criterionforum.org

Narshty wrote:I think any chance of further New Line titles from Criterion will be zip, given how they're now a subsidiary of Warner (also expect the five current ones - Short Cuts, My Own Private Idaho, Hoop Dreams, Naked and An Angel at my Table - to go OOP once the current licences expire).

kaujot wrote:How about Pinter's Betrayal? Anyone have any info on the status of that one?

July Criterions Announced:
Mon oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971), Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) and High and Low (Kurosawa, 1963)

Mon oncle Antoine
Claude Jutra’s evocative portrait of a boy’s coming of age in wintry 1940s rural Quebec has been consistently cited by critics and scholars as the greatest Canadian film of all time. Delicate, naturalistic, and tinged with a striking mix of nostalgia and menace, Mon oncle Antoine follows the everyday lives of both young Benoit, as he first encounters the twin terrors of sex and death, and his fellow villagers, living under the thumb of the local asbestos-mine owner. Set during one ominous Christmas, Mon oncle Antoine is a holiday film unlike any other, and an authentically detailed illustration of childhood’s twilight.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
-- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director of photography Michel Brault
-- On-Screen: “Mon oncle Antoine,” a 2007 documentary tracing the making and history of the film
-- Claude Jutra, an Unfinished Story, a 2002 documentary that attempts to unravel “the Jutra mystery,” featuring interviews with Brault, Bernardo Bertolucci, actors Geneviève Bujold and Saul Rubinek. and actor-director Paule Baillargeon
-- A Chairy Tale, a 1957 experimental short codirected by Jutra and Norman McLaren
-- Theatrical trailer
-- Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
-- New and improved English subtitle translation
-- PLUS: A new essay by film scholar André Loiselle

SRP: $39.95
Prebook: 6/3/08
Street date: 7/8/08

Trafic
In Jacques Tati’s Trafic, the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, outfitted as always with tan raincoat, beaten brown hat, and umbrella, takes to Paris’s highways and byways. For this, his final outing, Hulot is employed as an auto company’s director of design, and accompanies his new vehicle (a camper tricked out in all sorts of absurd gadgetry) to an auto show in Amsterdam. Naturally, the road is paved with modern-age mishaps. This late-career delight is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’s expert timing and sidesplitting visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
-- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
-- In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot (1969), a two-hour documentary tracing the evolution of Jacques Tati’s beloved alter ego
-- Interview from 1971 with the cast of Trafic, from the French television program Le journal de cinema
-- “The Comedy of Jacques Tati,” a 1973 episode from the French television program Morceaux de bravoure
-- Theatrical trailer
-- New and improved English subtitle translation
-- PLUS: A new essay by film critic Jonathan Romney

SRP: $39.95
Prebook: 6/10/08
Street date: 7/15/08

Vampyr
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (as in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result—concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris—is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
-- New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the 1998 film restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cineteca di Bologna
-- Optional all-new English-text version of the film
-- Audio commentary featuring film scholar Tony Rayns
-- Carl Th. Dreyer (1966), a documentary by Jörgen Roos chronicling Dreyer’s career
-- Visual essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer’s influences in creating Vampyr
-- A 1958 radio broadcast of Dreyer reading an essay about filmmaking
-- New and improved English subtitle translation
-- PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, Martin Koerber on the restoration, and an archival interview with producer and star Nicolas de Gunzburg, as well as a book featuring Dreyer and Christen Jul’s original screenplay and Sheridan Le Fanu 1871 story “Carmilla,” a source for the filmTitle: Vampyr

SRP: $39.95
Prebook: 6/17/08
Street date: 7/22/08

High and Low
Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s highly influential domestic drama and police procedural High and Low. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society. Criterion is proud to present High and Low (Tengoko to jigoku) in this new high-definition digital transfer.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
-- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with newly restored original
four-track surround sound
-- New audio commentary by Akira Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince
-- A 37-minute documentary on the making of High and Low, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
-- Rare archival interview with Toshiro Mifune
-- New video interview with actor Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the kidnapper
-- Theatrical trailers from Japan and the U.S.
-- New and improved English subtitle translation
-- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a reprinted essay by Japanese film scholar Donald Richie
-- More!

SRP: $39.95
Prebook: 6/17/08
Street date: 7/22/08

tavernier wrote:At least he gets a "visual essay."

About VAMPYR, my friend at Criterion just told me that the materials are incredibly f-ed.

criterionaficionado wrote:thanks denti...best month for sure, 7/08 is the shit!!!
its been a while since a bergman flic was added to catalogue. i nominate the magician as a late summer/early fall release. come to think of it, bunuel's exterminating angel coupled with simon of the desert is actually making me excited just thinking about it. september: bergman/bunuel - that would be awesome.

criterionaficionado wrote:its been a while since a bergman flic was added to catalogue. i nominate the magician as a late summer/early fall release.