Wes Anderson, Miranda July & More Coming to The Criterion Collection April 2020
January 15th, 2020 by Aaron Neuwirth
This April, check in to The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes Anderson’s extravagantly nostalgic caper, widely hailed as one of the greatest films of the 2010s, will join the Criterion Collection. Miranda July’s playful and transgressive Me and You and Everyone We Know, one of the most original debut features in recent memory, will make its Blu-ray debut. A marvel of studio craftsmanship, Destry Rides Again pairs Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart for a boisterous comic western, presented here in a new 4K restoration. Juraj Herz plumbs the horrors of fascism in the black-as-ashes comedy The Cremator, a macabre marvel of the Czechoslovak New Wave, long unavailable on home video. And that’s not all: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, widely hailed as the summit of the director’s career and the greatest film ever made about the French Resistance, returns to the Collection.
–
–
ARMY OF SHADOWS
The most personal film by the underworld poet Jean-Pierre Melville, who had participated in the French Resistance himself, this tragic masterpiece, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, recounts the struggles and sacrifices of those who fought in the Resistance. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret star as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler’s regime. Long underappreciated in France and unseen in the United States, the atmospheric and gripping thriller Army of Shadows is now widely recognized as the summit of Melville’s career, channeling the exquisite minimalism of his gangster films to create an unsparing tale of defiance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* High-definition digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Pierre Lhomme, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Alternate 2.0 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 2006 featuring film scholar Ginette Vincendeau
* Interviews from 2007 with Lhomme and editor Françoise Bonnot
* On-set footage and excerpts from archival interviews with director Jean-Pierre Melville, cast members, author Joseph Kessel, and real-life Resistance fighters
* Jean-Pierre Melville et “L’armée des ombres” (2005), a short program on the director and his film
* Le journal de la Résistance (1944), a rare short documentary shot on the front lines during the final days of the German occupation of France
* Restoration demonstration by Lhomme
* Trailers
* PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin, along with (for the Blu-ray) a piece by historian Robert O. Paxton and excerpts from Rui Nogueira’s Melville on Melville
1969 * 145 minutes * Color * Monaural * In French with English subtitles * 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Available April 7, 2020
–
THE CREMATOR
Czechoslovak New Wave iconoclast Juraj Herz’s terrifying, darkly comic vision of the horrors of totalitarian ideologies stars a supremely chilling Rudolf Hrusínský as the pathologically morbid Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium director in 1930s Prague who believes fervently that death offers the only true relief from human suffering. When he is recruited by the Nazis, Kopfrkingl’s increasingly deranged worldview drives him to formulate his own shocking final solution. Blending the blackest of gallows humor with disorienting expressionistic flourishes-queasy point-of-view shots, distorting lenses, jarring quick cuts-the controversial, long-banned masterpiece The Cremator is one of cinema’s most trenchant and disturbing portraits of the banality of evil.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* High-definition digital transfer of The Junk Shop, director Juraj Herz’s 1965 debut short film
* Short documentary from 2011 featuring Herz visiting filming locations and recalling the production of The Cremator
* New interview with film programmer Irena Kovarova about the style of the film
* Documentary from 2017 about composer Zdeněk Liska featuring Herz, filmmakers Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers, and others
* Interview with actor Rudolf Hrusínský from 1993
* Trailer
* New English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by scholar Jonathan Owen
1969 * 100 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * In Czech with English subtitles * 1.66:1 aspect ratio
Available April 21, 2020
–
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart ride high in this superb comedic western, both a boisterous spoof and a shining example of the genre it is having fun with. As the brawling, rough-and-tumble saloon singer Frenchy, Dietrich shed her exotic love-goddess image and launched a triumphant career comeback, while Stewart cemented his amiable everyman persona, in his first of many westerns, with a charming turn as a gun-abhorring deputy sheriff who uses his wits to bring law and order to the frontier town of Bottleneck. A sparkling script, a supporting cast of virtuoso character actors, and rollicking musical numbers- delivered with unmatched bravado by the magnetic Dietrich- come together to create an irresistible, oft-imitated marvel of studio-era craftsmanship.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith
* New interview with Donald Dewey, author of James Stewart: A Biography
* New video essay featuring excerpts from a 1973 oral-history interview with director George Marshall, conducted by the American Film Institute
* Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1945, featuring actors James Stewart and Joan Blondell
* PLUS: An essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme
1939 * 94 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * 1.35:1 aspect ratio
Available April 14, 2020
–
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Wes Anderson brings his dry wit and visual inventiveness to this exquisite caper set amid the old-world splendor of Europe between the World Wars. At the opulent Grand Budapest Hotel, the concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his young protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) forge a steadfast bond as they are swept up in a scheme involving the theft of a priceless Renaissance painting and the battle for an enormous family fortune-while around them, political upheaval consumes the continent. Meticulously designed, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a breathless picaresque and a poignant paean to friendship and the grandeur of a vanished world, performed with panache by an all-star ensemble that includes F. Murray Abraham, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Mathieu Amalric, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* 2K digital transfer, supervised by director Wes Anderson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New audio commentary featuring Anderson, filmmaker Roman Coppola, and actor Jeff Goldblum
* Selected-scene storyboard animatics
* The Making of “The Grand Budapest Hotel,“ a new documentary about the film
* New interviews with the cast and crew
* Video essays from 2015 and 2020 by critic Matt Zoller Seitz and film scholar David Bordwell
* Behind-the-scenes, special-effects, and test footage
* Trailer
* PLUS: Two pieces by critic Richard Brody and (with the Blu-ray) a double-sided poster and other ephemera
2014 * 100 minutes * Color * 5.1 surround * 1.37:1, 1.85:1, 2.40:1 aspect ratios
Available April 28, 2020
–
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange-an original vision of creativity, sexuality, childhood, and loneliness through a series of braided vignettes around a pair of potential lovers: Richard, a newly single shoe salesman and father of two (John Hawkes), and Christine, a lonely video artist and “Eldercab” driver (July). While they take hesitant steps toward romance, Richard’s sons follow their own curiosity toward their first sexual experiences, online and in real life, venturing into uncharted territories in their attempts to connect with others. Playful and profoundly transgressive, Me and You and Everyone We Know is a poetic look at the tortuous routes we take to intimacy in an isolating world and the moments of magic and redemption that unite us.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* High-definition digital master, approved by director Miranda July, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New documentary about July’s artistic beginnings and the development of her debut feature
* Open to the World, a new documentary by July about the 2017 interfaith charity shop and participatory artwork she created in collaboration with Artangel
* July Interviews July: Deauville, 2005, a discovery from July’s archives, newly edited
* Six scenes from the 2003 Sundance Directors Lab, where July workshopped the film, with commentary by July
* The Amateurist (1998) and Nest of Tens (2000), short films by July
* Several films from July’s Joanie 4 Jackie project, and a documentary about the program
* Trailer
* PLUS: Essays by artist and scholar Sara Magenheimer and novelist Lauren Groff
2005 * 91 minutes * Color * 5.1 Surround * 1.78:1 aspect ratio
Available April 28, 2020
–
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.
