Hi Bryan Here….

Criterion has announced some great titles to be released in the months of March and April of 2012.  Some great classics on Blu-Ray.  Below you can see all the extras and synopsis of each film.  Also a link to pre order the titles listed.  Enjoy.  Especially looking forward to ‘Harold and Maude’.  Click on the images to pre-order.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (BLURAY) – MARCH 13TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: The Last Temptation of Christ, by Martin Scorsese, is a towering achievement. Though it initially engendered enormous controversy, the film can now be viewed as the remarkable, profoundly personal work of faith that it is. This fifteen-year labor of love, an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s landmark novel that imagines an alternate fate for Jesus Christ, features outstanding performances by Willem Dafoe, Barbara Hershey, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, and David Bowie; bold cinematography by the great Michael Ballhaus; and a transcendent score by Peter Gabriel.

DISC FEATURES

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION:

• Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack by supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay
• Audio commentary featuring director Martin Scorsese, actor Willem Dafoe, and writers Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks
• Galleries of production stills, research materials, and costume designs
• Location production footage shot by Scorsese
• Interview with composer Peter Gabriel, with a stills gallery of traditional instruments used in the score
• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Ehrenstein

LETTER NEVER SENT (BLURAY) – MARCH 20TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent. This absorbing tale of exploration and survival concerns the four members of a geological expedition, who are stranded in the bleak and unforgiving Siberian wilderness while on a mission to find diamonds. Luxuriating in wide-angle beauty and featuring one daring shot after another (the brilliant cinematography is by Kalatozov’s frequent collaborator Sergei Urusevsky), Letter Never Sent is a fascinating piece of cinematic history and a universal adventure of the highest order.

DISC FEATURES

• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova

DISC FEATURES

• New high-definition digital transfers of the BFI National Archive’s 2008 restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray editions
• Audio commentary on Brief Encounter by film historian Bruce Eder
• New interviews with Noël Coward scholar Barry Day on all of the films
• Interview with cinematographer-screenwriter-producer Ronald Neame from 2010
• Short documentaries from 2000 on the making of In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter
• David Lean: A Self Portrait, a 1971 television documentary on Lean’s career
• Episode of the British television series The Southbank Show from 1992 on the life and career of Coward
• Audio recording of a 1969 conversation between Richard Attenborough and Coward at London’s National Film Theatre
• Trailers
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by Ian Christie, Terrence Rafferty, Farran Smith Nehme, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Kevin Brownlow

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (BLURAY) – MARCH 27TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: On April 14, 1912, just before midnight, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg. In less than three hours, it had plunged to the bottom of the sea, taking with it more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. In his unforgettable render­ing of Walter Lord’s book of the same name, the acclaimed British director Roy Ward Baker depicts with sensitivity, awe, and a fine sense of tragedy the ship’s last hours. Featuring remarkably restrained performances, A Night to Remember is cinema’s subtlest and best dramatization of this monumental twentieth-century catastrophe.

DISC FEATURES

• New digital restoration, with uncompressed
  monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, author and illustrator of “Titanic”: An Illustrated History
• The Making of “A Night to Remember” (1993), a sixty-minute documentary featuring producer William MacQuitty’s rare behind-the-scenes footage
• Archival interview with Titanic survivor Eva Hart
• En natt att minnas (1962), a half-hour Swedish documentary featuring interviews with Titanicsurvivors
• The Iceberg That Sank the “Titanic” (2006), a sixty-minute BBC documentary
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Sragow and archival photographs

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY (BLURAY) – APRIL 10TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: Icon of the American avant-garde Hollis Frampton made rigorous, audacious, brainy, and downright thrilling films, leaving behind a body of work that remains unparalleled. In the 1960s, having started out as a poet and photographer, Frampton became fascinated with the possibilities of 16 mm filmmaking. In such radically playful, visually and sonically arresting works as Surface Tension, Zorns Lemma, (nostalgia), Critical Mass, and the enormous, unfinished Magellan cycle (cut short by his death at age forty-eight), Frampton repurposes cinema itself, making it into something by turns literary, mathematical, sculptural, and simply beautiful—and always captivating. This collection of works by the essential artist—the first home video release of its kind—includes twenty-four films, dating from 1966 to 1979.

DISC FEATURES

• New high-definition digital restorations of all twenty-four films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray edition

DISC ONE

Early Films
Manual of Arms (1966 • 17 minutes • Black & White • Silent)
Process Red (1966 • 3 minutes, 30 seconds • Color • Silent)
Maxwell’s Demon (1968 • 4 minutes • Color/Black & White • Silent)
Surface Tension (1968 • 9 minutes, 30 seconds • Color • Monaural)
Carrots & Peas (1969 • 5 minutes • Color • Monaural)
Lemon (1969 • 5 minutes • Color • Silent) 
Zorns Lemma (1970 • 60 minutes • Color • Monaural)

DISC TWO

Films from Hapax Legomena
(nostalgia) (1971 • 36 minutes • Black & White • Monaural)
Poetic Justice (1972 • 31 minutes, 30 seconds • Black & White • Silent)
Critical Mass (1971 • 25 minutes, 30 seconds • Black & White • Monaural)

Films from Magellan
The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I (1977–1980 • 6 minutes • Color • Monaural)
Pans 0–4 and 697–700 (1974 • 1-minute each • Color • Silent)
INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, Part I (1975 • 5 minutes • Color • Silent)
Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate I, 0 (1976 • 4 minutes, 20 seconds • Color • Silent)
Winter Solstice (1974 • 33 minutes • Color • Silent)
Gloria! (1979 • 9 minutes, 30 seconds • Color • Monaural)

• Audio commentary and remarks by filmmaker Hollis Frampton on selected works
• Excerpted interview with Frampton from 1978
• A Lecture, a performance piece by Frampton, recorded in 1968 with the voice of artist Michael Snow
• Gallery of works from Frampton’s xerographic series By Any Other Name

• PLUS: A booklet with an introduction by film critic Ed Halter and essays and capsules on the films by Frampton scholars Ken Eisenstein, Bruce Jenkins, and Michael Zryd

¡ALAMBRISTA! (BLURAY) – APRIL 17TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: In ¡Alambrista!, a farmworker sneaks across the border from Mexico into California in an effort to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromising, groundbreaking work of realism from American independent filmmaker Robert M. Young. Vivid and spare where other films about illegal immigration might sentimentalize, Young’s take on the subject is equal parts intimate character study and gripping road movie, a political work that never loses sight of the complex man at its center. ¡Alambrista!, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural Camera d’Or in 1978, remains one of the best films ever made on this perennially relevant topic.

DISC FEATURES

• New high-definition digital restoration, with 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New audio commentary featuring director Robert M. Young and coproducer Michael Hausman
• New interview with actor Edward James Olmos
• Children of the Fields, a 1973 short documentary by Young, accompanied by a new interview with the director
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film historian Charles Ramírez Berg

HAROLD AND MAUDE (BLURAY) – APRIL 17TH, 2012

SYNOPSIS: With the idiosyncratic American fable Harold and Maude,countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era. Working from a script by Colin Higgins, Ashby tells the story of the emotional and romantic bond between a death-obsessed young man (Bud Cort) from a wealthy family and a devil-may-care, bohemian octogenarian (Ruth Gordon). Equal parts gallows humor and romantic innocence, Harold and Maude dissolves the line between darkness and light along with the ones that separate people by class, gender, and age, and it features indelible performances and a remarkable soundtrack by Cat Stevens.