Hi, Bryan Here….
Criterion has announced some great titles to be released in May of 2012. Some great classics and modern 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 ‘Being John Malkovich’. Click on the images to pre-order.
LA HAINE (BLURAY) – MAY 8TH, 2012
SYNOPSIS: Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine(Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieues on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—white, black, and Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant and otherwise marginalized populations, their resentment at their situation simmering until it reaches a boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
DISC FEATURES
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
- Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Mathieu Kassovitz, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- English-language audio commentary by Kassovitz
- Introduction by actor Jodie Foster
- Ten Years of “La haine,” an eighty-minute documentary that brings together cast and crew a decade after the film’s landmark release
- Featurette on the film’s banlieue setting, including interviews with sociologists Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jeffrey Fagan, and William Kornblum
- Production footage
- Deleted and extended scenes, each featuring an afterword by Kassovitz
- Gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
- Trailers
- PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and an appreciation by acclaimed filmmaker Costa-Gavras
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (BLURAY) MAY 15TH, 2012
SYNOPSIS: Have you ever wanted to be someone else? Or, more specifically, have you ever wanted to crawl through a portal hidden in an anonymous office building and thereby enter the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes before being spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike? Then director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman have the movie for you. Melancholy marionettes, office drudgery, a frizzy-haired Cameron Diaz—but that’s not all! Surrealism, possession, John Cusack, a domesticated primate, Freud, Catherine Keener, non sequiturs, and absolutely no romance! But wait: get your Being John Malkovich now and we’ll throw in emasculation, slapstick, Abelard and Heloise, and extra Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.
DISC FEATURES
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
- New high-definition digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New selected-scene audio commentary featuring filmmaker Michel Gondry
- New behind-the-scenes documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs
- Conversation between John Malkovich and humorist John Hodgman
- Director Spike Jonze discusses Being John Malkovich via photos from its production
- Two films within the film: 7½ Floor Orientation and “American Arts & Culture” Presents John Horatio Malkovich, “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment”
- An Intimate Portrait of the Art of Puppeteering, a documentary by Bangs
- Trailer and TV spots
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a conversation between Jonze and pop-culture critic Perkus Tooth
CERTIFIED COPY (BLURAY) MAY 22ND, 2012
SYNOPSIS: The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche and opera singer William Shimell—getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon gradually reveals itself as something richer, stranger, and trickier: a mind-bending reflection on authenticity, in art as well as in relationships. Both cerebrally and emotionally engaging, Certified Copy (Copie conforme) reminds us that love itself is an enigma.
DISC FEATURES
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
- New high-definition digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New interview with director Abbas Kiarostami
- Let’s See “Copia conforme,” an Italian documentary on the making of Certified Copy, featuring interviews with Kiarostami and actors Juliette Binoche and William Shimell
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire
SUMMER INTERLUDE (BLURAY) MAY 29TH, 2012
SYNOPSIS: Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—the tenth film by Ingmar Bergman was a gentle sway toward true mastery. In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as Marie, an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student (Birger Malmsten). Her memories of the rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works. A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude is a reverie on life and death that bridges the gap between Bergman’s past and future, theater and cinema.
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 Peter Cowie
SUMMER WITH MONIKA (BLURAY) MAY 29TH, 2012
SYNOPSIS: Inspired by the earthy eroticism of his muse Harriet Andersson, in the first of her many roles for him, Ingmar Bergman had a major international breakthrough with this ravaging, sensual tale of young love. In Stockholm, a girl (Andersson) and boy (Lars Ekborg) from working-class families run away from home to spend a secluded, romantic summer at the beach, far from parents and responsibilities. Inevitably, it is not long before the pair is forced to return to reality. The version originally released in the U.S. was reedited by its distributor into something more salacious, but the original Summer with Monika, as presented here, is a work of stunning maturity and one of Bergman’s most important films.
DISC FEATURES
- New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman
- New interview with actress Harriet Andersson, conducted by film critic Peter Cowie
- New interview with film scholar Eric Schaefer about Kroger Babb and Babb’s distribution of Monika: Story of a Bad Girl as an exploitation film
- Images from the Playground, a half-hour documentary by Stig Björkman with behind-the-scenes footage shot by Bergman, archival audio interviews with Bergman, and new interviews with actresses Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Laura Hubner, a 1958 review by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and a publicity piece from 1953 in which Bergman interviews himself