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Back on topic, the French BD of Winter Sleep is 2 discs, so assume ours will be 2 as well.

newwavefilms

The Blu-Ray is on ONE DISC. Approx. 5 1/2 hour on a 44,61 Gb disc size! Not good, even tough it seems that the documantary has a very modest bitrate!

Pepsi wrote:The Blu-Ray is on ONE DISC. Approx. 5 1/2 hour on a 44,61 Gb disc size! Not good, even tough it seems that the documantary has a very modest bitrate!

In France, the 2h20 making of is on a DVD, so if the making of is kept in SD here too, it won't take so much space, and the main movie will still have moire than 30 Gbs to breathe.

Beaver on the Adopt Films release (U.S.) Some disappointments. Burned in subs, no lossless audio and no extras. I'll go with the New Wave release.

I think they ought to be. I wish I could see one of these to see how the picture looks knocked down to HD, I saw the film at a MoMA preview and I have to say the detail in the landscape shots are stunning. (I think the film opens with one.) Pretty amazing, it really showed off what you can get with one of those cameras.

Netflix blu-ray and dvd release date is tomorrow, 5/5/15.

This was a significantly better experience then Once Upon a Time for pretty much the same reasons I liked that film. In many respects this is a traditional film. There's a lot, a whole lot, of talking with most of the film being in medium shots paced back and forth between the characters at a relatively normal rate. Basically when taken at any one of its pieces this is a fairly normal dramatic film. What makes it great is how its narrative fits into the mold of Pedro Costa. Like Costa's best films this is an enormous film thanks primarily to the need to show the entire interaction between characters which creates a series of smaller films of various tensions.

The way that one conversation bleeds into the next and what it says about the Boss Tweed like lead makes this an archetype expose almost. That doesn't get to how naturalistic, in a positive way, the film is and how casually it allows the lead to hang himself. If his preening arrogance weren't so clear in his interactions with his sister then he might even be a totally ambiguous character in terms of how the film sees him as he can be charming and intelligent when he isn't being cutthroat. That said, and this perhaps perverts the expose idea, the best scene of the film; one so full of truth about life and full of the reality the characters inhabit doesn't feature him at all. That absence speaks wonders about him, but to focus too long on him is probably to distract from what wonderful characters do inhabit the scene. Of course I am talking about the discussion between the sister and wife which I assume is entirely taken word for word from Chekhov (beyond the few modern intrusions). How what they say characterizes them, their philosophies, their person of connection, and perhaps most importantly their culture is done with such surprising brevity that I'm sure it will be taught in (good artistically driven) film writing classes. It's such a perfect moment that had it gone on for the full 190 minutes it would be one of my favorite films of the decade. Even in its current form this scene is practically the best film included in a great, but not as great film.

The film is also incredibly beautiful without ever calling attention to itself. The ever increasingly rare exteriors are like a like action Ivan Maximov film full of strange colours and a natural Rube Goldberg feel. Even the scene in the plains has a bright excitement to it that almost makes one forget that this is set in the death season. Ceylon clearly has a lot of love and excitement for the land. The interiors remain bright and earthy with the homes feeling like they are carved out of a mountain giving an excessively antique feel to a film which is aggressively modern. The colour brown has never looked so glistening at least. Also this film is humourously cinephilic with even a cute inside joke about Ishtar.