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#971
17th August 2022, 07:53 PM
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'Daisies' (1966) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for Blu-Ray - $31.96 Release date: November 1 "If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form." Special features:
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty  |
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#972
17th August 2022, 07:56 PM
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'In The Mood For Love' (2000) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 2 disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray Combo - $39.96 / Blu-Ray - $31.96 / 2 disc DVD - $23.96 Release date: November 1 "Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching sound*track and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career." Special features:
 MacBlayne likes this.
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#973
17th August 2022, 07:59 PM
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'The Power Of The Dog' (2021) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 2 disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray Combo - $39.96 / Blu-Ray - $31.96 / DVD - $23.96 Release date: November 8 "Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape—pulsating with both freedom and menace—that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage’s novel. After a sensitive widow (Kirsten Dunst) and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) move in with her gentle new husband (Jesse Plemons), a tense battle of wills plays out between them and his brutish brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose frightening volatility conceals a secret torment, and whose capacity for tenderness, once reawakened, may offer him redemption or destruction. Campion, who won an Academy Award for her direction here, charts the repressed desire and psychic violence coursing among these characters with the mesmerizing control of a master at the height of her powers." Special features:
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#974
17th August 2022, 08:05 PM
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The 'Infernal Affairs' Trilogy - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 3 disc Blu-Ray - $79.96 Release date: November 15 "The Hong Kong crime drama was jolted to new life with the release of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a bracing, explosively stylish critical and commercial triumph that introduced a dazzling level of narrative and thematic complexity to the genre with its gripping saga of two rival moles—played by superstars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah—who navigate slippery moral choices as they move between the intersecting territories of Hong Kong’s police force and its criminal underworld. Set during the uncertainty of the city-state’s handover from Britain to China and steeped in Buddhist philosophy, these ingeniously crafted tales of self-deception and betrayal mirror Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and the psychic schisms of life in a postcolonial purgatory. Infernal Affairs (2002) Two of Hong Kong cinema’s most iconic leading men, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah, face off in the breathtaking thriller that revitalized the city-state’s twenty-first-century film industry, launched a blockbuster franchise, and inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The setup is diabolical in its simplicity: two undercover moles—a police officer (Leung) assigned to infiltrate a ruthless triad by posing as a gangster, and a gangster (Lau) who becomes a police officer in order to serve as a spy for the underworld—find themselves locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse, each racing against time to unmask the other. As the shifting loyalties, murky moral compromises, and deadly betrayals mount, Infernal Affairs raises haunting questions about what it means to live a double life, lost in a labyrinth of conflicting identities and allegiances Infernal Affairs II (2003) The first of two sequels to follow in the wake of the massively successful Infernal Affairs softens the original’s furious pulp punch in favor of something more sweeping, elegiac, and overtly political. Flashing back in time, Infernal Affairs II traces the tangled parallel histories that bind the trilogy’s two pairs of adversaries: the young, dueling moles (here played by Edison Chen Koon-hei and Shawn Yue Man-lok), and the ascendant crime boss (Eric Tsang Chi-wai) and police inspector (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) whose respective rises reveal a shocking hidden connection. Unfolding against the political and psychological upheaval of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, this elegant, character-driven crime drama powerfully connects its themes of split loyalties to the city-state’s own postcolonial identity crisis. Infernal Affairs III (2003) Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah return for the cathartic conclusion of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which layers on even more deep-cover intrigue while steering the series into increasingly complex psychological territory. Dancing back and forth in time to before and after the events of the original film, Infernal Affairs III follows triad gangster turned corrupt cop Lau Kin-ming (Lau) as he goes to dangerous lengths to avoid detection, matches wits with a devious rival in the force (Leon Lai), and finds himself haunted by the fate of his former undercover nemesis (Leung). A swirl of flashbacks, memories, and hallucinations culminates in a dreamlike merging of identities that drives home the trilogy’s vision of a world in which traditional distinctions between good and evil have all but collapsed." 
