Revenge and Sensitivity At The Criterion Collection in May
It will be March tomorrow, over at The Criterion Collection, they are 2 steps ahead. They are looking ahead to May, which they promise to deliver revenge and sensitivity.
John Boorman‘s stylized revenge thriller Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, comes to 4K UHD on 4th May. Capturing Los Angeles locales with a surreal pop-art eye, Boorman locates the existential dread lurking beneath the city’s sunlit surface.
Following on 11th May, The Big City, directed by the great Satyajit Ray, comes to Blu-ray. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the modern Indian woman.
On 18th May, My Beautiful Laundrette arrives on Blu-ray. Directed by Stephen Frears from a richly layered script by Hanif Kureishi, this culture-clash comedy is also a subversive work of social realism that dares to address racism, homophobia, and sociopolitical marginalization in Margaret Thatcher’s England.
POINT BLANK– Out on 4th May – New 4K Digital Restoration
Director John Boorman brought the gangster drama into new realms of modernist abstraction with this stylized revenge thriller, which transforms hard-edged pulp into a kaleidoscopic psychological puzzle. Lee Marvin is iconically cool as the enigmatic Walker, who, after he’s betrayed and left for dead by his best friend during a robbery, embarks on a brutal quest for vengeance, aided by a jaded ex-moll (a sensational Angie Dickinson) who has her own complex motives for helping him. Capturing Los Angeles locales with a surreal pop-art eye, Boorman locates the existential dread lurking beneath the city’s sunlit surface.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Boorman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Boorman and filmmaker Steven Soderbergh
- Interview with Boorman conducted by author Geoff Dyer
- New interview with critic Mark Harris
- New reflections on Point Blank by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
- New program on the midcentury Los Angeles architecture featured in the film, with historian Alison Martino
- The Rock (1967), a short documentary on Alcatraz and the making of the film
- Interview with Marvin from a 1970 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by Dyer
New cover by Jay Shaw
Buy on 4K UHD: Amazon
THE BIG CITY – Out on 11th May – New Restored 2K Digital Transfer
The Big City, the great Satyajit Ray’s first portrayal of contemporary life in his native Kolkata, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the modern Indian woman.
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee
- Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview with Ray scholar Suranjan Ganguly
- The Coward (Kapurush, 1965), a short feature by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
- Satyajit Ray (1974), a documentary short by B. D. Garga
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson
New cover by Marian Bantjes
Available to buy on Blu-ray: Amazon
MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE– Out on 18th May – New Restored 2K Digital Transfer
Stephen Frears was at the forefront of the British cinematic revival of the mid-1980s, and the delightfully transgressive My Beautiful Laundrette is his greatest triumph of the period. Working from a richly layered script by Hanif Kureishi, who was soon to be an internationally renowned writer, Frears tells an uncommon love story that takes place between a young South London Pakistani man (Gordon Warnecke), who decides to open an upscale laundromat to make his family proud, and his childhood friend, a skinhead (Daniel Day-Lewis, in a breakthrough role) who volunteers to help make his dream a reality. This culture-clash comedy is also a subversive work of social realism that dares to address racism, homophobia, and sociopolitical marginalization in Margaret Thatcher’s England.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New, restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Oliver Stapleton, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New conversation between director Stephen Frears and producer Colin MacCabe
- New interviews with writer Hanif Kureishi, producers Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, and Stapleton
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Graham Fuller
New cover by Eric Skillman
Available to buy on Blu-ray: Amazon
PETER HUJAR’S DAY – Out on 25th May
A loving snapshot of a vanished New York, director Ira Sachs’s captivating cultural time capsule is a warm, witty, graceful re-creation of a real-life conversation that took place between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) in 1974. Peter Hujar’s Day eavesdrops on the two friends’ leisurely, affectionate hangout as Hujar recounts his previous day’s activities, offering insights into both his art and his everyday life. What emerges is a touching celebration of creativity, connection, and simply being present, made exceptionally vivid by Sachs’s cinematic flourishes and wonderfully tender performances from Whishaw and Hall, whose chemistry gives the film its heart and soul.
Criterion Premieres is a selection of new theatrical films presented on Blu-ray and DVD, released in association with the Criterion Channel.
DVD AND BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- Meet the Filmmakers: Ira Sachs, a Criterion Channel original interview
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Notes by author and film curator Michael Koresky
Available to buy on Blu-ray and DVD: Amazon
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