Marriage Story, War of the Worlds & More Coming to The Criterion Collection July 2020
April 15th, 2020 by Aaron Neuwirth
This July, Byron Haskin’s genre-defining sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, an Oscar-winning adaptation of H. G. Wells’s influential novel, will join the Criterion Collection in a new 4K restoration. One of the most acclaimed films of 2019, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet Marriage Story will make its home-video debut in an edition featuring behind-the-scenes footage and extensive interviews with the cast and crew. The battle of the sexes takes a breezier turn in Preston Sturges’s screwball classic The Lady Eve, starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, which will appear on Blu-ray for the first time. Also making its Blu-ray debut is Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece Taste of Cherry, a gorgeously complex meditation on mortality. And that’s not all: our previously announced Blu-ray box set Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits will collect five kung-fu classics starring the international martial-arts legend, along with a dizzying array of supplemental features.
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THE LADY EVE
Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoon-worthy romance. Aboard a cruise liner sailing up the coast of South America, Stanwyck’s conniving cardsharp sets her sights on Fonda’s nerdy snake researcher, who happens to be the heir to a brewery fortune. But when the con artist falls for her mark, her grift becomes a game of hearts-and she is determined to win it all. One in a string of matchless comedic marvels that Sturges wrote, directed, and produced as part of a dazzling 1940s run, this gender-flipped battle-of-wits farce is perhaps his most emotionally satisfying work, tempering its sparkling wit with a streak of tender poignancy supplied by the sensational Stanwyck at her peak.
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SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 2001 featuring film professor Marian Keane
* Introduction from 2001 by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
* Interview from 2020 with writer-director Preston Sturges’s biographer and son Tom Sturges and friends
* New video essay by film critic David Cairns
* Costume designs by Edith Head
* Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1942 featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Ray Milland
* Audio recording of “Up the Amazon,” a song from an unproduced stage musical based on the film
* English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
* PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a 1946 profile of Preston Sturges from LIFE magazine
1941 * 93 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * 1.37:1 aspect ratio
Available July 14, 2020
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MARRIAGE STORY
A love story about divorce. A marriage coming apart and a family coming together. Marriage Story is a hilarious and harrowing, sharply observed, and deeply compassionate film from the acclaimed writer-director Noah Baumbach. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson deliver tour-de-force performances as Charlie, a charismatic New York theater director wedded to his work, and Nicole, an actor who is ready to change her own life. Their hopes for an amicable divorce fade as they are drawn into a system that pits them against each other and forces them to redefine their relationship and their family. Featuring bravura, finely drawn supporting turns from Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, and Laura Dern-who won an Academy Award for her performance here-as the trio of lawyers who preside over the legal battle, Marriage Story (nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture) is a work of both intimacy and scope that ultimately invokes hope amid the ruins.
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DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Noah Baumbach, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New interview with Baumbach
* The Players, a new program featuring interviews with actors Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Julie Hagerty, and Ray Liotta
* The Filmmakers, a new program about the production of the film, featuring interviews with Baumbach, editor Jennifer Lame, production designer Jade Healy, costume designer Mark Bridges, and producer David Heyman
* The Making of “Marriage Story,” a new program featuring behind-the-scenes footage
* New interviews with composer Randy Newman and Baumbach about the film’s score
* New program featuring Baumbach walking the viewer through a key location from the film
* Trailers
* English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
* PLUS: Notes on the film by novelist Linn Ullmann
2019 * 137 minutes * Color * 5.1 surround * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Available July 21, 2020
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TASTE OF CHERRY
The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives around the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will agree to dispose of his body after he commits suicide, a taboo under Islam. Extended conversations with three passengers (a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist) elicit different views of mortality and individual choice. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, Taste of Cherry challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life.
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BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
* Project, Abbas Kiarostami’s 39-minute 1997 sketch film for Taste of Cherry, made with the director’s son Bahman Kiarostami
* New interview with Iranian film scholar Hamid Naficy
* Rare 1997 interview with Abbas Kiarostami, conducted by Iranian film scholar Jamsheed Akrami
* Trailer
* New English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by critic A. S. Hamrah
1997 * 99 minutes * Color * Monaural * In Persian with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Available July 21, 2020
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
A mysterious, meteor-like object has landed in a small California town. All clocks have stopped. A fleet of glowing green UFOs hovers menacingly over the entire globe. The Martian invasion of Earth has begun, and it seems that nothing-neither military might nor the scientific know-how of nuclear physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry)-can stop it. In the expert hands of genre specialists George Pal and Byron Haskin, H. G. Wells’s end-of-civilization classic receives a chilling Cold War-era update, complete with hallucinatory Technicolor and visionary, Oscar-winning special effects. Emblazoned with iconographic images of 1950s science fiction, The War of the Worlds is both an influential triumph of visual imagination and a still-disquieting document of the wonder and terror of the atomic age.
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SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, created by sound designer Ben Burtt and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Joe Dante, film historian Bob Burns, and author Bill Warren
* Movie Archaeologists, a new program on the visual and sound effects in the film featuring Burtt and film historian Craig Barron
* From the Archive, a new program about the film’s restoration featuring Barron, Burtt, and Paramount Pictures archivist Andrea Kalas
* Audio interview with producer George Pal from 1970
* The Sky Is Falling, a 2005 documentary about the making of the film
* The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds from 1938, directed and narrated by Orson Welles
* Radio program from 1940 featuring a discussion between Welles and H. G. Wells, author of the 1897 novel The War of the Worlds
* Trailer
* English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
* PLUS: An essay by film critic J. Hoberman
1953 * 85 minutes * Color * Monaural * 1.37:1 aspect ratio
Available July 7, 2020
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Aaron Neuwirth
Writer/Reviewer, Film Lover, Podcaster, Gamer, Comic Reader, Disc Golfer & a Lefty. There are too many films, TV, books, etc. for me to list as favorites, but I can assure that the amount film knowledge within my noggin is ridiculous, though I am always open to learning more. You can follow me on Twitter @AaronsPS4, see what else I am up to at TheCodeIsZeek.com & check out my podcast, Out Now with Aaron and Abe, on iTunes.
