized at the height of the free swinging 1960s, Fellini’s Satyricon is a period piece that defies
easy categorization or for that matter, digestion. Akin to Ken Russell’s The Devils in terms of anachronistic sensual excess, grotesquerie
and outrageousness, this playful chunk of revisionist history is as much about
the lives of the two leading males’ swan dive into debauchery as it is about
the director’s stylized eccentric worldview.
A precursor to the work of Terry Gilliam, Criterion’s new Blu-Ray
edition of one of cinema’s greatest masterworks of provocation gets a lush 4K digital
restoration, several retrospective interviews as well as a documentary on the
controversial epic’s inception. At a
time when cinema was changing and opening up the doors of free possibilities,
it could be argued the ignition of Italian art as transgressive, surrealistic
cinema began with Federico Fellini and paved the way for artists determined to
break new ground through provocation for years to come.
Watership
Down 2-24-15
Among the very first truly adult animated features
(not Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated Fritz the Cat)
in terms of emotional maturity, modernity and realistic violence,
screenwriter-producer-director Martin Rosen’s cinematic adaptation of Richard
Adams’ Watership Down is a timeless
gem of beauty and brutality. The story
of a pack of wild rabbits in search of a new home while evading human forces
working towards their demise as well as rival clans of rabbits, Watership Down presented hand drawn
animation of colorful cartoon characters with all the harshness of the world we
live in stacked against them. Touching
and terrifying, this was never easy to digest let alone view, with scenes of
rabbits as animals with human voices either being buried alive or having their
throats ripped by predators. And yet a
terrific allegory about social dynamics and the nature of repression comparable
to George Orwell’s Animal Farm emerged,
one that continues to warm the hearts and minds of all who see it. Marking Criterion’s debut of an animated
feature in their catalogue, the underrated classic will include extras comparing
the storyboards to the finished film, interviews with both the director and a
video essay by Guillermo Del Toro about the film’s significance in animated
film history, as well as a new featurette about the film’s idiosyncratic style.
The
Thin Blue Line 3-24-15
Following the success of his breakthrough documentary Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris unleashed
one of the greatest documentaries ever created, The Thin Blue Line.
Concerning the wrongful arrest and incarceration of Randall Adams, a
drifter accused of murdering a Dallas police officer and sentenced to death row
despite a flood of evidence to the contrary, Morris’ film possessed the unique
power of forcing authorities to reconsider the case, resulting ultimately in
the release of Adams from prison. One of
the first documentaries to utilize dramatizations of the fateful night intercut
with interviews from all involved, including the actual murderer himself, David
Harris, The Thin Blue Line revitalized
the documentary film and showed the world that art can also function as
activism. Morris’ invention of the
Interrotron, a device allowing both the filmmaker and subject to stare directly
into a camera without needing to be in the same room together became a vital
tool to interview as well as break the fourth wall by having the subject
speaking directly to the audience. Often
compared to Alfred Hitchcock for his uncanny mastery of the film medium, Errol
Morris is among the world’s greatest filmmakers and The Thin Blue Line among his most important films!
Cries
and Whispers 3-31-15
The Swedish master of interior spiritual conflict,
Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, Persona) has crafted some of the most
simultaneously uplifting and deathly horrifying treatments of the human
condition the cinema world has ever seen.
No stranger to staring death in the face, with his iconic grim reaper
playing Chess against Max Von Sydow in The
Seventh Seal, in 1973 emerged what is probably his hardest work to date, Cries and Whispers. An ensemble piece concerning a nurse and two
sisters, Karin and Maria (Bergman regular and ex-wife Liv Ullman), caring for
their sister Agnes (Harriet Anderson) dying of cancer, Cries and Whispers is nothing less than a thousand yard gaze deep
into the pit of despair. Equal parts a
focus on the nature of how people respond to the death of a loved one and
Agnes’ own journey into enlightenment and spiritual purification, this is a
flawless masterpiece that does not make for easy or repeat viewings, with some
sequences so upsetting they will linger long after viewing. Shot by the renowned Sven Nykvist (which won
an Academy Award for Best Cinematography) with deep reds and intense close-ups
of the human face, this and Scenes from a
Marriage represent the Swedish maestro at his most confrontational and
harrowing. An essential work of
cinematic art that should be seen by all but not one to revisit often, not even
Lars Von Trier’s work is this emotionally draining.
-Andrew Kotwicki