Criterion February 2010

I'm a little late on writing up details of the latest set of Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD upcoming titles, mainly because Brian Carmody, the guy who deals with the CC press release, didn't wish to send out a newsletter to me this month. Maybe he thought we had shut down when we went quiet for a month or so. Anyway, for now I've had to go off what The Playlist tell me. The big release that really caught my eye for February was Steve McQueen's debut film, the 2008 British Cannes selection Hunger, starring Inglourious Basterds actor Michael Fassbender which gets a Blu-Ray and DVD release. Set in the Thatcherite Britain of 1981, the movie tells the final 66 days of Provisional IRA member Bobby Sands' life, when he starved himself to death in a media frenzied hunger strike, protesting against the prison conditions he was being kept under at HM Prison Maze. He died aged 27. Hunger was released on DVD earlier this year in the U.K, a film I actually own but haven't gotten around to watching yet. The Region 2 release was pretty bog standard stuff, with only a making of featurette, a couple of interviews and the theatrical trailer. One hopes Criterion will go all out with this one... i.e. footage filmed from it's Cannes premiere, deleted scenes and of course a director's commentary.

Next up is Revanche (Blu-Ray and DVD release), an Austrian revenge movie that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture at the most recent Oscars ceremony. Johannes Krisch stars as a man plagued by ideas of vengeance during the aftermath of a crime that promised a new life for him and his girlfriend.

The release was always planned as amazingly, Criterion actually distributed the film themselves.

The gorgeous artwork (above) and the trailer (below) hints towards a methodically paced cerebral picture that boasts amazing cinematography, and you can see why Criterion got behind this one. Looks like a Bonnie and Clyde, if it were made by the French New Wave... by a Godard. My order is placed...

Third release of February and yet another duel Blu-Ray and DVD release is Lola Montes, the final movie directed by Max Ophuls before his sad heart attack two years later in 1957, when he was just 54.

The Playlist predict the release will be the same restored print that was shown at the New York Film Festival last year which included at least five minutes of never seen before footage, making it the closest version of Ophuls' original vision brought out to date. The film was savagely butchered by producers in the 50s, when they didn't like appreciate Ophuls' use of flashbacks.

And finally Make Way For Tomorrow, a movie I have never heard of before in my life but what a striking and unusual DVD cover (no Blu-Ray release on this one)... The front cover tells me it was directed Leo McCarey, who wiki tells me was an American actor, writer and director who was involved with over 200 pictures. The drama concerns an elderly couple (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) who are forced to separate when they lose their house and none of their five children will take both parents in. Orson Welles is said to have loved it claiming "it would make a stone cry", so there ya go. A Wells praise is good enough for me.