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#975
17th August 2022, 08:08 PM
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'Malcolm X' (1991) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 3 disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray Combo - $39.96 / 2 disc Blu-Ray - $31.96 Release date: November 22 "One of the most electrifying heroes of the twentieth century receives an appropriately sweeping screen biopic, rich in both historical insight and propulsive cinematic style, courtesy of visionary director Spike Lee. Built around an extraordinary performance from Denzel Washington, Malcolm X draws on the iconic civil rights leader’s autobiography to trace his journey of empowerment, from a childhood riven by white-supremacist violence to a life of petty crime to his conversion to Islam and rebirth as a fearless fighter for Black liberation, whose courage and eloquence inspired oppressed communities the world over. An epic of impeccable craft that was made with Lee’s closest creative collaborators and is buoyed by commanding performances from Delroy Lindo, Angela Bassett, Al Freeman Jr., and others, this is a passionate monument to a man whose life continues to serve as a model of principled resistance." Special features:
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#976
17th August 2022, 10:23 PM
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__________________ "We're outgunned, and undermanned. But, you know somethin'? We're gonna win. You know why? Superior attitude. Superior state of mind."  |
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#977
8th September 2022, 04:43 PM
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'WALL·E' (2008) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 3 disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray Combo - $39.96 / 2 disc Blu-Ray - $31.96 Release date: November 22 "A high-water mark of digital animation, this prescient vision of a dystopian future is packaged within a dazzling pop-science-fiction love story, making for an urgent fable for our troubled millennium. It’s the twenty-ninth century, and humans have long since fled Earth for outer space, leaving WALL•E, the last functioning trash-compacting robot, to go about the work of cleaning up a pollution-choked planet, one piece of garbage at a time. When he meets EVE, a fellow automaton sent to detect plant life, the pair are launched on an intergalactic quest to return humanity to Earth. Transporting us simultaneously back to cinema’s silent origins and forward light-years into the future, WALL•E is a soaring ode to the power of love and art to heal a dying world." Special features:
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#978
15th September 2022, 05:54 PM
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'Michael Haneke: Trilogy' - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 3 disc Blu-ray - $63.96 Release date: December 6 "One of contemporary cinema’s most original, provocative, and uncompromising filmmakers, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke dares viewers to stare into the void of modern existence. With his first three theatrical features, The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—a trilogy depicting a coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise—Haneke established the rigorous visual style and unsettling themes that would recur throughout his work. Exploring the relationships among consumerism, violence, mass media, and contemporary alienation, these brilliant, relentlessly probing films open up profound questions about the world in which we live while refusing the false comfort of easy answers." The Seventh Continent (1989) "The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family (Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, and Leni Tanzer) begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with rigorous, clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness at the heart of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion" Benny’s Video (1992) "Michael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteningly affectless Arno Frisch), the teenage son of wealthy, disengaged parents (Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe), finds release in the world of violent videos—an obsession that leads him to create his own monstrous work of real-life horror. Layering screens within screens and digital frames within the filmic frame, Benny’s Video is a coolly postmodern, metacinematic labyrinth in which the boundaries between actual and mediated violence become terrifyingly indistinguishable" 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) "The simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final installment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy. Seventy-one intricate, puzzlelike scenes survey the routines of a handful of seemingly unrelated people—including an undocumented Romanian boy (Gabriel Cosmin Urdes) living on the streets of Vienna, a couple (Anne Bennent and Udo Samel) who are desperate to adopt a child, and a college student (Lukas Miko) on the edge—whose stories collide in a devastating encounter at a bank. The omnipresent drone of television news broadcasts in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance underscores Haneke’s vision of a numb, dehumanizing world in which emotional estrangement can be punctured only by the shock of sudden violence."  MacBlayne and nosferatu42 like this.
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#979
15th September 2022, 06:00 PM
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'Three Films by Mai Zetterling' - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 3 disc Blu-ray - $63.96 Release date: December 13 "A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent state of twentieth-century Europe. Her peerless ability to render subjective psychological states with startling immediacy is on display in Loving Couples, Night Games, and The Girls—three provocative, taboo-shattering works from the 1960s featuring some of Swedish cinema’s most iconic stars. With their audacious narrative structures that fuse reality and fantasy, their elaborate use of metaphor and symbolism, and their willingness to delve into the most fraught realms of human experience, these movies are models of adventurous, passionately engaged filmmaking." Loving Couples (1964) "The title of Mai Zetterling’s boldly iconoclastic debut feature — adapted from a cycle of seven novels by the provocative feminist writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna — drips with irony. In 1915, three pregnant women from varying social backgrounds (Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gio Petré) enter a maternity ward. Cue a swirl of perspective-shifting flashbacks that, with searing psychological insight, illuminate the divergent yet interconnected experiences that brought them there — and that came to a head during one lavish, debauched Midsommar celebration. Wildly subversive in its treatment of sexuality, gender, class, religion, marriage, and motherhood, Loving Couples is as electrifying a first feature as any in cinema history, announcing the arrival of an uncompromising artist in pursuit of raw emotional truth" Night Games (1966) "Outrageous and explosively controversial (the Venice Film Festival refused to screen it publicly, while John Waters has called it his favorite film), Mai Zetterling’s second feature is a blazing psychosexual odyssey with heaving Freudian flourishes. On the eve of his marriage to his fiancée (Lena Brundin), Jan (Keve Hjelm) returns to his childhood home — a sprawling estate stuffed with antiques — where he relives his memories of his beautiful, decadent, mercurial mother (Ingrid Thulin) and finds himself forced to confront his unresolved Oedipal longings. Seamlessly interweaving past and present, carnivalesque camp and potent symbolism, Night Games functions as both a feverishly perverse family portrait and a serious statement on the tormented soul of a modern Europe reckoning with the demons of its past" The Girls (1968) "Mai Zetterling’s cinema reached new heights of exuberant experimentation and fierce political engagement with this pointed and playful touchstone of 1960s feminist cinema. As they tour Sweden in a theatrical production of Lysistrata, performing to often uncomprehending audiences, three women (national cinema icons Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom) find their own lives and marriages mirrored in the complex, combative gender relations at the heart of Aristophanes’s play. Onstage drama, offstage reality, and a torrent of surrealist fantasies and daydreams collide in The Girls, a slashing, sardonic reflection on the myriad challenges confronting women on their path to liberation, and on the struggles of the female artist fighting to make her voice heard over the patriarchal din."  MacBlayne likes this.
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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#980
15th September 2022, 06:03 PM
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'The Velvet Underground' (2021) - Pre-order available from The Criterion Collection direct for 1 disc Blu-Ray - $39.95 / 2 disc DVD - $29.95 Release date: December 13 "Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York’s 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band’s incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol’s fabled Factory, and the explosive tension between pop and the avant-garde that propelled the group and ultimately consumed it. Never-before-seen performances, interviews, rare recordings, and mind-blowing transmissions from the era’s avant-garde cinema scene come together in an ecstatic swirl of sound and image that is to the traditional music documentary what the Velvets were to rock: utterly revolutionary." Special features:
 MacBlayne and nosferatu42 like this.
__________________ People try to put us down Just because we get around Golly, Gee! it's wrong to be so guilty |
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