Posted Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 01:00 PM PST by Steven Cohen
The distributor has revealed its upcoming slate of March releases, including Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Blow-Up' and Hal Ashby's 'Being There.'
In an early announcement to retailers, Criterion is preparing '45 Years,' 'Canoa: A Shameful Memory,' 'Being There,' 'Multiple Maniacs,' and 'Blow-Up' for Blu-ray throughout the month of March.
'45 Years' (March 7) - In this exquisitely calibrated film, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay perform a subtly off-kilter pas de deux as Kate and Geoff, an English couple who, on the eve of an anniversary celebration, find their long marriage shaken by the arrival of a letter to Geoff that unceremoniously collapses his past into their shared present. Director Andrew Haigh carries the tradition of British realist cinema to artful new heights in 45 Years, weaving the momentous into the mundane as the pair go about their daily lives, while the evocatively flat, wintry Norfolk landscape frames their struggle to maintain an increasingly untenable status quo. Loosely adapting a short story by David Constantine, Haigh shifts the focus from the slightly erratic Geoff to Kate, eliciting a remarkable, nuanced portrayal by Rampling of a woman’s gradual metamorphosis from unflappable wife to woman undone.
The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, an English DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack, and supplements will include:
- Audio commentary featuring Haigh and producer Tristan Goligher
- New documentary featuring interviews with Haigh, Goligher, actors Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, editor Jonathan Alberts, and director of photography Lol Crawley
- New interview with David Constantine, author of the short story on which the film is based
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Ella Taylor
'Canoa: A Shameful Memory' (March 14) - One of Mexico’s best-regarded works of political cinema, Canoa: A Shameful Memory reimagines a real-life incident that had occurred just eight years before its release, when a group of urban university employees on a hiking trip were viciously attacked by residents of the village of San Miguel de Canoa, who had been manipulated by a corrupt priest into believing the travelers were communist revolutionaries. Intercutting footage from a fictional documentary about the village with gruesome scenes of the crime itself, director Felipe Cazals produced a daring commentary on the climate of violence and repression in Mexico during that era, including the military’s infamous massacre of demonstrating students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City. With its gritty newsreel style, Canoa is a visceral expression of horror as well as an important historical document.
The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, an uncompressed Spanish mono soundtrack, and supplements will include:
- New introduction by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro
- New conversation between filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and Cazals
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Fernanda Solórzano
'Being There' (March 21) - In one of his most finely tuned performances, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted Chance, a gardener forced out of moneyed seclusion and into the urban wilds of Washington, D.C., after the death of his employer. Shocked to discover that the real world doesn’t respond to the click of a remote, Chance stumbles haplessly into celebrity after being taken under the wing of a tycoon (Oscar winner Melvyn Douglas), who mistakes his new protégé’s mumbling about horticulture for sagacious pronouncements on life and politics, and whose wife targets Chance as the object of her desire. Adapted from a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, this hilarious, deeply melancholy satire marks the culmination a remarkable string of films by Hal Ashby in the 1970s, and serves as a carefully modulated examination of the ideals, anxieties, and media-fueled delusions that shaped American culture during that decade.
The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, an English uncompressed mono soundtrack, and supplements will include:
- New documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with members of the production team
- Excerpts from a 1980 American Film Institute seminar with director Hal Ashby
- Author Jerzy Kosinski in a 1979 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show
- Appearances from 1980 by actor Peter Sellers on NBC’s Today and The Don Lane Show
- Promo reel featuring Sellers and Ashby
- Trailer and TV spots
- Deleted scene, outtakes, and an alternate ending
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris
'Multiple Maniacs' (March 21) - The gloriously grotesque second feature directed by John Waters is replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema’s most memorably blasphemous moments. Made on a shoestring budget in Waters’ native Baltimore, with the filmmaker taking on nearly every technical task, this gleeful mockery of the peace-and-love ethos of its era features the Cavalcade of Perversion, a traveling show mounted by a troupe of misfits whose shocking proclivities are topped only by those of their leader: the glammer-than-glam, larger-than-life Divine, out for blood after discovering her lover’s affair. Starring Waters’ beloved regular cast the Dreamlanders (including David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe, George Figgs, and Cookie Mueller), Multiple Maniacs is an anarchic masterwork from an artist who has doggedly tested the limits of good taste for decades.
The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, an English uncompressed mono soundtrack, and supplements will include:
- New audio commentary featuring Waters
- New interviews with cast and crew members Pat Moran, Vincent Peranio, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe, and George Figgs
- More!
- PLUS: An essay by critic Linda Yablonsky
'Blow-Up' (March 28) - In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for this international sensation, the Italian filmmaker’s English-language debut. A countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making, Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Antonioni’s meticulous aesthetic control and intoxicating color palette breathe life into every frame, and the jazzy sounds of Herbie Hancock, a beautifully evasive performance by Vanessa Redgrave, and a cameo by the Yardbirds make the film a transporting time capsule from a bygone era. Blow-Up is a seductive immersion into creative passion, and a brilliant film by one of cinema’s greatest artists.
The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, an English uncompressed mono soundtrack, and supplements will include:
- A new piece about director Michelangelo Antonioni’s artistic approach, featuring photography curators Walter Moser and Philippe Garner and art historian David Alan Mellor
- Blow-up of “Blow-Up,” a new 52-minute documentary on the making of the film
- Conversation from 2016 between Garner and actor Vanessa Redgrave
- Archival interviews with Antonioni and actors David Hemmings and Jane Birkin
- Trailers
- PLUS: A book featuring an essay by film scholar David Forgacs and more
Suggested list price for each Blu-ray is $39.95.
You can find the latest specs for all of the titles listed above linked from our Blu-ray Release Schedule, where they're indexed throughout March.
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