We are quickly reaching the end of 2023 which means the warm weather will be replaced by cozy nights in. The Criterion Collection has your back covered in October with a couple of new releases that will be ‘strange and darkly comedic’
First on 9th October comes Martin Scorsese’s Kafkaesque cult classic After Hours on Blu-ray™ and for the first time in the UK, also on 4K Ultra HD. The film stars Griffin Dunne and a scene stealing Rosanna Arquette in a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity.
Finally on 23rd October, Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers on Blu-ray™. The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning, early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur.
MARTIN SCORSESE’S AFTER HOURS – OUT ON 9th OCTOBER
New Director-approved 4K Restoration Available on Blu-ray™ & 4K Ultra HD
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hook-up with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY™ SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New conversation between director Martin Scorsese and writer Fran Lebowitz
- Audio commentary featuring Scorsese, Schoonmaker, director of photography Michael Ballhaus, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson
- Documentary about the making of the film featuring Dunne, Robinson, Schoonmaker, and Scorsese
- New program on the look of the film featuring costume designer Rita Ryack and production designer Jeffrey Townsend
- Deleted scenes
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley
FREAKS/ THE UNKNOWN/ THE MYSTIC: TOD BROWNING’S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS – OUT ON 23rd OCTOBER New 2K Restoration Available on Blu-ray™
The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New 2K digital reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
- New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
- Audio commentaries on Freaks and The Unknown and an introduction to The Mystic by film scholar David J. Skal
- New interview with author Megan Abbott about director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror
- Archival documentary on Freaks
- Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks
- Reading by Skal of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks is based
- Prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film in 1947
- Program on the alternate endings to Freaks
- Video gallery of portraits from Freaks
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme
